A book that captivates the loneliness
and helplessness of childhood, The Ocean At the End of the Lane is a short
taste of the Neil Gaiman we all know, love and secretly envy.
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| Jamie Lynn Kerner's designs are just as beautiful and haunting as the story. |
Initially began as a novella for his
wife, singer “Amanda Fucking Palmer” of the Dresden Dolls, it evolved into a
short novel.
The story is based around an
unnamed narrator who returns to his hometown and suddenly begins to remember a
traumatic, supernatural childhood incident that happened to him at age 7. The
story, in typical Gaiman fashion, involves a person from a boring life accidently
gaining access to a hidden, magical dimension.
The story itself unravels slowly in
a peaceful, tense and mourning fashion. The rural setting is just as lonely as
the seven year old boy, running from strange, malicious, magical beings. This
is the part of the novel that will stay with me, the reminder of how helpless
and lonely childhood could be. To
children the fantastical is much more real and dangerous than the cloudy, far
away, adult world.
Many descriptive moments in the
novel made me very uncomfortable because they were so specifically gross, particularly
one part where the protagonist removes a living being from inside of his body
with stainless steel tweezers. The way Gaiman describes a lot of scenes are
very vivid and haunting, and I still cringe thinking about them days later, goose
bumps on my arms.
At 181 pages the main issue I had
with the book is the lack of explanation of whatever mystical dimension is
involved in this particular Gaiman plot, the reader does not get a lot of
detail and I felt a yearning to know more and to understand more about what the
danger truly was.
However, it is fascinating that
Gaiman has revisited the Hempstick family, many of its members appear in his
other works. Daisy Hempstock is a
character in Stardust and Liza Hempstock in The Graveyard Book. In The Ocean at
the End of the Lane, Lettie Hempstock, of unclear relation to those two, protects
the unnamed narrator from the trouble they both released onto the human world.
One of the most touching moment of
the story is when the narrator chooses to remember something unpleasant rather
than have the memory removed. “I want to remember…because it happened to me. And
I’m still me,” reasons the seven year old in a moving moment of maturity and
clarity.
Memory is a large focus of the
novel, with the adult narrator in shock of how he could have possibly forgotten
the most exciting memories of his life. It is that idea that will bring you
back to mourning your childhood, and wondering what forgotten adventures you
yourself have lost.
I don’t
normally put my book reviews on here, I normally just leave that sort of thing
for my Goodreads account. However, the Gaiman is one of my favorite authors
and since its release on June 18th I’ve been waiting for the time
and money to get my hands on it.
