Book Review: Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Telling my son about Neil Gaiman's latest book, I struggled to come up with the essential adjective - you know, the way (Southern) "Gothic" describes Flannery O'Connor or "piquant" describes Christopher Hitchens.

I tried "eerie," but so much of the book was filled with hopeful longing, and the sweetness of childhood, that the word wilted the second it left my lips.  All of its synonyms failed, as well: unearthly, otherworldly (though that one comes close), creepy, odd, freakish.

Yet Gaiman has given us scenes like this between a once-affectionate father and his seven year-old son:

     He didn't say anything in response.  The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.
     Then, swiftly, he picked me up.  He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.
     I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs.  He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie.  He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.
     Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

I almost used ellipses to omit the paragraph describing the father's clothing, but realized that it was elemental to the scene's brilliance (and terror).  The details: light blue shirt, maroon paisley tie, and the care he takes to spare his watch though not his child - these heighten the tension, as we already suspect that something horrible is about to happen.  That descriptive break slows the pace and lets us inside the boy's innocent thoughts.  And his feeling of weightlessness contributes to the effect, both thrilling and chilling, yet also hearkening back to his younger years when his father would have swept him up and carried him more often, and more affectionately.  Brilliant.  And terrifying.

Yet those adjectives, even in combination - or ghastly, shocking, appalling, and so on - ignore all the tender scenes refulgent with the beautiful innocence of childhood, as on the narrator's seventh birthday:

     My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had.  I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when my father's youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolante, a play filled with lords and fairies.  I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. ...
     That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him.  In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly.
     Fluffy slept on my bed at night.  I talked to it, sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in a human tongue.  It never did.  I did not mind.

So we'd have to pair up contrasting descriptions, such as "warmhearted" and "eerie," but even then the pairing fails to show how tightly Gaiman interweaves the beauty and terror of the narrative.  I suppose resistance to simple description makes a work worthy of our praise.  And praise this work we must.