THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE, Neil Gaiman

Some readers may tend to steer clear of first-person narration, especially with child narrators. In response to that, I say that if you want to see a writer do first-person well, read Neil Gaiman’s work. Specially The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Part of what makes the narration effective—both in first-person and with a kid—is that it captures the atmosphere of childhood in all its mythical, treacherous glory. There’s also some temporal distance at play, even if it’s not always apparent.

The voice itself belongs to a middle-aged man reflecting on a series of memories from childhood he’d lost. No, it’s not a soap opera-worthy case of amnesia. These foggy recollections are triggered when he visits the Hempstock farm after a funeral (never told whose funeral—there’s a lot of names we don’t know, actually). He doesn’t even realize how much he’s forgotten until, while staring into a duck pond that his friend Lettie Hempstock called “the ocean,” he’s mentally brought back to his seven-year-old self.
The narration is still expressed with an adult vocabulary and sensibility, but it also respects the boundaries of a seven-year-old’s perspective of the world. This boy is helpfully precocious enough to comprehend the gravity of a situation—such as when a boarder at his house, an opal miner who ran over his kitten by accident, commits suicide in the family car. The child is understandably disturbed while failing to completely grasp what’s happened. This incident is also his introduction to the Hempstock family—Lettie, Mrs. Hempstock, and Old Mrs. Hempstock, who run their farm by themselves, no men in sight.

Things in the protagonist’s world stay in the plausible, even with the suicide, until he starts having dreams about coins showing up in his throat, and some invisible force pelts more coins at random people. From there the supernatural escalates, but in a way that the narrator doesn’t find unbelievable when he’s in the presence of the Hempstocks. They drop little hints early on that they have knowledge beyond mundane human logic and senses. All pretense of the ordinary is defenestrated when Lettie agrees to take the boy with her to find the being that is throwing money at people. Rather than explain any mythos through narrative exposition, Gaiman relies on visuals and bits of dialogue to introduce the boy and the readers to the supernatural side of his world.

Gaiman captures a reality that mirrors our own that's also inhabited by creatures that our imaginations can barely comprehend. Lettie and the boy start in the fields near the Hempstock farm; while they don't noticeably cross through an interdimension tear, we feel the uncanny shift into a different world. The entity responsible for the proliferation of misplaced money is described as “strips of cloth,” defying any attempt to slap the usual hallmarks of demonic or angelic or alien beings. I can’t help but wonder if Jim Henson could’ve brought this creature to life through puppetry in a style similar to Labyrinth. Of course, don’t let the fabric-based appearance fool you into thinking this a cutsy Muppet or Sesame-Street monster. The entity becomes a nasty piece of work when Lettie binds it to its realm to prevent it from returning to the human realm. The creature retaliates by stabbing the boy’s foot, opening a bridge or wormhole, for lack of better terms, that its uses cross over through him. The creature first manifests as a worm the boy tries to (quite calmly) pull out of his foot like a splinter. Unfortunately, his mother didn’t teach him that flushing gross pests down the drain doesn’t guarantee permanent removal. It returns in human form as Ursula Monkton, who ingratiates herself into the boy’s family as a nanny. She spends her time either making his family members happy (especially his father, and yes, in the worst way possible) or imprisoning and tormenting the boy to convince him to stay out of her way. 

Monkton is a terrifying yet sympathetic character. She leaves me trembling whether she feigns kindness and threatens the boy with electrocution. However, she’s motivated not by bringing misery (except to the boy for thwarting her) but by making people happy. The boarder commits suicide because he can’t pay back a debt, and in death he comes into contact with Monkton, who thinks the way to fix everything is to literally throw money around. The Hempstocks mentions other “varmints” who’ve snuck into the human world to cause trouble, but Monkton’s misguided acts, stubbornness, and vindictive side give her surprising complexity for a preternatural being. Even Lettie recognizes that while Monkton is a monster, what turns her into a monster is understandable fear--fear of even more dangerous monsters. They make their entrance thanks to Lettie’s last-ditch effort to get rid of Monkton. At this point the boy has realized that eleven-year-old Lettie has existed much longer than appearances suggest—but even she falls prey to short-sightedness, much like Monkton, when her plan puts the narrator in greater danger.

The climax and resolution bring together world-ending stakes and poignancy, leaving the reader reeling with the weighty and mature tone of the book that still fits into a seven-year-old’s perspective. Granted, there is one line the boy says to his father that feels a little too precocious for even this kid, but it’s an important “coming of age” moment between father and son. In fact, I wish we could learn more about the boy’s relationship with his father after the fact, including whether or not it’s the father’s funeral the now grown boy is attending. There aren’t enough hints to clarify who the deceased is (the narrator’s sister is in attendance and he’s pretty glum about the whole affair, but that may just be a side-effect of what happens in the story’s climax). Instead, once the exciting action concludes, Gaiman glosses over the boy’s growing years and brings the reader back to the present day.

The narrator forgets (or is made to forget) all the fantastic parts of his history with the Hempstocks. Lettie makes a sacrifice for him that requires her to be set adrift in the duck pond, which really is an ocean underneath. Her mother and grandmother wait for her return on their farm, the same ages as when he met them in his boyhood. Now remembering everything, he thanks a possibly present Lettie, and there is hope that the damage wrought on him in childhood is finally beginning to heal after all these years.

Like I said, there are some aspects of the boy’s life that could’ve benefited from some follow through. What we do know is that the boy’s parents divorce, and his sister suspects that their father had an affair with their nanny Miss Monkton. Besides that, a few extra details about how he left things with his family when he grew up and lived on his own would’ve nicely rounded out his development. It's an understandable omission, though, since the book is really about the boy’s relationship with the Hempstocks. His departure from them marks the moment that he leaves childhood behind, along with his memories. It reflects how our adult selves let go of beliefs in the impossible and fantastic in childhood that maybe we shouldn't have lost. Or maybe we do need to leave them behind in order to grow up or recover from trauma, but it does us good to recall and revisit sometimes to complete the healing process, just as the narrator does with the Hempstocks.

Gaiman’s fantasy elements have a familiar ring with its alternate dimensions and otherworldly beasts (oddly reminiscent of some Stephen King) while still unique in how he integrates the supernatural with the mundane. For most of the book you may not be sure where the story is going, in the best possible way. Some questions are left hanging not because the author doesn’t want to bother answering them, but because they don’t need to be answered to understand the important details—not an easy feat. In short, Ocean brings much of what many readers love about Gaiman: strange yet sympathetic characters, a creative fantasy environment, and splashes of understated humor to balance out the grim and frightening. If a first-person child narrator doesn’t faze you, give this book a read. If such narrators do faze you, read this book anyway.

Rating: 4.5/5