The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Update – 7/5
I’ve been seeing a lot of different responses to my criticisms and I want to make some clarifications about my feelings (Warning: major spoilers)
One of the events in the book involves the narrator’s father attempting to drown him. Now, it’s not clear from the story how much is pure fantasy and how much is reality that’s been warped into fantasy by the passage of time, but it’s my interpretation that the events are at least based on reality, i.e. what the boy remembers actually happened while the reasons for it happening may be made up. If that’s the case, I really don’t feel anything ‘magical’ or ‘nostalgic’ comes out of what is essentially a story of unresolved abuse, as I never felt the boy comes to terms with his father’s role in what happened. The Hempstocks’ sure, but not his father’s. That lack of closure (and me not really getting the nostalgia) are the reasons for my lower rating.
Of course, the other explanation is that everything that happened is pure fantasy, i.e. the monster manipulated his father into drowning him and it wasn’t ‘real’ but a fictional account, but this explanation for me is even less satisfying because as I alluded to originally the story just becomes your garden variety attack of the evil babysitter and ruins the profoundness of the rest of the book. I guess I could have gone with it as many people have, but as I said I don’t feel the general sense of nostalgia towards childhood as many older readers have, and frankly I don’t understand why anyone would find nostalgia when such abuse is being glossed over.
Original Review
One day perhaps, when I am forty seven years old looking back at my seven year old self, The Ocean at the End of the Lane will hold more appeal for me, but I am not forty seven years old yet. Neil Gaiman’s latest book is a beautifully written, haunting paean to lost childhood, but the story itself was just an incredibly trying experience. Gaiman has a lot to say about the innocence and powerlessness of being seven years old, but frankly, I’m still at an age when I refuse to believe I was either of those things when I was seven years old, so while I applaud Gaiman’s genius storytelling, I just can’t ignore my frustration with the actual story.
What worked for me about The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the presence of Gaiman’s trademark qualities that’s been praised time and time again. This is the very personal story of a middle aged man, somewhat lost over the years, returning to his childhood home to find himself again and reminisce about the strange events once encountered by his seven year old self, but more than that, Gaiman infuses the story with his surrealist magic that makes every word almost hauntingly beautiful. (Plus some really creepy and fantastic imagery, like with that worm…) Sure, Gaiman never comes out and directly tells us what happened to his narrator (although much can be inferred) or what’s real and what isn’t, but that’s the beauty of the story, the mystery not only emphasizes how memories, especially childhood memories, are not concrete, tangible things but bygone magic, but really also compounds the wistful and somber tone of the story. Purely as a work of writing, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is top notch and modern myth at its best.
What I can’t overlook though, is that Gaiman writes the book from the point of view of a middle aged man looking at his childhood through the eyes of his seven year old self, and it just didn’t work for me. As I said, I still remember my childhood quite well, and I wouldn’t exactly describe it as anything magical or special, so while I had a vague sense of the emotions Gaiman wanted to convey with his magical words, I don’t think I’m at an age when I can fully appreciate the deeper emotions that I’m told are here – everything I felt only worked on an academic level. Rather than being moved by the sadness, the nostalgia, the melancholia, I actually became more and more embittered and jaded as the story progressed, because, although I get Gaiman’s narrator is reflecting back on a neglected childhood and parents who didn’t really understand him, a monster destroys this kid’s family, his father abuses him, and I’m sorry, but how Gaiman handled that at least completely irked me.
I know I praised Gaiman for blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, but that for me is also this book’s downfall, because either way, whether I accept the events of the book as fact or fantasy, there’s just something substantively lacking about Gaiman’s narrative. Maybe because he’s too focused on the surrealist aspects, maybe because I’m just still too young and can’t understand the kind of parent/child interactions Gaiman alludes to, but I hated Gaiman’s interpretation of this family. If I took the events as fact veiled by fiction, I think Gaiman tries too hard to appeal to that adult sense of childhood as a sad, innocent time, and just oversimplifies the narrator’s relationship with his father, eventually sweeping the bulk of what happens under a rug, because at the end of the day, has what the monster caused affected anyone in any meaningful way? Not as far as I can tell. And if it’s taken as pure fiction? – then the plot is hardly profound at all, but merely your garden variety attack of the evil babysitter.
Twenty odd years from now, when I look back at this review, I suspect I’ll probably disagree with much, probably even all, of my criticisms. But for the time being, while childhood doesn’t have the emotional appeal for me that Gaiman’s capturing, The Ocean at the End of the Lane tries too hard to recapture the nostalgia at the expense of exploring the trauma to the point in parts it almost reads like formulaic horror, while the elements that probably hold the most magic are the ones that I’m probably just too young to appreciate.
