Voyaging Backwards: A Review of Neil Gaiman’s “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In spirit, Gaiman’s new novel is an elegy for the forgotten swaths of childhood, but it reads like an unexpurgated fairytale. The first-person narrator returns almost by accident to a farm in the English countryside, a place he believes he hasn’t visited since childhood, and the sight of its pond releases a memory of a grotesque but magical childhood adventure involving a creature from another universe that wants to give the adults on the lane what they want: money or sex. The entire novel is a flashback, but the adult narrator adds depth to what the seven-year-old protagonist doesn’t understand about the grownups’ world.
What I love about Neil Gaiman is that he is unafraid of following his imagination, and in a story like this, it makes the young protagonist’s experience ring with authenticity. Kids aren’t afraid to throw their whole selves into a made-up world, and neither is Gaiman. The protagonist befriends an eleven-year-old (but possibly immortal) girl whose magical powers are peculiar and almost limitless; and as the friends gather what they need to fight the creature, Gaiman evokes that particularly young feeling of following the known world to its boundary and crossing into the unknown–full of wonder and terror.
As I read, I often found myself wondering why the book was written for adults and why it wouldn’t be suitable for much younger readers. But the young protagonist’s encounters with the creature are probably too disturbing for middle grade. Disguised as a beautiful nanny, the creature forces the protagonist to remain at home, away from the help of his friend. Gaiman does such a spot-on job of capturing the feeling of no escape that it’s hard not to read a deeper meaning into it, something about the layers of manipulation, violation, and hurt that children suffer at the hands of adults.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a very fast read, and while it’s engrossing in the way that the Narnia Chronicles and Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is, there is a dark under-layer that resonates with some more mature truths about what it means to be a child.
The only reason I gave it three stars instead of four is that I’m comparing it against his complex masterpiece, American Gods.
