Dreamtime reading: "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

There are some writers who just leave you agog at the sheer fertility of their imaginations and inventiveness. Neil Gaiman is such an author. This was another book-in-a-day, devoured over a slow morning in waiting for the weather to improve and then, once it had, lounging at the beach, not wanting to interrupt the story even to get into the inviting water. 

Gaiman's stories are magical, and for that reason come burdened with the label of the "fantasy" genre. I'm guessing that this puts some people off, and, yes, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is in very many ways a fairy tale, full of fairy tale tropes: the mysterious farmhouse at the end of the lane, three wise women, blindly uncomprehending adults, evil disguised as beauty, a magical world bursting through into the real one, a kind of elemental savagery combined with a form of natural justice... Gaiman gladly embraces the fairy tale world, and in his hands it becomes true, truer than the humdrum adult world which frames this story. He also embraces its techniques. Most of the novel is a memory of childhood, evoked by an adult visit to a duckpond (the "ocean" of the title), in a example of what I once learned to call Rahmentechnik (framing technique, aka a story-within-a-story), beloved of eighteenth century German novella writers, writing stories frequently featuring magical events in mysterious forests.

The knowledge of childhood

But this is very far from fairy-tale-by-numbers. Gaiman not only writes a page turning story, but also a beautifully evocative one. I notice how many times I have already used the term "adult" as a contrast to the heart of this book, which is, perhaps more than anything, an evocation of what it is like to be a child, like the seven year-old protagonist, living in a world far more open to interpretation and discovery than it is to an adult, full of fears and comforts lost to adults, and to which the child feels a much more intimate physical connection than the adult. 

A sense of place, and of home, is very strong in this book. It is revealing that Gaiman explicitly built the physical environment of the novel on his own memories of his childhood home. Whether or not we as readers feel in any way similar to the boy protagonist (who never, I think, acquires a name), I am sure that everyone will recognise the way he both knows and feels the world in which he lives: the details of his room, the house, the garden and the immediate surroundings. At one point we find a little explanation of this: 

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never accurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

Strangely perhaps for a fairy tale, a lot of what happens in this novel is familiar, close to one's own memories of the fears and pleasures of the childhood world, both deriving from a less than complete understanding of the world and, at the same time, a willingness to accept interpretations which we would reject as adults. In this book, in its "frame", it is the boy protagonist as an adult who returns to the scene of his childhood adventure, and remembers the extraordinary events and the truths about the world as it really is gained at that time. As he sits by the duckpond, it all comes back to him, but later we understand that the knowledge always deserts him again when he leaves this place, and returns to adult reality. The reconnection with childhood is always fleeting and provisional, something which produces a genuine melancholy at least in this reader, but perhaps the good news is that it is possible, albeit sporadically, not least because of people like Neil Gaiman.

So, if that "fantasy" label does bother you, think of the fairy tale stuff as metaphorical - a way of evoking the other world that is childhood. Or, if you're like me and you do have a weak spot for fairy tale (I did read all those eighteenth century German novellas...), embrace it and enjoy it as such. Either way, read the book, it is a beautiful one.