Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Back in high school, I went through a phase where I read a lot of fantasy books. A few of those were written by a little guy called Neil Gaiman. Ever since then, I have followed his career by buying all of his novels, and, honestly, loving every last one. Ocean at the End of the Lane is a phenomenal addition to Neil Gaiman’s already stunning bibliography. With novels like Stardust, Neverwhere, Good Omens, and American Gods, it wasn’t hard to believe that this novel would be another home run. And I’m so glad that it was.
I’m gonna be honest, I have no idea how to describe this book without spoiling anything. So let me just let Barnes & Noble do it for me: “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.”
At just 178 pages long, this book does not skimp. Every description, every word is used perfectly. If I had had the time, I would have read this book in one sitting. From the first word, it pulls you in and make you want to keep going until the end. After every page the story get more and more interesting, to the point where at one point, my jaw was literally dropped in awe.
I think my favorite part about this book, which might just speak to my personal preference, was the genre that it fell into. This was complete and utter fantasy, but it was in a specific sub-genre that I like to call “Miyazaki.” I understand that that isn’t really a fantasy sub-genre, but I think you know what I mean. All of Miyazaki’s movies have a uniqueness to the story that I don’t see very often, and this novel really captured that uniqueness.
This book feels so much like a Miyazaki film that, after the first chapter, I found it immensely difficult to imagine the events of the novel playing out in anything other than animation. I don’t know if I’m the only one who does this, but whenever I read a book, I tend to cast the characters with actors that I know in order to make it easier to visualize. So, for me to say that I couldn’t visualize this with real actors should say a whole lot.
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I think all I’m really saying here, if I’m saying anything, is this: this book was absolutely phenomenal. It is very short, but that does not detract from the quality of the book. If you like fantasy, especially Miyazaki films, you will like this book.
