What is the difference between a good book and a great book? A good book is well written or well plotted or well paced, but perhaps not all three at once. A good book you tell your friends about in a loud voice. A good book you enjoy: you devour it or savor it and fragments of it will stay with you forever. A great book though, shifts the world and makes it into a new place. You speak of a great book in low reverent tones. A great book remains whole inside you.
I adore Neil Gaiman’s previous novels for adults and children alike. I would not say, however that they are great books. I delighted in them, savoured them, and rejoiced in his unique, wide ranging literary voice. Scenes and characters and even bits of worlds from them still strike me now and then. In my long list of favorite writers, he has had a place for many years now. ( Also I have to give a shout out to The Graveyard Book … which has a very special place in my heart as amazing literary story telling.)
His newest book though, is a GREAT work. The Ocean at the End of the Lane will change the way you look up at the moon, and will move you to open tears in a public place. Tears that you will not even be ashamed of. Tears that you will be happy to cry.
As a whole this book is astoundingly beautiful and moving. It opens simply with our protagonist, whose name we never learn, returning to his small hometown in Sussex for a funeral. We never learn who’s funeral it is, and though we could guess, it doesn’t really matter. The scene is utterly relatable, a grown man feeling a bit lost escapes from the strained memorial proceedings to drive by his old childhood house, seeking something familiar to ground him.
At the end of his old lane he finds a red brick farmhouse with an old woman inside, and moments later he is sitting on the farm, next to a duck pond he thinks someone might have once called an ocean. And then memories begin to trickle in. At first they are the normal sorts of things we remember when we are suddenly thrust back into a place of childhood. How his father used to burn the toast on Saturdays when he made breakfast, what was on a birthday cake when he turned seven… but then they evolve into a tapestry of a story, a story of magic and deep unworldly mystery.
As the story of the seven year old boy unfolds we never forget the older man version of our protagonist, still sitting on the bench by the duck pond, in a way waiting and in a way re-living what he’s lost. Gaiman explores the adventure and upheaval of being small, of growing up, and of being human in a compact wonderous tale that is as touching as it is entertaining.
If I’m making this sound like a Hallmark card of a book I’m doing it a huge disservice. This book’s beauty is in its hard truths, and at the end we get no pat answers, only the complications of reality, popping out at us from a world we like to pretend is sketched in bas relief. In the epilogue, our protagonist asks
“and did I pass?” The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, “You don’t pass or fail at a being a person, dear.”
It’s a short book, and might read at times like a young adult story, but I don’t think you can stick the YA label on it, that would just be limiting it too much. As for its length, it takes the perfect amount of time to tell precisely what it needs to.
Clearly I recommend this book wholeheartedly, but I also particularly recommend it on Audiobook. Gaiman is one of the best readers I have ever heard, and he does an especially astounding job with this one.
I’ll end with one quote that really struck me, personally. I think you’ll understand why.
“I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.”
Indeed Neil Gaiman, indeed. Please keep making your art.
Out Loud Writing 