A Book A Week - Week 29: The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

This week's book:
   The Ocean at the End of the Lane  by Neil Gaiman

Grade: B-

There is so much more he could have done with this...
   I think it would be wrong of me to judge this book on what I wish the author would have done, though.  So I'll stick to what he did do.

This is, at its base, just a story.  A collection of characters, a setting, and a plot.  Things evolve from there.  Now, as just a story this is a fairly decent one.  A young English boy discovers there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.  He gets in trouble, he makes friends and enemies, and the trouble is resolved in a day or two.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, and it's done.  It's imaginative and well-written, descriptive and surprising, and moves at a quick enough pace to keep the reader interested.  If the author intended this to be just a story then he accomplished that goal.  But I think he intended it to be more.

I think Mr. Gaiman intended this to be a modern myth.  The main character states his preference for myth stories at the beginning, and the tropes are there: the outcast hero, the journey to a distant land, the betrayal in his homeland, the magical guide.  The family at the end of the lane - where the Ocean is - are three women: daughter, mother, and grandmother.  Maiden, Mother, and Crone.  The Fates.  Whose presence, if you've never read Greek, is a pretty big clue that you're reading a myth.  There is also a big monster to defeat, something huge and beyond his ability, an unattainable goal.  Which the hero decides to deal with in his own fashion instead of listening to the advice of his guide.
    Like I said, all the classic trappings are there, this is clearly intended to be a myth.

He doesn't pull it off.  I'm a fan of ancient myths myself, I loved learning them when I was about the age of the hero of this novel.  If you don't know classical myths then think Grimm's Fairy Tales, the delicious, dark ones, where children kill witches and evil elves steal babies.  Those are myths too, relatively recent ones.  Myths explained things.  Myths were a primitive people's way of understanding the vast, unknowable universe around them.  Myths also had a moral.  Always.  They were allegories of the human condition, usually cautionary tales, that also, for example, tried to explain how people first learned about fire.  Or about hope.  Or about lies.

This story - this attempt at making a new myth - doesn't have a moral.  And, near as I can tell, doesn't attempt to explain anything.  Mr. Gaiman takes a stab at it, the hero of the story is a seven-year-old boy who is baffled, repulsed, and fascinated by adults.  The author takes great pains to show that his hero, as a child, is already a stranger in a strange land where adults rule and the customs are foreign.

But the story never resolves this tension, it never explains anything about the workings of the world or about being an adult, and it never presents a moral.  The story includes all the bits and pieces of a myth, and the storytelling intent, but it never quite comes together.  What was the purpose of the hero's journey?  The resolution of the story makes it impossible for him to learn from his experiences, so... what was the point?

If you're a Neil Gaiman fan you should read this book.  If you like fantasy or fairy tales you should read this book.  If you have never read fantasy or Mr. Gaiman's work you should give it a try, it's a good introduction to both.  It's also a good Summer read, not too taxing on the brain, even though I wish it were.


Next week:
 Salt, a World History   by Mark Kurlansky
 No, this is not the novelization of that terrible Angelina Jolie movie.  I'm going back to non-fiction next week, and a book about the only rock people eat.