The enchanter

"The Sandman" keeps doing this, balancing the callow satisfactions of conventional genres with a playful argument against the kind of personality that makes someone obsess about such things to begin with. At its most limited, pop culture directed at men is a shabby little tango between fantasies of mastery and self-pity ("Only I can save the world, and yet I can never truly be part of it" -- that sort of thing). Gaiman can play that tune, but he keeps introducing new and more challenging partners and steps.

Morpheus, for example, is the epitome of late-adolescent Goth cool, a gaunt, chalk-skinned, ebony-haired hipster who can brood with the best of them -- plus he has superpowers! Yet the entire Sandman epic is also an elucidation of Morpheus' emotional and personal failures (romantic as well as familial), culminating in his recognition of his own isolation and obsolescence. Similarly, "Neverwhere" is partly an old-fashioned boy's adventure story, but the hero is neither especially brave nor notably gifted, just an ordinary fellow whose only sterling quality is kindness. Gaiman the author points his readers toward a richer, more grown-up way of understanding life and stories than that offered by tortured superheroes, alienated loners or strapping champions. Some say that Morpheus looks a bit like his creator, but Gaiman's secret twin is Death, a witty, charming escort to the next stage of our existence.

For Gaiman, one of the chief uses of enchantment is not to escape from the real world, but to illuminate it. In "Neverwhere," when Richard, by association with its scruffy denizens, joins the world of London Below, he also becomes, if not quite invisible, at least profoundly unmemorable and radically unremarkable to the inhabitants of London Above. That's only a slight tweak on the actual world: I walked past a homeless man yesterday who held up a sign reading "Everyone ignores me." He lives in New York Below.

Much of what passes as fantastic literature these days doesn't maintain any fertile relationship with the real. Even the classic works of British fantasy that Gaiman uses as touchstones, the novels of Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, to name a few, feel insular, like retreats from the world into an imaginary realm untouched by modernity. Gaiman, on the other hand, is ever eager to expand his compass and take in everything, the new mixing exuberantly with the old. "The Sandman" contains everything from vamps on old-time horror comics, to ersatz (but convincing) African folk tales to references to the devastation of the first Gulf War to snapshots of urban life featuring single mothers, transvestites and a touchingly devoted pair of lesbian lovers. In "Neverwhere," London's Tube becomes as mysterious, romantic and perilous as Olde England's Forest of Arden.

Nevertheless, Gaiman has never lost touch with the spellbinding voice of classic British fantasy. He reproduces it perfectly in "Coraline," his most polished piece of writing yet, as far as prose is concerned; every sentence is distilled to its essence. Gaiman, like Lewis, builds his narratives from images; even when the connective tissue doesn't hold up (as it sometimes doesn't in "American Gods" and mostly doesn't in the fairytale-like novel "Stardust"), the individual pictures retain their potency.

In "Coraline," a little girl wanders through a magical door in her family's sitting room to discover a replica of her house on the other side, presided over by her "other mother," a sinister and overly affectionate person with shiny black buttons instead of eyes. The other mother holds her captive, demanding that Coraline acquire her own pair of buttons. It's a very, very creepy book, but also funny and, despite its weirdness, true to life about the way certain adults treat children. A friendly if sarcastic cat explains the other mother's motivations to Coraline: "She wants something to love, I think ... Something that isn't her. She might want something to eat as well. It's hard to tell with things like her."

"American Gods," Gaiman's most recent major novel, shows how this generous and resourceful writer keeps enlarging his scope. The task he sets for himself -- building a fantastic epic on a core of mythic material that feels authentically American -- is a tough one. The revelation in the novel's climax doesn't ring entirely true, but the method Gaiman uses to get there does.

The battered hero of classic hardboiled detective fiction is, in a way, the Hercules of our time. Gaiman sends a man like that, ex-con Shadow Moon, into noir's typically skanky situations, and sets him up for the usual rounds of beatings and betrayals. But Shadow's companions and adversaries in these adventures are a multicultural potluck of defunct gods and demons, withering away due to lack of worshippers, hustling and grifting in order to get by while they plot their big comeback. Not only did Gaiman learn enough about an obscure dualistic Slavic deity to slip him into the novel, he also researched enough about prison life to make Shadow's memories of that seem convincing as well.

There's a story in one of the early Sandman comics in which a writer who has angered Morpheus is cursed by the Dream King with a surplus of ideas. He goes staggering through the streets of London, plagued by scenarios that come so fast he can't set them down. It's a pop-Borges cavalcade: "A city in which the streets are paved with time ... a were-goldfish ... a man who inherits a library card to the Library of Alexandria." You get the impression this guy could be yet another aspect of Gaiman, whose imagination is forever making odd and fruitful leaps to parts previously unknown, leaps that somehow always bring him back home again. In Gaiman's case, though, this onslaught is no curse. For those of us lucky enough to have discovered him, it's a blessing.

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