On the Problem of Competence in the Supernatural Classes

The room was wrong. Not in any immediately identifiable way — the chairs were chairs, the table was a table, the tea was a brownish liquid in a white cup — but there was a quality to the space that suggested it had been assembled by someone who had studied rooms very carefully without ever having relaxed in one. The wallpaper had a pattern of climbing roses that, if you looked at it long enough, seemed to be climbing away from something.

Wodehouse was already seated when I arrived, legs crossed, teacup balanced with the architectural precision of a man who had been navigating teacups since birth. He looked exactly as I’d imagined, which was itself suspicious. Gaiman was standing by the window, looking out at something that might have been a garden.

“The trouble with invisible people,” Gaiman said, without preamble, “is that they’re never actually invisible. They’re just people no one is looking at.”

“That’s rather the point, though, isn’t it?” Wodehouse said. “The whole engine of social comedy is the people no one is looking at. The butler is invisible until the fish course goes wrong. The aunt is invisible until she descends. The valet is invisible until — well, until everything.”

“No, I mean properly invisible. I mean people who have fallen through the cracks. In Neverwhere I was writing about the homeless, really, about the way you can walk past someone on the street and your eye slides off them like water off a particularly uncharitable duck. London Below isn’t magic, not really. It’s what happens when people stop being seen.”

“I see.” Wodehouse took a considered sip. “And you want to make that funny?”

I should have intervened here, probably. That was the assignment, after all — Gaiman’s mythic London Below and Wodehouse’s comic machinery, bolted together in some fashion that wouldn’t collapse under its own weight. But Gaiman had a look on his face that I’d seen before, the look of a man working something out, and I’d learned that interrupting that process was like interrupting a cat deciding whether to leap.

“I want it to be funny,” Gaiman said. “There’s a difference. Making something funny is putting a rubber nose on it. Something being funny means it was always funny, and the situation finally reached the point where the humor became undeniable. Pratchett understood this. The Discworld was never funny because he decorated it with jokes. It was funny because the world operated on joke-logic, and the characters had to live inside that logic as though it were perfectly serious.”

“I knew Pratchett, of course,” Wodehouse said, and then paused in a way that suggested he was navigating the complicated relationship between fictional conversations and real chronology. “That is to say — well. The mechanism I’m interested in is rather specific. It’s the valet.”

“Jeeves,” I said.

“Not just Jeeves. Jeeves is the perfected form, but the principle is older than that. The competent servant and the incompetent master. It works because the power flows the wrong way. Bertie Wooster has the title, the money, the flat in Mayfair, and he cannot successfully navigate a weekend in the country without causing at least one engagement, two misunderstandings, and a near-fatal encounter with an aunt. Jeeves has nothing — no rank, no wealth, no social position — and he can rearrange the entire social fabric of Berkshire with a well-placed cough.”

“That’s exactly the dynamic of London Below,” Gaiman said, and I could see the connection forming. “Richard Mayhew has a flat and a job and a fiancee and a credit card, and none of it matters. Door has nothing — she’s a refugee, she’s hunted, she’s been living in the cracks of the city — and she has all the real power. She can open anything.”

“So we have a Bertie figure,” I said, my notebook out, “who has all the trappings of the ordinary world — the flat, the social calendar, the aunts — and a Jeeves figure who comes from… below. From the invisible world.”

“Don’t make the valet a refugee,” Gaiman said quickly. “That was Neverwhere’s terrain. The valet should be someone who has chosen the invisible world. Someone who finds it more sensible than the one above. The way Jeeves finds service more sensible than — what would Jeeves do if he weren’t a valet?”

“Nothing at all,” Wodehouse said, with great certainty. “That’s rather the point. Jeeves is not a man who has been prevented from doing something else. He is a man who has found the exact thing he was designed for. He is a precision instrument that has located its mechanism. The tragedy of Jeeves, if there were any tragedy in Jeeves, which there isn’t, is that he is complete.”

“But that’s not funny,” I said. “Or — it’s funny situationally, the way a genius choosing to organize some idiot’s sock drawer is funny, but if we’re combining this with Neverwhere’s themes, there needs to be something at stake in the invisibility. Something that’s not just convenient.”

Gaiman sat down. “You’re right. There does. The thing about London Below — the thing I was trying to get at and I’m not sure I entirely managed — is that invisibility is seductive. Richard Mayhew gets his old life back at the end, and he gives it up. He chooses Below. Because once you’ve seen the cracks in the world, you can’t stop seeing them, and the smooth surface of the ordinary world starts to feel like the lie.”

“Bertie never sees the cracks,” Wodehouse said. “That’s rather essential. He is immune to disillusionment because he was never particularly illusioned in the first place. The world is full of terrifying aunts and complicated girls and men who want him to steal cow-creamers, and he finds all of this perfectly normal. He doesn’t question the system. He merely tries to survive it.”

“So what happens,” Gaiman said slowly, “when someone who never questions the system has a servant from a world that exists because the system has gaps?”

There was a pause. The tea cooled. The roses on the wallpaper held still.

“The comedy,” Wodehouse said, “comes from the Bertie figure not noticing that anything is wrong. Or rather — not wrong, unusual. He engages a new valet through the usual agency. The valet is satisfactory. The valet presses his trousers and mixes an excellent restorative and manages the situation with Aunt Agatha. That the valet also happens to be from a parallel dimension existing in the negative spaces of London is, to the Bertie figure, a matter of approximately the same significance as the valet’s preference for a slightly wider trouser cuff.”

