The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
William Morrow, 2013, 178pp
hc, First Edition
ISBN: 973 0 06 225565 5
$25.99 (a bargain at twice the price)
A Review by Gene Stewart
Our narrator at the start of the book goes back to his roots to attend a funeral. He escapes the duties of mourning for awhile by wandering away from the reception to rediscover childhood places. Some have changed, some have gone, and some retain a potent magic that transports him into memory he forgot he carried.
It is there the book lives, in those memories.
He sifts out events formative and strange, with surreal threats and magical rescues. He discovers lines of power and strength, spots of weakness and fault lines of guilt and regret. A kitten’s death, a man’s suicide, and a refuge granted and denied factor into what makes him real to himself, as he learns to remember.
There is fear in it, pain, and darkness, but it is not horror, nor yet suspense. It is Ficta Mystica, which is to say mystical realism, steeped in myth and toying with legend. In this beguiling book the Fates, our choices, regrets, fears, and shadows feast and frolic in fearsome majesty and plain mud-on-shoes simplicity. Wonder is grounded in a child’s contact with the earth, its grit and smells, its tastes and worms, its long-way-‘round short-cuts. He evokes immanent magic deftly, making it as real as the delicious meals he describes, comfort food for a reader’s hopes.
It is a brief book but, like the ocean in it, has unimagined depths and a horizon that engulfs existence. It is bigger inside than on the outside, a TARDIS of a book, a world unto itself where, as with Middle Earth, we might visit or live, depending on our life’s slant.
The sacrifice at the heart of this book is one we all make and have made for us, our past in exchange for our present, the only trade that counts, even if we forget, even if our memories are flotsam in fragments and sunken glints. The Ocean At the End of the Lane is recommended for anyone who blinks to find life has swallowed them in an act of Protean appetite.
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27 August 2013 C.E.
