Stories: Underground & Over the roof

There are many literary works where the crucial action may not occur at ground level.

Probably the most famous is the scene in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" where Jean Valjean carries the unconscious Marius through the Paris sewers, ironically only to have him snatch the love of Cosette, from her adopted father.

The action shifts to the sewers of Vienna, where Graham Greene's thriller "The Third Man" is set. The war-time profiteer, Harry Lime, is chased through the sewers by his old time friend Rollo Martins & taken out. 

In the "Borrowers" book series by Mary Norton, a Lilliputian people hiding in the nooks & crannies of human habitations, find it necessary to escape through a sewer line when their existence is threatened by exposure & extinction.

If these are stories of the underground, one of the earliest of the airborne stories is the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes' "The Birds." Here two Athenians, fed up with Athens, persuade some birds to build a "cloud cuckoo land" in the air for their habitation.

Coming to the twentieth Century, who can forget the innovatively choreographed number by the chimney sweeps on the roof tops of London along with the iconic "Mary Poppins" & Bert?

In the twenty first century, we have Katherine Rundell writing about "Rooftoppers" French 'gamins' (urchins) infesting the rooftops of Paris. When Sophie starts "mom-hunting" & is being thwarted by French bureaucracy, she enlists the help of Matteo, the Rooftopper & is reunited with her mom.