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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Headline)
Book blurb:
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.
Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.
He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back.
And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways.
The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.
It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
As you can tell from the blurb, this story is one about childhood, but not necessarily for children. It is a novel which feels like a short story and reads more like a fable. Magical and imaginative, but that is how you could describe any one of Gaiman’s books.
The man that the nameless boy becomes remembers the impossible things that he witnessed in his youth.
The boy’s memories are clear and vivid, while the recollections by his older self are plagued with doubt and second-guesses. Sacrifice, boundaries, things forgotten, dreams, the effect that belief has on reality are all dealt with here.
The most poignant of these being the things that we forget, things that happened or things we believed in during our childhood.
The sad, but natural way that grownups rationalise things they believed when they were younger almost makes it feel as if more and more magic is escaping the world.
The iconic female characters, although not named as such seem to represent the sisters of the moon, or rather the maiden, mother and crone figures which symbolise the phases of womanhood represented by the phases of the moon.
Personally I thought this was a nice touch as it reminded me of the Zorya sisters in American Gods. I wanted more of these characters!
After reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane I can’t help but take to heart the pseudo philosophy about living a worthy life and what that means. The book had an overall sadness to it, but this worked.
Read more of Tamarin’s reviews on her blog.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Keen on reading this book? Buy your copy now.
Read this book yet? Tell us what you thought of the book in the comment box below.
Sign up for Women24 book club newsletter and stand a chance to win our top ten books from kalahari.com.
Book blurb:
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral.
Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.
He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back.
And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways.
The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.
It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
As you can tell from the blurb, this story is one about childhood, but not necessarily for children. It is a novel which feels like a short story and reads more like a fable. Magical and imaginative, but that is how you could describe any one of Gaiman’s books.
The man that the nameless boy becomes remembers the impossible things that he witnessed in his youth.
The boy’s memories are clear and vivid, while the recollections by his older self are plagued with doubt and second-guesses. Sacrifice, boundaries, things forgotten, dreams, the effect that belief has on reality are all dealt with here.
The most poignant of these being the things that we forget, things that happened or things we believed in during our childhood.
The sad, but natural way that grownups rationalise things they believed when they were younger almost makes it feel as if more and more magic is escaping the world.
The iconic female characters, although not named as such seem to represent the sisters of the moon, or rather the maiden, mother and crone figures which symbolise the phases of womanhood represented by the phases of the moon.
Personally I thought this was a nice touch as it reminded me of the Zorya sisters in American Gods. I wanted more of these characters!
After reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane I can’t help but take to heart the pseudo philosophy about living a worthy life and what that means. The book had an overall sadness to it, but this worked.
Read more of Tamarin’s reviews on her blog.
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
Keen on reading this book? Buy your copy now.
Read this book yet? Tell us what you thought of the book in the comment box below.
Sign up for Women24 book club newsletter and stand a chance to win our top ten books from kalahari.com.
