Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Although Neil Gaiman has published a number of books written specifically for children, this is obviously not one of them. Yet one of the things which really fascinated me about this novel is it's connection to children's fiction. It's not only written from the point of view of a child, it also feels like it's structured like a children's story. In the interview included at the back of the book, Gaiman notes himself that while previously he's always had a instinctive awareness of what kind of audience he's writing a particular book for - whether for children or adults - in this case he initially found himself unsure and had to consider which audience he was writing for.
Perhaps I'm over-reaching here. The narrative viewpoint is actually a little more complicated, since it's presented as the memories of a nameless, adult narrator, who comes across the farm in rural Sussex which he used to live near to as a boy in the aftermath of his father's funeral. And plenty of adult books have been written from the point of view of a child - just think of Dickens. Still, Gaiman manages to capture the perspective of the little boy so successfully, and the fantastic events he encounters do feel like could they easily slot alongside such classic English fantasies as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series.
One thing which many children's fantasies have is a villain who is clearly an adult, and who in some ways represents the threat to children which can be represented by the adult world. The character which the novel's magical villain Ursula Monkton most reminds me of is the Other Mother in Coraline, a novel which was written and published for children. There's also something to her of J.K. Rowling's Delores Umbridge from the fifth Harry Potter book. The threat which all three of these characters represent is surely very similar. They're all in the position of authority figures - teacher, mother, nanny - but they're also clearly 'wrong'. They represent a perversion of the authority which a child instinctively ought to be able to trust. This is made most clear at the point when Ursula is pursuing the narrator across a rainswept field at night and is described as representing, 'the adult world with all its power and all it's secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.'
That's a brilliant description, and it also gets at why this isn't really a book for children. It's all in the telling of the tale. As Gaiman himself notes, this is a book which is partly about the 'powerlessness of being a child'. I don't imagine that's something very many children need to be reminded of, but I can imagine it's something a lot of adults all to often forget very easily.
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The other thing I noticed, and perhaps this is only because the next book I've chosen to read is the English edition of The October Country, is just how clear a debt Gaiman owes to Ray Bradbury's work. He's talked in more than one place about its influence on him, so I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise to me. The thing is, although I was familiar with his name from early adolescence, I only discovered Bradbury's work for myself as an adult when I finally sat down with a copy of The Martian Chronicles and realised what I'd been missing. So it's only now that I can see how not only Gaiman, but many of the science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I loved as an adolescent and since were all clearly influenced by him. Even J.G. Ballard, a writer who you would think was almost a polar opposite in terms of the interest and focus of his work, owed something to Bradbury's work in his early stories.
There's also the magical Hempstock family, who certainly have something in common with Bradbury's Elliot family, even if it's not a direct influence (there's also the influence of Pratchett's witches, and probably umpteen other things I'm missing), here transplanted to the rural Sussex of Neil Gaiman's childhood. Something of the rhythm of the half sentence I've quoted above also seems to show the influence of Bradbury's linguistic tumbling. I imagine that it's an influence which has been subsumed very early on, so that it's probably something which even Gaiman himself doesn't always recognise. After all, it's also a very Gaiman sentence!
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