Review of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of The Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane plays with my head a bit; it is like all of Gaiman's novels steeped in mythology and written a bit like a whimsical prose poem. Or at least an attempt at one. There is a hint of satire at play here, reminding me a tad of Ronald Dahl's stories, except it lacks the cruelty of Dahl, and is far more whimsical like Terry Prachett (without the annoying puns) or JK Rowling (without the politics).

The story on its face is rather simple. A man returns to his childhood home to reminisce about his childhood after providing the eulogy at a funeral. He sits in front of a duck pond, and slowly remembers a magical and nightmarish period of time when he was seven years of age and the pond was an ocean. According to the Acknowledgement section at the end, Gaiman pulls from various myth and legend tropes, along with various places and memories from his own childhood to paint this small tapestry of a story. For The Ocean at the End of the Lane is in some respects just that, a tapestry interwoven with words instead of thread by a master of the craft. The words have a sound and texture all their own...and the book requires a bit of focus, but also a bit of letting it go.

Much like Gaiman's other tales, the protagonist is almost a non-entity, barely there...and here unlike those novels, we never even learn his name. He feels at times like a stand-in for the author or for us. We never see what he looks like. And he tells us, at one point, that how others view him is something he can never quite know, and when he looks at himself or tries to see himself through others - all he sees is a variety of mirrors always looking inward. The non-identity of the narrator serves this tale better than Gaiman's other efforts - in that it lends itself to the thematic arc and mystery. We aren't quite sure of our narrator's memories. As another character tells him towards the end of the novel, that everyone remembers things differently – no two people remember things the same.

Various female characters appear throughout, and in this novel the women have power, while the men seem to have none. Gaiman appears to be more found of writing female characters than male characters – his female characters are more complex and more powerful, while his male characters can often feel card-board thin. At any rate the men in this novel seem to be at the women’s mercy. Ineffectual. Dependent. As is the narrator. There are four main female characters and they appear to be pulled from myth, the Hempstock women, grandmother, mother, and daughter or crone, mother, and maid – who is eleven to the narrator’s seven. She is missing at the beginning of the novel, off in Australia, and missing in the end. And there is Ursula Moonstruck, the babysitter and roomer, and something else altogether. For a villain, she’s more than meets the eye. She gives people what they want – it’s all that she wished to do, and the boy, our narrator is her way into our world and her way home again.

The story has a surrealistic feel and plays with the mind long after you leave it, much as it plays with the narrator, whose memories of the tale he tells seem to diminish once he leaves the Hempstock estate and the Ocean at the End of the lane, where his child home stood, once upon a time.

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Started reading The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle Over James Joyce's Ulysses. This is the story of how various people fought to get the book published and distributed around the world. The book was banned in Europe, the US and various other countries. Copies were burned in Paris, France, and if you were found with a copy in the UK - you were fined. Ernest Hemingway helped a French independent publisher, Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company smuggle copies into the US. At that time, the way independent books got distributed was through the US Postal Office which sent them to subscribers. But Arthur Comstock who instigate the Comstock Act, which at that time dictated obscenity law and held a great deal of power in the 1930s - provided the postal service with the power scan mail and books for obscenity and fined anyone shipping these materials. It was enacted in 1875.

Joyce, an Irish writer and a modernist, fought to get all his novels published. He came up with the idea of Ulysses after he received the first of many rejection letters for Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. And it was painful for him to write and read, since he was going blind at the time and underwent over 17 eye surgeries without the benefit of anesthetic to prevent or forestall it. He suffered from irisitis - a condition that caused his irises to dilate. He was always in pain. Wore thick glasses and often used a magnifying glass to read.

Joyce's view of writing - was that he would rather have just one person read his book a million times, than a million people read his novels. He wrote for that one person.
And to him art was a powerful thing, the freedom to create it - worth fighting for and devoting his life to.

Because of James Joyce's battle to distribute Ulyssess, the Comstock Act was rewritten and overthrown, and today, I can perform a production of The Vagina Monologues.

One of the early founders of Random House and the founder of the ACLU joined forces to fight the courts and the law to get the book published. And the book itself was inspired by a woman, and various woman enabled others to read it and fought to get it distributed.

I've only read the Introduction, and already I find the story inspiring. If he could publish his novels, half-blind, in pain, and with the world against and just few hardy souls fighting for it - several of which didn't even like his writing style.
Than so can I, and so can you. If there is a will there is a way.

Also, feel a bit validated for my college obsession with Joyce's novels.