The beginning of The Ocean at the End of the Lane is like the surface of the ocean itself: rhythmically shifting, but deceptively calm. It took me a while to realize that no, this wasn’t a radical departure for Neil Gaiman, this wasn’t just a lyrical, feel-good story about a lost childhood memory in the English countryside.
It’s just that what happened to the adult narrator when he was a child was so strange and frightening that his adult mind had buried over much of it. Now he’s returned to the place where it all happened, and even after he narrates the story of his seven-year-old self he has difficulty remembering that he’d been there before several times before, not just that one time when it all happened. The narrator’s mind is also like the ocean: ceaselessly churning, remembering, forgetting, trying to make sense of something that makes sense only in that mind’s deepest levels, for that is where Gaiman’s genius lies.
In short, Gaiman’s latest novel is a 178-page masterpiece. Though his narrator is an adult, he slips effortlessly into the mind of his childhood self in relating a tale full of magic reality—a reality that also can be interpreted as a child’s imaginative way of dealing with family difficulties and death. That the child’s imagination resonated with magical beings rooted in dark myths made the story immensely pleasurable to read.
I heard echoes of at least two other classic fantasy novels as I read this: Tuck Everlasting and A Wrinkle In Time. Like Tuck Everlasting, The Ocean starts off somewhat languidly, building a sense of place that reinforces the timelessness at its center. Like A Wrinkle In Time, Gaiman’s novel features a trio of strong, idiosyncratic female characters who are plugged into the magical world that the protagonist discovers.
But unlike them, The Ocean is not a book for children, not really. In the Gaiman canon it’s closest to Coraline, in that it features a child protagonist dealing with terrifying otherworldly beings as his mind probes its own secrets. By contrast, The Graveyard Book, which is meant for children, does not plumb the same psychic depths, and in my opinion doesn’t quite measure up to the other two.
He plumbs those depths in The Ocean at the End of the Lane in a lyrical way that also transforms into a page-turner by novel’s end. And somehow, Gaiman makes the unbelievable not only believable, but inevitable.
J.S. Webster Mind Voyages 