The Ocean at the End of the Lane ~ Neil Gaiman
It’s only in the last couple of years that I have really gotten into Neil Gaiman’s books and he quickly became one of my favourite authors. So far, I haven’t found anything he has written that I don’t love. The Ocean at the End of the Lane has not changed that.
The plot is hard to overview, it is really a story that needs to be experienced. It is not a book that you just read or just enjoy, it is a book that transports you from your reality to your childhood. In essence, it is a book that forces the reader to revisit childhood alongside the protagonist. The unnamed protagonist has driven off after a funeral and finds himself turning down a road that leads to the place he grew up, forty years beforehand. He visits the farm of a childhood friend, sits by the duck pond, which they used to call the ocean and remembers. It started when the family lodger stole a car and committed suicide, waking ancient, malevolent spirits.
I’m really struggling to find the words to review this book because it felt like a deeply personal experience that (from other reviews I have read) is different for everyone. For me, this book feels like my childhood. It’s set in my home county and feels like the type of place I could’ve come across whilst out exploring one day. I will admit that such familiarity made it a little difficult to picture the magic and otherworldliness when I first started reading it, but by the end, it was like I had unlocked that childlike imagination needed to believe in those events.
No one could have written this book but Neil Gaiman. He seems to have a way of writing childhood that feels so magical, scary and big. Like Coraline and The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is hauntingly nostalgic, dreamlike and much more horrific as an adult than a child. Unlike those two books, this is an adult novel, not because there is anything in it that is only suitable for those of a certain age, but because you need to have grown up enough to dismiss the idea that monsters exist in the shadows. You also need to have forgotten how desperate you were to be a grown-up.
This is not my favourite of the Neil Gaiman books I have read, but that is because I don’t think it’s the right time in my life for me to fully understand and appreciate the deeper context. In twenty or so years, I will probably find that this book strikes a different chord. I look forward to rereading The Ocean at the End of the Lane at that point in my life and comparing how my feelings have changed with experience.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a hauntingly beautiful short novel that encompasses childhood. For now, at age twenty-one, this book is rated four stars. In the future, I can imagine that it will be five stars, but I’ve still got a lot of life to experience before that.
C🌙
