DARK FABLE
British author’s dark story filled with weird thrills of childhood imagination
British author Neil Gaiman fills his latest story with weird thrills from a childhood imagination.
M emories can be like waves — quickly and gently washing over the mind. Or, sometimes, as the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane experiences, memories can be like tidal waves that crash down and drown us completely.
After ducking out of a funeral to haunt the neighbourhood where he grew up, the middle-aged narrator of Ocean finds himself down the lane, at an unassuming duck pond behind a farm. There, he reflects on stray childhood memories he has tied to the little pond and a little girl named Lettie Hempstock who told him the pond was really an ocean.
Thinking about “the ocean” and Lettie — who lived on the farm with her mother and grandmother — a rush of memories is suddenly unleashed. He then recounts a fantastic story that begins with meeting Lettie when he was seven years old under mysterious circumstances that include a corpse and supernatural spare change.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane isn’t a reflection of childhood, it’s more a symbolic drowning in the unique almost-magic realism feel of kid logic, where creatures from other worlds make more sense than an adulterous parent.
Like the duck pond that also happens to be an ocean the size of the cosmos, this thin tome — clocking in at less than 200 pages — has deceptive and sneaky depth. It’s an adult fable set in a mostly un-nostalgic portrayal of childhood, a time when a child’s world can feel both cosmically gigantic and insect-small.
Ocean is Gaiman’s first adult novel since 2005’s Anansi Boys, and while his last novel, the children’s book Graveyard Book, might be a longer read than Ocean, Gaiman has always had a knack for making his shorter stories count, creating expansive myths in small doses.
In his comic book series Sandman, for example, he told some of his deepest and most epic stories in 20 sequential pages or less. While Gaiman has spun new stories that evoke classic lit, as well as offering his own take on myths and fables, Ocean is an entirely new fable that can resonate with people of just about any age.
What the best Gaiman stories tap into is something the narrator of Ocean reflects on in a not-so-subtle passage about the types of stories his seven-year-old bookworm-self enjoyed:
“I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start … Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?”
Here there is no shortage of fantastic ideas and images — a world under an orange sky where half-manta ray, half-wolf creatures float, kittens that can be picked out of the ground like pumpkins, and the awesome image of “hunger birds” that rip apart reality.
But it’s the melancholic honesty about being a powerless and selfish kid that makes Ocean a compelling story about the cost of childhood adventure and the crushing power of memory.
Ocean is an enjoyable read that flies by, with great scene after great scene. And as tension mounts, so does the cost of dealing with things bigger than your own world — ultimately ending on a bittersweet note.
Very fittingly, the story is prefaced by a quote from the late Maurice Sendak, whose darkly imaginative children’s story, Where the Wild Things Are, still deeply resonates with adults decades after they’ve read it.
In Ocean, Gaiman succeeds as almost an upside-down reflection of Sendak, telling a dark story filled with the weird thrills of childhood imagination.