I’ve been on a huge Neil Gaiman run this past year. I finished The Graveyard Book, explored his early work in Good Omens and Black Orchid, and scattered myself over his non-fiction works and short stories in The View from the Cheap Seats and Trigger Warning. He’s been my favorite author since I first set foot in the Gaiman world with American Gods back in 2017. And small wonder: His works are myth, and they are magic. And they’ve shaped who I want to be as a person and as a writer.
My last stop was Gaiman’s beautiful and many-award-winning The Ocean at the End of the Lane. There’s something especially magical about this book. I came into it thinking it was a “grown-up” story, like American Gods or Sandman, given (well) the cover image and all the hype about it being Gaiman’s masterwork. But really, like it says so insightfully in its pages, “Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the story of a memory, a boy who touches the face what’s behind the world, through the tutelage of three (ostensibly) farm women at the end of the lane. It crawls up on you slowly, the Gaiman-esque fantasy of this book. Not so much fantasy, but a gentle affirmation of the magic inherent in the earth and in the vastness of creation—an undefined, uncatalogued affirmation that there are things out there long forgotten, a vast world much bigger than our limited minds can imagine. And Gaiman is a sort of guide, not telling us what is out there, or who, just that it’s there, something, and we don’t need to really know everything or remember everything, but just know that it’s there, out there and inside of us.
Myths aren’t “adult stories and they [aren’t] children stories. They were better than than that. They just were.” And that’s what makes Gaiman’s works so wonderful, because like myths, they just are. And they’re wonderful.
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