If you had given me The Ocean at the End of the Lane with no cover or title page, without telling me anything about it at all, I’d still know it was a Neil Gaiman story. Out of all my favorite authors, Gaiman has the most comfortable, clever, and satisfying style of writing.
The book starts off with a man driving to a funeral in his hometown when he find himself driving down a lane he thought he’d forgotten. He suddenly remembers the house there, the people inside, and the duck pond that is definitely not a duck pond.
After that, the story begins again, this time about an eight year old boy. He’s quiet and shy, and much more comfortable around books than people. He meets the Hempstocks, and he’s fascinated by them, especially their youngest girl, Lettie. They know things they couldn’t possibly know, and they’re very matter-of-fact about being able to read a suicide note that’s still in the pocket of a dead man over a mile away, and know what the dead man was thinking when he wrote it. Old Mrs. Hempstock also says she remembers when the moon was made, and it doesn’t sound like she’s kidding.
But they’re not witches. They boy knows this, because they emphatically told him they weren’t.
Once I finished the book I felt the characters could be described like this: the main character is who you imagine yourself to be. Mrs. Hempstock and Old Mrs. Hempstock are people whose respect you’d do anything to earn. Lettie is who you’d most want to be like.
Gaiman has said in interviews that while the line between children’s books and adult books can be indistinct, he never intended this book to be for children, and it’s pretty apparent right from the beginning. There’s frank depictions of death, corpses, adultery, violence, and a really detailed description of someone pulling a worm out of their foot. But as much as I love Gaiman’s Coraline and The Graveyard Book, both meant for young adults, there was something amazingly fun about reading a new Gaiman book for grownups.
Gaiman paints a beautiful, off-color world around the reader, and the Hempstocks are the best part of it. They’re so casual about the things they live with, there’s always some off-hand reference that’s never quite explained, like manta wolves, hunger birds, shaper language, tokens-of-work, and the field of kittens. And the way they talk about magic is almost terrifying, because they shrug some things off as easily as breathing.
“Let’s see. We could be away when they get here. They could arrive last Tuesday, when there’s nobody home.”
“Out of the question. Just complicates things, playing with time…”
It’s not a completely happy book, but that’s part of what makes it so good. In all of his books, Gaiman mixes in a lot of dark, unhappy sections. They make the bits that are funny or sweet feel like little rewards for getting through the hard parts.
I only have one complaint: it was a fairly short book, I would’ve liked it to go on a lot longer. But it’s a Neil Gaiman book, I tend to want them to go on forever.