The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

In his first adult novel in over eight years, famed fantasy author Neil Gaiman takes us to the landscape of his childhood for a journey of memory, magic and survival in a world just beyond the veil of reality... To the Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Anyone who knows me knows of my love for Gaiman and his work. From Stardust and Neverwhere to his episodes of Doctor Who, I've thoroughly enjoyed the strange, fantastical – and yet seemingly real and tangible – worlds that Gaiman conjures up. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a perfect example of this: a world that's simultaneously completely fictitious and yet entirely and believably real. This is, in part, due to the fact that Gaiman draws on elements of his childhood for the setting and impetus of this dark and fantastical tale, and his usual engaging narrative style immediately sucks you in.

Told through the memories of our narrator, a forty-something man recalling a time in his life through the eyes of his seven-year-old self, the narrative is as much about childhood and growing up as it is about a world of fantasy and monsters. The book tells the story of the protagonist encountering beings from other worlds, things that exist just outside of our reality (and may very well be more real than what we call reality), but more than that, it tells a story about the powerlessness of childhood, as we attempt to make our way in a world we barely understand. This is probably the biggest thing that separates this book from children's fiction. In Gaiman's more child-friendly works, such as Coraline, he tells children that they can be powerful, that they can triumph over darkness and overcome seemingly impossible odds. But in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the protagonist is burdened by the role he unwilling has to play in this story, and is powerless against the extra-dimensional entities he's faced with, let alone against his own parents!

In many ways, that's the scariest part of this book: not the entities and not the struggle against the darkness, but the overwhelming sense of futility and hopelessness felt by the narrator. It takes you back to those times in childhood when the world was far bigger and scarier than you could even begin to imagine; a world inhabited by giant grown-ups who were invariably right; a world in which you very rarely were able to have any real form of influence or control (a large reason why I buried my head in books in my formative years, and have yet to truly emerge into the “real” world...). It's a powerful way to convey a story, especially one where sometimes the monsters feel more like a metaphor for the unknowably daunting challenges of the real world we begin to discover as we grow up. To feel the vulnerability of childhood from an adult perspective is a sombre and humbling experience, and is something that Gaiman accomplishes brilliantly in this book. The Ocean at the End of the Lane may be a book for adults, but is very much written for the children these adults used to be.

Not only has the book been ranked Number 1 Bestseller
by the New York Times, and signed by the man himself,
it has also earned the highly-coveted position on my
Coffee Table of Excellence™!

The story which frames the allegory of childhood is also a fantastically realised world of magic, wonder and darkness. We're introduced to the magically mysterious yet earthly and everyday Hempstock family who live on the farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them, Lettie Hempstock, claims that her duck pond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang. These characters are so matter-of-fact about things that would otherwise seem abnormal that you don't even question it, you just allow yourself to be carried away into their weird and wonderful world; a world that's always one step beyond logic.

There are also, of course, dark, monstrous things from beyond our narrator’s reality, things that should never have been summoned to this world, that are brought forth when the lodger commits suicide in the family car (an event based on a true story from when Gaiman himself was seven - whether the entities that are summoned and the events which then unfold are also true remains unknown!). I shan’t go into more detail about the narrative that ensues, because this is a story best left unspoiled and delightfully surprising, but what I will say is that it is incredibly engaging. I devoured the first ten chapters as soon as I got the book on the night of the 17th of June (to be honest, I can’t even remember getting home; one minute I was in the theatre, then I was seven-years-old and encountered the thing that called itself Ursula Monkton, and the next I was back home!), and persuaded myself to read only one chapter a night to prolong the experience.

From what started life as a short story for his wife, Amanda Palmer, The Ocean at the End of the Lane has become a genuinely brilliant novel. Through this story, Gaiman conjures up those oft-forgotten worlds of magic and adventure, capturing the essence and innocence of being a child again, but also leading us to that bittersweet taste of childhood’s end. It is a wonderful and poignant tale, and worth every tug at the heart-strings.

It's an adult fairy tale, a modern day myth, and a bloody good read!

You can read a transcript of Neil Gaiman’s Q&A at the Royal Society of Literature on the 17th of June, talking about the inception of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, here.