Neil Gaiman says in the acknowledgements of his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane that it
was intended to be merely a short story, but that it just kept growing until it
was a novel-length project. This happens sometimes, for as Stephen King states
in his memoir On Writing, “The writer
who is serious and committed is incapable of sixing up story material the way
an investor might size up various stock offerings” (159). Readers are not
particularly drawn to books in order to analyze how they are crafted
structurally; instead they want to experience a good story (King 160). Ocean is a little bizarre, and certainly
different than most novels on
bookshelves, but overall can be reckoned a worthwhile read.
To begin with, this is a fantasy novel which is marketed at
children. (Apparently I was wrong on this point, but I've never been very good at defining target audiences.) To be fantasy is to inhabit a “Perilous Realm” which “cannot be
caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable,
though not imperceptible”, as J.R.R. Tolkien said in his essay “On Fairy
Stories”. The world of Ocean can be
felt easily, but trying to define it in concrete terms is impossible. While
writing it, Gaiman was plagued by a nagging question, which became the title of
an article he wrote for Horn Book
Magazine: “What the [Very Bad Swearword] Is a Children’s Book Anyway?” As
Gaiman describes the then-work-in-progress, “It has magic in it. It has a Sense
of Wonder in it, and strangeness. It’s a book about the incomprehensibility of
the adult world.” Very much autobiographical, the book was written to try to
explain to his wife what his childhood had been like. As King says, because readers love reading about
ordinary people working, “God knows why, but they do” (On Writing 161), perhaps that is why the Narrator of Ocean lives so deeply in books: “Growing
up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I know about
what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and advisors” (77).
Gaiman is an author, so therefore he is writing about his own work here. Good
authors, as Tolkien pointed out, “create worlds in which your mind can enter.”
These Secondary Worlds are soap bubbles; as they disappear the moment disbelief
enters the scene. As long as we are inside the soap bubble, all the rules of
the tale’s reality are true.
In “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien wrote that “the trouble with
the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are; and
they put on the pride and beauty that we would fain wear ourselves. At least
part of the magic that they weird for the good or evil of man is power to play
on the desires of his body and his heart.” Once the opal miner commits suicide,
nothing is quite how it appears. Ursula Monkton quickly ensnares the narrator’s
father and his little sister; and a tent-creature or worm-thing is certainly
not they thought they saw when she was hired as governess. The Hempstocks are just “good country
people”, their neighbors would say – and they are good, befriending and protecting the Narrator throughout the
story. They are odd, though. Lettie especially is an enigma; at face value she
is eleven, but it is implied that she has been eleven for a very, very long
time. Her ocean is mystifying, as is almost everything else related to the
Hempstocks. What exactly happened at the end by the pond is hidden by the
tricks of memory and the distance of forty years’ clutter, but it is possible
that Lettie sacrificed herself for our Narrator; coming as close to dying as is
possible for those of her kind.
Ursula Monkton, or the creature calling herself by that
name, is eventually defeated, and the hunger birds are driven away, much to the
cheers of the audience. This constant fight between good and evil, black and
white, light and dark has been going on as long as there have been humans,
going back to the Garden of Eden. We are rooting for the Narrator to survive
these trials, even though if we step outside the tale for a second we realize
that of course he must have gotten through if he’s telling us this story forty
years later. Paul Asay says in his book Burning
Bush 2.0: “We want the good guys to survive and the bad guys to get their
due. That’s Storytelling 101” (68). This could be why we still say someone has
an Achilles heel or posesses the Midas touch, and why we study tragedies like Oedipus and Medea in courses like this one. For as the Narrator tells us: “I
liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories.
They were better than that. They just were”
(53). Asay continues: “There are echoes of a universal right and wrong here
–and the belief that the universe itself will punish wrongdoers.” (Bush 68).
Gaiman’s description is very vivid and cinematic, and his
narration flows like dialogue, which “either moves the story along or reveals
information about the character,” as screenwriter Syd Field wrote in The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver (183).
The details he points out to us often accomplish both tasks. We never learn the
Narrator’s name, but because Gaiman is able, to quote Field again, to “feel
comfortable in his [character’s] skin, the dialogue [is] individual and
appropriate,” capturing the character of that character (183). We feel with him
the terror and revulsion of the adults’ way of looking at things, their
conventional way of skipping to the boring, nonessential tasks. Adults have
stories that never make sense to a child’s mind; “They made me feel like there
were secrets, masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to
read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?”
the Narrator wonders on page 53. Gaiman the author might have answered his
creation’s question in “What the [Swearword]…” where he points out that adults
often look for logical, well-thought-out answers. Authors, and stories, are not
very good at giving those appropriate answers. They are very good, however, at
giving answers which may be “unreliable, personal, anecdotal and highly
imaginative. These things can be drawbacks.” Towards the end of the article,
Gaiman admits to the reader what he knew all along: “You do not come to authors
for answers. You come to us for questions. We’re really good at questions.” The
reader is left to puzzle out answers to many of the questions Ocean raises on his or her own, which is
part of the reader-writer contract, because, like Tolkien said, “Fairy stories
[are] plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability.”
This could be why the concept of fanfiction is so popular, giving a second or
third (or sixteenth) chance at getting that favorite couple from that one TV
show back together again.
“A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the
people in the story change,” the Narrator concludes on page 170. But it should
be remembered that the reader is one of the people on the journey that the plot
takes, and so perhaps that is Gaiman the author speaking there. Words have
power, and stories can changes lives. If the reader is changed – inspired to
encourage others, made more courageous, makes up or changes their ideas on an
issue – then the story matters.
Works
Cited
Asay, Paul. Burning Bush 2.0: How Pop Culture Replaced
the Prophet. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015. Print.
Field, Syd. The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver: How to
Recognize, Identify, and Define Screenwriting Problems. New York: Dell,
1998. Print.
Gaiman, Neil. The Ocean at the End of the Lane. New
York: William Morrow, 2013. Print.
-----------------.
“What the [Very Bad Swearword] Is a Children’s Book Anyway?” Horn Book Magazine 88.6 (2012) 10-22.
Professional Development Collection. Web. 5 November 2015.
King, Stephen. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 2000.
Print.
Tolkien, J.R.R.
“On Fairy Stories”. 1947. University of California – San Diego. PDF file. 5
November 2015.
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