The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children stories. They were better than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

I've been musing a lot lately about the differences and overlaps between literature and genre fiction, and the above quote captures a basic fact about me: I am not terribly interested in reading about Narnia and secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies. I like adult stories, books that seem to have been written for me as the audience, and there's something about The Ocean at the End of the Lane that didn't speak to me.

I found this photo on the back cover to be unsettling -- something unnatural about the splayed fingers, the droopy socks, the cut off head. I later learned that it's a picture of Neil Gaiman as a child, posing on the same drainpipe the anonymous protagonist of his story shimmies down. I also later learned that this book started off as a series of stories that the author sent off to his wife while she was away working in Australia, and that seemed to explain my disconnect: this is quite a personal story, set intentionally in the author's own childhood, and I suspect that a reader will enjoy it to the degree that he identifies with it. 

Gaiman is a deservedly celebrated author (I loved Anansi Boys) and his overall story here is interesting and well told, but for me, it failed to rise to the level of literature, staying at a Stephen King-like level of world- and myth-making. And as for the mythmaking, there was little new in the Pagan triad of Maiden-Mother-Crone, or water as restorative or the bad Nanny that only a child can see through. On the other hand, what did work for me, what always works for me, was the pain that the little boy had always known within his home, before anything supernatural happened. (Sad children always tug at my heart while fear of the bogeyman can be dismissed.) No friends coming to his birthday party (and his mother obliviously setting the table for fifteen anyway), and losing the comfort of his room with the basin, just his size, but most especially the father who yells but self-righteously refuses to hit -- these kinds of pain are more real and more frightening to me than even Gaiman's creepy canvas and tentpole creation. And on the topic of the angry father, with the afterknowledge that this is based loosely on his own childhood, it's uncomfortable wondering if the Dad in the story is supposed to be enchanted when he makes his most abusive acts (attempting to drown the boy and the tryst with the babysitter), or whether he was always capable of them. 

On this pretty straightforward story, Gaiman hangs some profundities that I did enjoy:

"And did I pass?" The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, "You don't pass or fail at a being a person, dear."

"Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."

Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.

And most especially I liked the following when the boy is  exposed to all the knowledge of the universe, since it involves the Quantum Mechanics and hidden unreality that has always fascinated me:

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.

Overall, this had a kind of YA fiction feel to me, a Harry Potter meets Nanny McPhee vibe (with maybe The Notebook thrown in...), but I read it in one sitting, enjoying the yarn. I would have preferred, however, if the yarn had been a part of a larger weave -- some tapestry depicting those secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood.