It’s no wonder Coraline is one of Neil Gaiman’s favourite works. He purposefully wrote it as a children’s book. Yet an adult reading it wouldn’t find anything childish about it. It is odd, and creepy, and yet also humorous in its dialogue. This book is truly one of a kind.
The protagonist is a young girl called Coraline – not Caroline – and Gaiman plays around with her name quite often throughout the story. She’s a likeable character: her intelligent, cynical yet polite attitude, and independence set her off from the way children are commonly portrayed in stories. Despite her maturity, she finds trouble in comprehending adults. Her parents are each distressed in their own troubles, just as you’d find from the perspective of any child – and she believes the adults lead a boring, mundane life that’s wasted on work.
As the reader delves into the story, it grows to become a fairytale – with talking cats and dogs – and with the turning of every page, the events become even more creepy. The other characters unfold with odd personalities; one neighbour trains mice for a circus, and the other two neighbours are stuck in the past. Everything about this story is a little uncanny, if not, all out strange.
Coraline finds a door that leads to nowhere and as soon as she feeds her curiosity, she falls into great danger. She finds the ‘Other World’ with ‘Other People’ – a world in which all of her wishes are granted; and where she finds adventure. There she finds her ‘Other Mother’ and ‘Other Father’. Children often dream of Other worlds, and Gaiman artfully, and rather cunningly, portrays this throughout the story. Coraline is then tied between which world she wants; the boring one or the one that would cost her her life.
An ageless book. Calling it a children’s book doesn’t do it justice. Gaiman says in one of his interviews, “It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written, it took the longest time to write, and it’s the book I’m proudest of.”
Every other chapter has a graphic of a scene or so that progresses alongside the story. The images are rather creepy and peculiar as well. It’s not the type of book that would keep you awake; it’s not horrifying either; it’s simply a little odd, and eerie, which adds up to the entire vibe of the story.
“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?”
by Sana Ashraf | @sanalikespie
