The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Abstract

While similarly not works of straight horror, the uncanny doubling involved in the button-eyed Other Mother (Coraline, 2002) or the black-suited ghouls with names like the Duke of Westminster or the Emperor of China (The Graveyard Book, 2008) demonstrate Gaiman's eye for the skull gradually revealed beneath the skin, for the skewed reflection of human anxiety and weakness in inhuman eyes. The book's hero might be a weak boy, but if his friends are immortal beings whose power is apparently limited only by their preferences or by the page-by-page demands of the story, there is little sense of threat: when an encounter with Ursula Monkton, "every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh" (p.116), can be followed under ten pages later by "I was not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was" (p.125), the novel seems overprotective of both its hero and its readers.

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (London: Headline, 2013)

A man remembers something he is rarely permitted to remember. When he was seven, his family's lodger, deep in debt, committed suicide; this caught the attention of an entity that, manifesting first as an amorphous canvas tent, then as a worm, and then as the boy's nanny Ursula Monkton, sought to establish a life in this world by way of the boy's family. And the boy was only believed by Lettie Hempstock, the girl from the farm at the end of the lane who had been eleven years old for a very long time, and by her mother and grandmother, who liked to make the moon shine full and could snip and stitch the course of human lives when the details required correction.

Such is the story told in Neil Gaiman's new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a book concerned with the reliability of memory, and with the conflict between the innocent loves of childhood and the more cynical desires of adulthood. While frequently compelling, it is not without weak points where instructive complexity is lost to narrative closure, causing the fantastic to seem commonplace, the terrifying merely bothersome.

Gaiman is mostly good - better than good - at avoiding broad brushstrokes, instead working his prose into the corners of his characters' emotional experience. This is seen in the relationship between Ocean's narrator and his father, described thus in the bleak seventh chapter:

I was terrified of him when he was angry. His face (angular and usually affable) would grow red, and he would shout, shout so loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyse me. [...] In the school stories I read, misbehaviour often resulted in a caning, or the slipper, and then was forgiven and done, and I would sometimes envy those fictional children the cleanness of their lives. (pp.89-90)

This is written from a naïve perspective: there is in reality nothing clean about hitting children. Yet Gaiman understands that a little boy comforted by books might find even the clichés of suffering consoling; and he ensures that the protagonist's suffering is not clichéd. That the father is not physically abusive makes all the more shocking his attempt to drown his son in the bath. Yes, the father is by this stage under the seductive influence of Ursula Monkton - "a cardboard mask for the thing that had travelled inside me as a worm, that had flapped and gusted in the open country under that orange sky" (p.81) - and, yes, it is unclear to what extent the drowning is a mere threat. But the effort is real enough, and the boy fights back:

Now he pushed me down again, but fear of death gives us strength: my hands and my teeth were clamped to his tie, and he could not break my grip on them without hitting me.

My father did not hit me. (p.98)

Hypocrisy, unsettlingly, saves the day, and the boy: there is no change of heart, only a man's commitment to a hollow principle. When the father complains "'You ruined my tie'" (ibid.) and sends the son to bed, Gaiman invokes the state of mind that George Orwell, remembering the corporal punishment of his school years, calls "a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was not actually possible for me to keep them" ("Such, Such Were the Joys", in Essays (Knopf, 2002), p.1294). The impression of callous illogic and disproportion serves the chapter well. And the uncertainty of the father's intentions recalls, as does his implied self-justification, the recent attempts to undermine the classification of waterboarding as torture. In the words of Christopher Hitchens, "You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning - or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure" ("Believe Me, It's Torture", in Arguably (Atlantic, 2011), p.450). Gaiman similarly shows how little a word like "albeit" means when applied to matters of basic human survival.

Further commentary on contemporary political matters arises through occasional references to economic concerns. The tent/worm/nanny will achieve her ambition - "'I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush'" (p.71) - by giving people what they want. And what people want is money. As the narrator suggests, this is what '"all the fighting and the dreams'" are about (p.41). The creature confirms this:

"Something came to me, and pleaded for love and help. It told me how I could make all the things like it happy. That they are simple creatures, and all any of them want is money, just money, and nothing more. Little tokens of work. If it had asked, I would have given them wisdom, or peace, perfect peace..." (p.57)

Here is some dark thinking, which might have been sustained for longer, about the aspirations of both the haves and the have-nots: a life lived on the basis of the acquisition of wealth is lived under the thumb of whoever, or whatever, can help to acquire it. Ursula Monkton is not evil per se, but does catalyse the petty anger, lust and greed of humankind; to view her as the novel's only villain is to ignore her as she laughs, or screams (possibly only within the protagonist's mind), "I NEVER MADE ANY OF THEM DO ANYTHING" (p.174).

Given that the novel is so thematically rich and disturbing, it is surprising that the tension of the main narrative is quite poorly controlled. There is an oddly clumsy approach to the question of naming. Early on, as they travel beyond the borders of the ordinary world, Lettie and the narrator are forced to hide from a presumed threat:

Something came through the woods, above our heads. I glanced up, saw something brown and furry, but flat, like a huge rug, flapping and curling at the edges, and at the front of the rug, a mouth, filled with dozens of tiny sharp teeth, facing down. (p.52)

The creepy description is somewhat spoiled when Lettie casually tells the narrator that the animal is a "'manta wolf.'" The name is too reassuring, defines too tidily; were this an isolated incident it would not matter much, but it foreshadows the point at which Ursula Monkton's true name, long withheld, is revealed by Lettie, who "'went looking for it'" (p.162), apparently at no great inconvenience. On such occasions Gaiman's novel is neat and complacent where it should, like its antagonist, be ragged and ambitious.

Ocean is not explicitly marketed as a horror novel, let alone a Gothic one, and one cannot legitimately condemn it for not adhering or contributing to a tradition to which it claims no connection. Yet there are enough explicit acknowledgements of fear to suggest that it should be considered a driving force. And insofar as this is a short novel with a child protagonist, if not necessarily a "children's book", comparisons with other recent Gaiman books seem permissible. While similarly not works of straight horror, the uncanny doubling involved in the button-eyed Other Mother (Coraline, 2002) or the black-suited ghouls with names like the Duke of Westminster or the Emperor of China (The Graveyard Book, 2008) demonstrate Gaiman's eye for the skull gradually revealed beneath the skin, for the skewed reflection of human anxiety and weakness in inhuman eyes. Expectations, however unfair, make the uncomplicatedly heimlich portions of Ocean a touch disappointing.

The Hempstocks, with their maternal warmth, are part of this problem. The book's hero might be a weak boy, but if his friends are immortal beings whose power is apparently limited only by their preferences or by the page-by-page demands of the story, there is little sense of threat: when an encounter with Ursula Monkton, "every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh" (p.116), can be followed under ten pages later by "I was not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was" (p.125), the novel seems overprotective of both its hero and its readers. Towards the end, when a meaningful sacrifice is replaced by a sacrifice that lacks significant negative consequences, one might even wonder why the tale is being told at all. A novel about memories and fears, and the difficulty of negotiating these phenomena, should not be happy to let such experiences come and go as if, well, by magic. Gaiman's fantasies tend to resonate, but this one, while making some admirable claims, ultimately seems willing to stay in its own world.

Adam Crothers