“I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger… I saw all these things, and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.”
Fantastically dark and vivid, Gaiman’s The Ocean at The End of The Lane is a surrealist literary artwork which swallows the reader entirely from within the first few pages. From amongst the chapters jump out a spectacular pantheon of sinister creatures and vanquishers of evil both in parallel worlds and in our own, creating this magically poetic narrative which will remain at the fringes of the reader’s mind long after putting the book down.
The book commences with a young boy witnessing a suicide at the tender age of seven. The unnamed protagonist is immediately plunged into a series of events on his quiet country lane, as his life and that of his family merge with alternative realities which are in constant proximity to the human population of the planet. The adults within the novel seem entirely unaware of the dark forces at play, and fall victim to the manipulative dynamisms of unseen powers, as the young narrator of the tale discusses a couple of his childhood days on which his world, and that of everyone around him, was under the severest of threats. Told with brutal honesty and raw sincerity, the reader is engulfed in the mind of a child perplexed by the masonic secrecy of adulthood: becoming, believing, understanding, thinking entirely as a child once more. This dark fable challenges the reader to return to their own childhoods, to embrace the darkness that lives within and without and to recognise the powerful insight of a youngster.
This captivatingly beautiful short story defies all established conventions, whether of literary genres, the supernatural, or childhood and adult life expectations. It defies all notions of life and death, love, fear, and hatred. It challenges the security of our world, the stability of our society, and the strength of scientific explanations. It reminds us how momentary our lives are; how terrifyingly quickly people can change; how quickly our memories can and will fade and how soon we ourselves will merge into the distant past. Gaiman has opened up a timeless, spaceless void, which enchants and disturbs us, and which draws the reader into a vacuum they may never be able to leave behind.
