The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Prolific novelist Neil Gaiman, whose works like his Sandman series and Neverwhere still make the bestseller shelves year well after their first edition, presents a quirky and thrilling story of supernatural creatures. Pocketed here and there within our universe, his creatures – insidious or helpful – come in all forms and shapes and are much older than the world.
The Ocean at the End of the Laneopens with a man driving around familiar lanes, and countryside homes that made up his childhood. He stops at a farmhouse at the end of the lane of his old family house, where he starts to remember that he might have had a friend – named Lettie Hempstock – and that she’d been older…maybe three years older? Or four? They hadn’t kept in touch; he remembers that she had left for Australia.
Pulled by memories of his friendship with Lettie, he finds the duck pond she used to call an ocean. As he sits by the pond, contemplating it, memories start flooding back to the real nature of his memories with his friend. They were events that were too complicated for him to understand; frightening for a seven year-old boy, confusing even to a grown man.
The reader is given access to the memories of the hero by the story’s use of the first-person perspective.
Slowly the reader gets sucked into a whirlwind of events that grow increasingly bizarre and impossible to understand: from ancient vile creatures that manipulate the vices of earthlings, to shadowy hunger birds that rip dimensions apart.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a grand little novel that makes one’s imagination run wild with horror and fascination. Gaiman’s illustrious 175-page novel is fueled with just the right amount of fantasy. The author, whose novels have enchanted strangers all over the world, is a master storyteller; his prose is simplistic, yet often lyrical, and he communicates profound messages in an accessible and matter-of-fact style.
Gaiman makes fantasy seem like a natural component of the universe, and just like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, he effortlessly creates one world after the other. This novel has something for everyone as it explores adult tropes of pain, betrayal, love, and awe, which youth can understand just as well. The Ocean at the End of the Lane’s realism is palpable and transports the readers into mazes of a fantastical world, and makes us wonder: is the universe really all there is?
By: Azza El Masri
