Wow. How to write a review for this book? It is so many things and nothing at all. A multitude of stories and just a piece of a whole. The fleeting strand of a memory from long ago; images and words and emotions sitting tantalizingly on the surface of your mind, yet somehow eluding your every attempt to put shape to the smoke. Something there and gone, there and gone . . . a melancholic happiness that sublimates the moment we focus on it. As a result, I fear this review may end up more of a rambling incoherence. But, hopefully, I can distill some form from the chaos.
Publisher Marketing:
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie--magical, comforting, wise beyond her years--promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
My Review:
First of all, this book is not strictly young adult. This book is marketed as adult. It contains violence unimaginable, moments of sexuality, and death. These experiences, however, are filtered through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy. They become something less than they are, but also much more. In doing so with such complete success, Gaiman has reached deep into us to rip out the all but forgotten seven-year-old in each of us. It is our seven-year-old self that experiences this book while our adult self attempts to make sense of the experience. Because of this, I think this book would work great for most young adults and even many precocious younger readers. As Gaiman points out in his hilarious and thought provoking "What the [Very Bad Swearword] is a Children's Book Anyway?" in the November/December 2012 issue of Horn Book: "Children tend to be really good at self-censorship. They have a pretty good sense of what they are ready for and what they are not, and they walk the line wisely." This is something every youth services librarian knows, and we also know that children have already experienced and know much more than we would have them know. But, as we grow older, we forget about this and many other things about childhood; as Gaiman points out in the same article, "the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children." So, this book is interesting in that point. It is a children's book for adults and, conversely, an adult book for children.
The book is simply astounding. Much like the book's wonderful Lettie Hempstock and her ocean, this novel is small and short in length, but astoundingly broad in scope and depth. The main character/narrator is an adult man of indeterminate age who has returned to his hometown to attend a funeral and wake (presumably for a parent), but as mentioned above, he isn't the person we experience the book through. It is his seven-year-old self whose only friends are books that we travel the road with. A boy whose life is suddenly shaken by the death of his kitten by an arriving lodger and the suicide of that very lodger. He meets a young girl (who isn't young) and her mother and grandmother (who aren't old) and from then on the fantastic and magical world crashes over us like great waves. We become lost with him in the danger and wonder of this world that is his own and not his own. An old and powerful creature has been awakened and drawn by the suicide of the lodger and the boy becomes inextricably bound to it and Lettie as a result.
Like all of Gaiman's stories, magic and fantasy seethe beneath every moment on the page of Ocean. The fantastic and the mundane intertwine as a part of a greater whole. This is really Gaiman's gift: his ability to join the often disparate worlds of childhood, with its magic and wonder, together with the world of adulthood, with its structured reality. Something he does in a way that once we turn the last page, we find ourselves observing our lives and the world around us with a slightly more focused eye to the mythical elements we encounter everyday. In this book, it is as if he's squeezed the very essence of this magic and focused on it entirely. Each sentence is suffused with ancient magics, creating a setting that is completely otherwordly, yet entirely our own.
Every one of Gaiman's works is replete with this kind of experience and wonder; from The Wolves in the Walls to the Sandman comics to the Newbery Award-winning The Graveyard Book to American Gods, his stories blur the edges of our world to bring into focus the unknown all around us. He has never done this as such a complete and visceral experience as he has with Ocean. It is a story steeped in the joys, fears, and experiences of childhood. Memories we all have that share a certain flavor and texture that is undeniably childlike. Don't let the word "childlike" fool you, however. Our journey in this book begins with a quote by the great Maurice Sendak stating, "I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." This is not a book of candy and puppies and teddy bears. Bad things happen in the lives of children just as they happen in the lives of adults. We like to think that the frights of children are somehow smaller than the fears of adulthood. Do we willfully diminish the recollections of our childhood as we age? How much do we forget in order to put our adult worlds into some shape we can understand and live in? Because just as horrible things happen to the boy in this book or how terrifying things happened to Coraline and Bod in their stories, bad things happened to all of us. And the "realness," or lack thereof, of those things did not make those experiences somehow smaller to our childhood selves. But we lived through them, often due to the aid of creatures/friends imagined or magical. Entities we knew to exist just as surely as we knew there were monsters under our beds. Entities that, in the end are not part of the world we grow into, yet are integral to the creation of that world. Friends that were there when we needed them most. Friends whose faces fade like our memories of childhood, to become something mythical and ephemeral. Memories much like this book, so real when awash in its pages and like a mist once we've turned the last page: there and gone . . . there and gone . . . like waves of an ocean too big to comprehend but small enough to be a pond; too big to comprehend, yet somehow easy to understand . . . there and gone . . . there and gone . . .
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