#AmReading – The Ocean At The End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (2013) – A funeral brings a man back to the town of his childhood. It also brings back memories of a family he knew at the end of a country lane. Memories of mystery and magic and an ocean…

So two Gaiman books on this year’s reading list. You’d think he was incredibly, amazingly, unspeakably good or something.

He’s all of that and more.

Here he takes us to a place that stands between worlds. Between childhood and adulthood, between magic and mundane, between worlds themselves. There’s something different about the Hempstock family, three generations of women living at the end of lane not too far from the house where he grew up. Grandmother, mother and daughter-are they witches? Aspects of the divine? They are powerful, without a doubt, and there’s something just a little scary about them too. Or is it the “reality” they reveal all around him that is what’s scary?

Gaiman wanders between horror, fantasy and magical realism here to great effect. I couldn’t help but recall Madeleine L’Engel’s “A Wrinkle In Time” but for every similarity, there is a distinct difference as well. There is evil in the world, and powers that push back. We may not understand either power, and that may be the way of things. As much as we want the world to be an orderly, even predictable place, Gaiman shows us that there may be something hiding at of the corner of our eye that is every bit as “real” as “reality”.

How good is this book? I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to stop reading it. I forced myself to slow down because it’s very short (a long novella or a very short novel). When I finished, I wanted to run out and read more by him.

That kind of good.

Rating – **** Recommended