The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman

Ebook, 2013

Library's rating

Library's review

How does he do it? How does Neil Gaiman, a grown man "of a certain age" manage to so effortlessly recall the inner voice and outer actions of a little boy? This short novel is a delightful mix of coming-of-age and creepy thriller, with a final chapter that made me sigh deeply in satisfaction of how

the story ended despite the lack of "happy ever after".

Ocean's story is told through the memories of a middle-aged man looking back at events that happened when he was 7 years old. The grown man is back in his home county in England for a funeral (though we never learn who has died), and he takes the opportunity to revisit his childhood home and that of Lettie Hempstock, the slightly (or greatly, depending on how you look at it) older girl who lives down the lane. Behind her house is what looks like a duck pond to our young narrator, though Lettie insists it is an ocean. As the man sits on a bench next to the pond, he begins to remember what really happened all those years ago.

Gaiman perfectly inhabits the body and voice of his young narrator. Again and again, the boy's reaction to those around him — his pesky little sister, his loving but somewhat absentminded parents, Lettie and her mysterious womenfolk, the horrific nanny who comes to live with him and who cannot be budged — is pitch-perfect. The little boy is shy and quiet, much more comfortable in the company of a book than other boys his age. Even as Lettie takes him on some eerie adventures, and helps him deal with the consequences of those adventures back in the real world, Gaiman makes the reader feel the little boy's inner strength as well as his sheer terror.

The real-world elements have the ring of sincerity about them, and strangely so do the otherworldly elements. One of Gaiman's gifts is that he doesn't try to over-explain the hows and whys of the supernatural elements that appear in his books. They simply are, and the reader believes and struggles to understand even as Gaiman's characters do. We never fully learn where Lettie and her kin came from or when, but in the end it doesn't matter. They exist, clearly, because the little boy sees and feels them and the consequences of what they do. No one watching television for the first time ever demands to know how the picture and sound gets inside that little box before they can enjoy the sensation. There's a time and a place for magic, and no one understands that better than Gaiman.

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5-star books, Read but unowned

Description

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

Media reviews

The Guardian

The Ocean at the End of the Lane arouses, and satisfies, the expectations of the skilled reader of fairytales, and stories which draw on fairytales. Fairytales, of course, were not invented for children, and deal ferociously with the grim and the bad and the dangerous. But they promise a kind of

resolution, and Gaiman keeps this promise.

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— 3 more

New York Times

[Gaiman's] mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown.

NPR

The story is tightly plotted and exciting. Reading it feels a lot like diving into an extremely smart, morally ambiguous fairy tale. And indeed, Gaiman's adult protagonist observes at one point that fairy tales aren't for kids or grownups — they're just stories. In Gaiman's version of the fairy

tale, his protagonist's adult and child perspectives are interwoven seamlessly, giving us a sense of how he experienced his past at that time, as well as how it affected him for the rest of his life.

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People

Reading Gaiman's new novel, his first for adults since 2005's The Anansi Boys, is like listening to that rare friend whose dreams you actually want to hear about at breakfast. The narrator, an unnamed Brit, has returned to his hometown for a funeral. Drawn to a farm he dimly recalls from his youth,

he's flooded with strange memories: of a suicide, the malign forces it unleashed and the three otherworldly females who helped him survive a terrifying odyssey. Gaiman's at his fantasy-master best here—the struggle between a boy and a shape-shifter with "rotting-cloth eyes" moves at a speedy, chilling clip. What distinguishes the book, though, is its evocation of the powerlessness and wonder of childhood, a time when magic seems as likely as any other answer and good stories help us through. "Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and ... dangerous fairies?" the hero wonders. Sometimes, they do.

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