Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Published: June, 2013
“All monsters are scared. That is why they’re monsters.”
About a week ago, I was wandering around Barnes and Noble doing my usual routine of walking in for something very specific and coming out with five books that were in no way related. One of those books was this one, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I had seen a blurb about it in Entertainment Weekly and since I had long ago sold my soul to Neil Gaiman, I decided to pick it up. It is not a long book, nor an overly complicated one. It’s a fairy tale, set in 1960s Sussex, about an unnamed narrator and the extraordinary events that surrounded him when he was seven years old.
In short, this novel is otherworldly, gorgeous in its simplicity, and mines the traditions of fable, myth, and fairy tale, to render a story about the nature of children, adults, and monsters. It is difficult to discuss the plot, though I assure it is most compelling, without giving the whole game away. There is the boy in the old house with the opal miner from South Africa, and there is the girl named Lettie who lives down the lane with her mother and grandmother, and there is Ursula, a nanny to send Gaiman’s Other Mother running, and there is the Ocean, a doorway between the layer of icing we are allowed to see, and the nightmare of dark chocolate cake that lies just underneath it. It’s slender duck pond of a novel that hides an ocean within its covers.
While it is certainly not the only Gaiman tome I expect to be reading this summer, Ocean is the one that, I think will stick with me the most. As Gaiman’s narrator says “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else,” and in this particular book, the crafting of the world our young narrator lives in is near flawless. Though you know that there can be no oceans on a lane in Sussex, that grandmothers are not really thousands of years old (or at least it’s very rude to say so), and that grown ups must, at least some of the time, be more than children in grown up costumes, anything that exists outside of the book does not matter. You are in it, as much a part of it as any other character, and as I sat in my room, on a dark and rainy evening, tea going cold on the table next to me, I let myself do something that very few authors have ever convinced me to do:
I believed.
Grade: A
Where thoughts come to be fathomed. 