The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
William Morrow
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: After a funeral brings an aging man back to his childhood hometown, he finds his steps wandering to the old Hempstock farm at the end of an unpaved lane. It's the sort of place immune to the passage of time... the sort of place where a man might remember things long forgotten. He was seven years old the first time he met Lettie Hempstock and her family - a meeting with profound consequences, yet which he struggles to recall. How could he have forgotten the peculiar Hempstocks, who are something both less and more than they appear? How could he have forgotten the thing in the woods, or the cruel Ursula? And how could he have forgotten that the small duck pond behind the old farmhouse was no pond at all, but an ocean... or was it?

REVIEW: Another audiobook to make work somewhat tolerable, I was initially on the fence about trying it. Much as I appreciate Gaiman's writing, I find his works a bit hit-and-miss for my tastes. But this one looked relatively short, and I'd heard interesting things about it (and, to be honest, the pickings are a bit slim on Overdrive these days, probably because everyone's stocking up library loans for holidays), so I gave it a shot, and was pleasantly impressed.
This is, ultimately, a story about the lost magic of childhood, the cruelty of adults, and the ephemeral nature of memory. The narrator, who is unnamed but admittedly based on Gaiman's youth, is an ordinary enough boy, if not necessarily a happy one; his memories of the Hempstocks start after a seventh birthday party where none of his classmate "friends" bothered to show up, though he's just as happy losing himself in a book or wandering the neighborhood wilds rather than playing with peers. Even the small joys he manages, though, are inevitably trodden on by unthinking grown-ups; he loses his bedroom when his parents need money and must take in boarders, forced to move in with his younger sister, and then the taxi of one of those boarders accidentally kills his pet cat. (But he's supposed to be okay with an entirely unfriendly and unsuitable substitute, because it was just a cat to everyone but him; it's this sort of casual disregard for his feelings, the way adults can be mean and hurtful without even quite realizing it or even having to realize it, because the power flows one way, that lies at the heart of much of this story.)
It's the suicide of that boarder, down the lane near the Hempstock farm, that kicks off the days of magic and terror which shape the rest of his life, yet which slide out of his memory so easily. Like the Hempstocks, those memories simply do not fit into the mundane human world, and can only be glimpsed briefly from the corner of the eye; to linger among them too long is to be forced to ask questions about the very nature of reality itself, questions the human brain is ill-equipped to handle and rejects given half a chance to forget. There's a surreal air to the boy's adventure, how he is mesmerized by the magic of Lettie Hempstock and the wonders he sees around her and her family, and subsequently terrorized by a thing not from this world (yet which is no more inherently evil than the average adult; Ursula does evil things, but seems to lack a basic understanding of morality that would be required to be truly and consciously evil, not particularly caring whether her actions have bad consequences - save for a dislike of the boy who wants to send her back where she belongs and out of his life). For all that he does not consciously remember what happened during those days, they nevertheless leave a lasting mark on the man's life. It's a beautiful story with more than a touch of poetry about it, strong dashes of old-school magic and ancient myths and faerie lore, and a certain sadness for things lost to time and memory.
This audiobook version includes an excerpt from an online interview with Neil Gaiman, talking about the inspirations of the book and themes and such. While somewhat interesting, I have to wonder why it was included, except to pad out the length.

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