Gaiman does it again
Jan. 2nd, 2014 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI started reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane along with Mark Oshiro at Mark Reads, but yesterday, I gave up. I went back to the beginning and read the entire book in three hours, including breaks for dinner and to admire the autograph scrawled on the title page (a perk of shopping at Porter Square Books). And I must say, as much as I like to hear Mark reading things, there was something more satisfying about curling up alone (with my cat, who doesn’t count as another person) and reading it the old-fashioned way. It helps that the hardcover version is gorgeous, with deckled edges and everything.
In this book, a man drives down to his boyhood neighborhood—a farming community in Surrey—after a funeral. Since the big rambling house he had lived in when he was young had been redeveloped into several smaller properties for commuting yuppies, he drives down to the farm all the way at the end of the lane, where he had once been friends with a girl named Lettie Hempstock. Lettie is long gone to Australia, but Mrs. Hempstock gives the narrator (whose name we never learn) a cup of tea and he goes down to the old pond, which Lettie had called an ocean, and he sits and reminisces. The reminiscing is the main story; the visit to the farm as an adult is mostly a framing device.
The narrator’s remembrances of the things that happened are pretty heavy stuff for a seven-year-old. It all started when his family was having money troubles and took in a South African opal miner as a boarder, and the opal miner took the family’s car down to the pond to commit suicide. The man’s suicide sets off a chain of supernatural events involving a creature from another dimension that starts trying to give people money—often in strange and damaging ways—and soon moves into the real world in the guise of a pretty but very nasty lady named Ursula Monkton, who takes the now vacant boarding space in the narrator’s home. The narrator—whose name we never learn—becomes an unwitting catalyst for a number of these strange occurrences due to his friendship with Lettie Hempstock. The Hempstock women—Lettie, her mother Mrs. Hempstock, and her grandmother Old Mrs. Hempstock—are not regular people, nor even witches. It’s not quite clear what they are, but they have many strange skills and powers, and they have all been around for a very, very long time. Old Mrs. Hempstock claims to have been around when the moon was formed, can taste electrons, and can boss bacteria around. (Old Mrs. Hempstock is fabulous.)
While the adventures of the boy and the Hempstocks and the strange creature that ineptly gives people money are pretty gripping stuff—Neil Gaiman’s creepy creatures are always deliciously unpredictable—what really makes this book great is not the plot, but the haunting and nuanced explorations of childhood and memory. The narrator is a quiet, solitary little boy who prefers reading adventure books to talking to other people; he doesn’t make friends easily with other children and he doesn’t trust grown-ups. The book is written in a sparse, slightly repetitive style that conveys the voice of childhood quite well, but is as clear and poetic and artful as the best of adult writing. (I don’t mean to insult children but have you heard a seven-year-old try to tell you a story lately? Telling a non-jumbled story is a skill long in the learning.) Although it’s a fantasy story, some of it has a similar feel to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, or at least I think it does. It’s also got a very strong sense of place—in this case, Surrey, England, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. It’s a bit different and a bit the same as some of Gaiman’s other adult novels, like Anansi Boys or American Gods, which also have very strong senses of place, but are so distinctly American that I didn’t realize Gaiman was British when I first read them. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is distinctly and intimately British. It’s kind of not fair that Gaiman can write multiple countries so well.
This is a very short novel, clocking in at under two hundred pages (which I think threatens to almost make it a novella except it has A Novel printed on the front cover, which is fancy), but there’s a world of stuff packed into it, and I may need to give it a reread sometime soon.
In this book, a man drives down to his boyhood neighborhood—a farming community in Surrey—after a funeral. Since the big rambling house he had lived in when he was young had been redeveloped into several smaller properties for commuting yuppies, he drives down to the farm all the way at the end of the lane, where he had once been friends with a girl named Lettie Hempstock. Lettie is long gone to Australia, but Mrs. Hempstock gives the narrator (whose name we never learn) a cup of tea and he goes down to the old pond, which Lettie had called an ocean, and he sits and reminisces. The reminiscing is the main story; the visit to the farm as an adult is mostly a framing device.
The narrator’s remembrances of the things that happened are pretty heavy stuff for a seven-year-old. It all started when his family was having money troubles and took in a South African opal miner as a boarder, and the opal miner took the family’s car down to the pond to commit suicide. The man’s suicide sets off a chain of supernatural events involving a creature from another dimension that starts trying to give people money—often in strange and damaging ways—and soon moves into the real world in the guise of a pretty but very nasty lady named Ursula Monkton, who takes the now vacant boarding space in the narrator’s home. The narrator—whose name we never learn—becomes an unwitting catalyst for a number of these strange occurrences due to his friendship with Lettie Hempstock. The Hempstock women—Lettie, her mother Mrs. Hempstock, and her grandmother Old Mrs. Hempstock—are not regular people, nor even witches. It’s not quite clear what they are, but they have many strange skills and powers, and they have all been around for a very, very long time. Old Mrs. Hempstock claims to have been around when the moon was formed, can taste electrons, and can boss bacteria around. (Old Mrs. Hempstock is fabulous.)
While the adventures of the boy and the Hempstocks and the strange creature that ineptly gives people money are pretty gripping stuff—Neil Gaiman’s creepy creatures are always deliciously unpredictable—what really makes this book great is not the plot, but the haunting and nuanced explorations of childhood and memory. The narrator is a quiet, solitary little boy who prefers reading adventure books to talking to other people; he doesn’t make friends easily with other children and he doesn’t trust grown-ups. The book is written in a sparse, slightly repetitive style that conveys the voice of childhood quite well, but is as clear and poetic and artful as the best of adult writing. (I don’t mean to insult children but have you heard a seven-year-old try to tell you a story lately? Telling a non-jumbled story is a skill long in the learning.) Although it’s a fantasy story, some of it has a similar feel to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, or at least I think it does. It’s also got a very strong sense of place—in this case, Surrey, England, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. It’s a bit different and a bit the same as some of Gaiman’s other adult novels, like Anansi Boys or American Gods, which also have very strong senses of place, but are so distinctly American that I didn’t realize Gaiman was British when I first read them. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is distinctly and intimately British. It’s kind of not fair that Gaiman can write multiple countries so well.
This is a very short novel, clocking in at under two hundred pages (which I think threatens to almost make it a novella except it has A Novel printed on the front cover, which is fancy), but there’s a world of stuff packed into it, and I may need to give it a reread sometime soon.