“Yes!” Gaiman’s eyes were bright. “Yes. Because that’s how Bertie works — everything is flattened to the same level of mild concern or mild enthusiasm. And that’s also how the mundane world treats the magical in my books. Nobody screams. Nobody falls over. The angel and the demon run a bookshop and a Bentley, and London barely notices. So you put those two things together and you get—”

“A man who is aggressively unbothered by the supernatural,” I said.

“Not aggressively. That implies effort. Naturally unbothered. Constitutionally incapable of being bothered. The way a golden retriever is unbothered by philosophy.”

I wrote that down. Wodehouse made a small sound that might have been approval or might have been the tea.

“The plot, though,” I said. “Wodehouse plots are clockwork. Everything interlocks. Every lie creates a problem that requires a bigger lie. The aunt and the girl and the stolen object and the borrowed identity — they’re all cogs. How does that work when one of the cogs is from a dimension that doesn’t obey the same—”

“It works better,” Wodehouse said firmly. “The more impossible the solution, the more satisfying the mechanism. If Jeeves resolved Bertie’s problems through ordinary means, there would be no comedy, only competence. Jeeves is funny because his solutions are so outrageously perfect that they transcend the merely practical. He doesn’t fix problems. He rearranges reality until the problem was never a problem. That is already magic. We are merely making the metaphor literal.”

“But I don’t want it to be easy,” Gaiman said. “The problem with literalizing the metaphor is that actual magic solves things too cleanly. If the valet can just magic the aunt away, there’s no story. The magic has to create its own complications. In Neverwhere, Door’s ability to open things is enormously powerful, but it doesn’t protect her. It makes her a target.”

“So the valet’s abilities from Below should make certain things effortless — the restorative that cures any hangover, say, or the ability to make a man’s trousers immaculate through means that don’t bear close examination — but should also introduce problems that the Bertie figure cannot begin to comprehend?”

“Problems he doesn’t want to comprehend,” Gaiman corrected. “Problems he will go to extraordinary lengths to misunderstand. Because comprehension would require acknowledging that the world has a basement, and the Bertie figure is not equipped for basements.”

I was writing furiously. “So the spiral — the Wodehouse spiral where everything gets worse — is driven by the Bertie figure’s refusal to acknowledge what’s actually happening? He keeps interpreting supernatural crises as social ones?”

“A territorial dispute between rival courts of London Below becomes, in the Bertie figure’s understanding, a disagreement over a dinner invitation,” Wodehouse suggested. “A creature from the sewers demanding tribute is understood as an especially persistent tradesman. The valet’s desperate attempt to prevent an incursion from the Under-Fleet is interpreted as a tiff with the building management.”

“And the resolution,” Gaiman said, “should be — not a resolution. Not really. The problem should be solved the way Jeeves problems are solved, through some impossibly elegant rearrangement, but there should be something left over. Something unresolved. A door that’s still open. A shadow that moves wrong.”

“No,” Wodehouse said, and this was the first time he’d been flatly contradictory. “The resolution should be complete. That is the mechanism. The farce requires it. Every thread must be tucked in, every aunt pacified, every engagement dissolved or confirmed. The joy of the thing is the clockwork clicking into place. If you leave threads dangling, you haven’t written a comedy. You’ve written a drama with jokes in it.”

“And if you resolve everything, you’ve written a fairy tale,” Gaiman said. “A pleasant fairy tale where nothing has consequences and the world snaps back to normal and we all pretend that the things we saw in the dark didn’t happen.”

They looked at each other. I felt the way I imagine a particularly thin piece of bread feels between two very different cheeses.

“What if,” I said carefully, “the Wodehouse machinery resolves perfectly — every social obligation met, every aunt satisfied, the valet’s Below-world crisis handled with elegant precision — but the Bertie figure, in the final moment, notices something? Not something big. Something small. A crack in the baseboard that wasn’t there before. A sound from beneath the sideboard that he’s going to pretend he didn’t hear. The clockwork is complete, but one gear is turning that he hadn’t accounted for.”

Wodehouse considered this. “The crack would have to be very small.”

“Tiny,” I agreed. “The width of a fingernail. Just enough to suggest that the world has a slightly different shape than it did before the story began.”

“And the Bertie figure’s response?”

“He asks the valet to see about having it plastered over.”

Gaiman laughed. Wodehouse did not laugh, but his silence had a quality of amusement in it, the way a cat’s silence can have a quality of satisfaction.

“The valet,” Gaiman said, “does not see about having it plastered over.”

“The valet says ‘Very good, sir,’” Wodehouse said.

“And the crack remains,” I said.

“The crack,” Gaiman said, “was always there.”

Neither of them seemed inclined to pursue this further, which was probably right. Wodehouse was examining his teacup with the attentiveness of a man who suspects the dregs of containing a message he’d rather not read. Gaiman was looking at the wallpaper again, at the roses climbing away from whatever they were climbing away from. I had the unsettling suspicion that if I looked at the baseboard of this particular room, I would find exactly the kind of crack we’d been discussing.

I did not look at the baseboard.