Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
New York: William Morrow; 2013; $25.99 hc; 181 pages
Have you noticed how inimitable Neil Gaiman seems to be? He is one of the biggest names in publishing now. I have heard it suggested that we have passed from the Age of Stephen King to the Age of Gaiman. But, whereas King rapidly spawned whole shelves of readily recognizable kinglets, and J.K. Rowling certainly inspired the publication of other series books about juvenile wizards, there does not seem to be any actual Neil Gaiman imitator despite the amount of money that could conceivably be made by one. Could it be that his talent is just too diverse, too protean, for the active ingredient to be synthesized in repeatable units of book-product?
This is not necessarily a put-down of writers who are imitated. Tolkien has epic plot structures and themes that can be copied. King has situations, types of characters, etc. (Once you figure out what a “family in supernatural peril” novel is, it is easy to write one. This does not make you Stephen King, but it means you’ve written the same type of book he did.) Any number of writers have obvious stylistic tics which can be copied. The superficial Lovecraft imitator attempts the oratorical style even if the result more often than not comes off like trying to play grand organ music on a kazoo. The more perceptive follower attempts to expand on Lovecraft’s actual themes. The same is true for Dunsany, Poe, or any number of others.
But Gaiman? His essence is much harder to define.
In his new novel, we see some clear Gaimanesque characteristics. He writes well about children either from their point of view or as reminiscence or both. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is not a juvenile the way Coraline is. It breaks one of the first rules of YA writing: childhood is here seen from the point of view of a middle-aged man at a crisis in his own life, having a flashback. A child reader will not identify with that. Immediately, we realize this book is for adults.
The protagonist might as well be Gaiman himself, although the author assures us in an afterword that the family depicted here is not his own, even if he has “plundered the landscape” of his childhood. Slipping away from a funeral (possibly of a parent), the 40-something hero (an artist of some kind) comes back to the rural district where he grew up. His actual childhood house is gone, torn down for development, but at the end of a lane beyond that stands a farmhouse he remembers very well indeed. There he encounters an old woman who recognizes him, welcomes him, and lets him go out back to look at the “duck pond” which is actually the “ocean” of the title.
Here the flashback occurs, and the grown man suddenly remembers vividly what happened to him when he was seven. A lodger committed suicide. While the police were investigating, he was left temporarily in the custody of the Hempstocks—11-year-old Lettie, her mother Ginnie, and her grandmother, who is not named. These are no ordinary persons. Their resemblance to Robert Graves’s trinity of maiden/mother/crone is surely not accidental. They are witches or even goddesses. Granny makes casual comments about how the Plantagenet princes used to like her cheese. She can remember when the Moon was formed. By the end of the book we learn that she also remembers the Big Bang. None of the others are their apparent ages either. The boy is perceptive enough to ask Lettie how long she has been eleven.
The lodger’s suicide causes supernatural disruptions in the natural world. Things of mythic and archetypal significance happen quick and fast, not the least of which is that a Thing from beyond reality presents itself as a new nanny and starts having an affair with the boy’s father.
You can tell this is a writer who has not merely raised children but remembers what it is like to be a child. Gaiman very capably captures a seven-year-old’s preoccupations with comfort and security, the desire for familiar things, and the helplessness one faces when trying to contradict what adults say. This is of course a familiar theme of juvenile fantasy fiction: the kids have to take care of the menace no adult would ever believe in. What parent would possibly believe it when their seemingly stubborn seven-year-old insists the new nanny is a monster or that the neighbors are witches (or goddesses) or that there are bird-like devouring things on the loose capable of gobbling up the entire universe?
This theme can be handled for adventure or horror or anything in between. One thinks also of Arthur Machen’s great story, “The White People,” in which a young girl is initiated into witchcraft by her nurse and discovers a whole new reality. Hidden realities were Machen’s great preoccupation too, the idea that beyond our senses, just beneath the fabric of our apparent world, lay something else. Gaiman is, of course, an enormously well-read person, familiar with the greats of fantasy literature, so an apparent nod to Machen does not surprise. Certainly, once the boy is dipped into the “ocean” (which looks like a pond but really is infinite), the resultant perspective could come right out of Machen:
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and I understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me. (141)
But of course understanding, like memory, is a tricky matter in this book. Children may have such understanding. They may see the magical things adults can’t, but as they mature, they inevitably lose this ability. At the moment he is immersed in the magical waters, the boy understands everything. The 40-something who has returned to this place clearly does not. A lesser writer might have written himself into a corner here since the story is told in the first person and the narrator has to remember himself forgetting things. In fact, by the end, he discovers that he has at least twice before made this visit and apparently forgotten everything. It’s tricky enough that you may want to read the book twice—it is short and so smoothly written that it is very easy to read it twice—to observe how all the pieces do indeed fall into place properly. The seven-year-old, briefly, understood everything, but even that began to fade as soon as he emerged from the ocean. He could only remember what the sensation was like. The 40-ish man can remember the whole adventure or most of it, almost as if he is remembering two timelines at once, although when he asks the oldest Mrs. Hempstock if he has remembered it correctly, she can only say that most of it happened that way. If we imagine that the narrator is Gaiman or a Gaiman stand-in, then the question of memory has been artfully sidestepped. He has reconstructed the memory as an imaginative story and written it down for us. Anything not true is made up, creatively. What writer knows where every piece of a story comes from?
So can we define the essence of the otherwise inimitable Mr. Gaiman? Very smooth writing, yes. His prose reads very well aloud, as anyone lucky enough to have attended that amazing performance at a World Horror Convention in Denver in 2000 when he read the entire text of Coraline and held his audience enraptured for three hours knows perfectly well. But there are lots of writers who write good prose and lots of writers who create convincing characters. What Gaiman does here is weave the real and the unreal together seamlessly. The effect is sort of like Magic Realism in that, at least for the characters in the know, the magical nature of existence is taken for granted. This is not a story of the Lovecraftian “weird” intruding into our rational, concrete world at the expense of our sanity. The boy, at least at seven, is quite at ease with there being a triple goddess living down the lane. This is the power of myth. He remarks about myth on page 53: “I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.”
The great theme here—which was also Machen’s—is how we can discover and forget that the universe is more than it seems and more than most of us can ever see, except briefly, with the eyes of childhood before adulthood gives us blinders.
Maybe the secret is that Gaiman is not wearing the same blinders the rest of us are.
Darrell Schweitzer is the editor of The Neil Gaiman Reader.
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