“For good or for evil – and I firmly believe that it is for good – Mrs. Owens and her husband have taken this child under their protection. It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,” said Silas, “take a graveyard.”
The Graveyard Book is my book club's Halloween spooky read – which I was pleased with, having read some Neil Gaiman and trusting him to deliver something imaginative – but this didn't really work for me. I understand that Gaiman was reworking The Jungle Book (and its format as a collection of short stories to make up a novel) for modern audiences by putting his orphan in a graveyard (with ghosts standing in for the animals that raised Kipling's Mowgli), but the episodic storytelling (in which most chapters admittedly had a fascinating scene at their core) didn't add up to something more; the framing device was not very believable, peripheral characters weren't important to the storyline, and the overall plotline held no tension or suspense for me. There was much entertaining dialogue and many well-written scenes – and I do understand that this is technically a children's book – but overall storytelling was done better in the Harry Potter books and black humour was done better in A Series of Unfortunate Events; despite its numerous awards, The Graveyard Book felt pretty pointless to me. (Spoilers beyond.)
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
As with Harry Potter, The Graveyard Book opens with an assassin sent to murder the child who was foretold to bring down his ancient shadowy society, and while the murderer does kill the boy's entire family, he accidentally lets the main target live – creating the circumstances that will allow the child to grow into the kind of person who can take down an ancient shadowy society. This toddler toddles his way to a nearby graveyard, is adopted by a ghost couple with a vampire as his sworn guardian, and by being granted Freedom of the Graveyard, this Nobody “Bod” Owens (as the graveyard's inhabitants decide to name him) is able to learn otherworldly skills (disappearing, walking through walls, haunting people's dreams). Over the years Bod has few encounters with living humans (his guardian, Silas, brings him his food and clothing) and he is kept safe in the graveyard as the killer continues to search for the boy out in the world. As Bod is happy in the graveyard and loves his ghostly family and friends, I had a hard time feeling any tension in the overall narrative – even Bod himself questions what would be so bad about dying in the graveyard and getting to spend eternity with these folks. Silas gives what I found to be an unsatisfying answer to that:
“You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.”
By the end of the book, Bod – who knows next to nothing about the outside world but is finally free to explore it – has a pretty hokey reaction to the “potential” of his life:
Bod said, “I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want,” he said, and then he paused and he thought. “I want everything.”
I liked the history that Gaiman put into this book (from references to the various monarchs under whom different characters died, to the Roman Empire-era soldier buried in the graveyard, and the even more ancient Celt – and its Druidic guardian – buried under a barrow), and I liked the witch and the werewolf, the vampire and the ghouls, the danse macabre; everything otherworldly was imaginatively written. But I didn't much care for the human interactions – Scarlett once grown, the bullies from Bod's brief time in school, the Jacks and their unexplained secret society; none felt like real people – and none of those interactions ended satisfactorily for me, and neither did the book itself. Not my cuppa.
