The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
Series: Standalone
on 2013 June 18
Genres: Magical Realism, Fantasy
Pages: 6
Format: Audiobook
Source: Borrowed from Public Library
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Sussex, England. 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.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.
A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
Perhaps by now, you have already concluded that I’m a big fan of Neil Gaiman. Well, I have become a fan since reading Stardust and watching the Stardust movie and the Sandman TV show. Can Neil Gaiman do anything wrong? Because like his other books that I have read previously, I loved this book despite the initial weirdness that I felt about it. The Ocean at the End of the Lane does not care about your ego nor your age nor the number of books that you have read all throughout your reading career, it only cares about how well you can set aside the knowledge and wisdom that you have acquired throughout the eyes and read this book from a perspective of a 7-year old kid.
Just like the Graveyard Book, the Ocean at the End of the Lane is another coming-of-age story written in that same magical prose that Neil Gaiman is such a master of. The POV of the story was told by an unnamed narrator who visited his childhood hometown and subconsciously, found himself also visiting the home of an old childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock. It was this visit that triggered the rush of memories in our narrator who was once a normal boy living in that hometown but came across bizarre things after one of their family’s house boarders committed suicide.
Starting off, the Ocean at the End of the Lane seemed like a contemporary story but as it progressed, you will realize it’s magical realism as Neil Gaiman masterfully incorporated elements into it that are out of this world and all the while, telling us of story of an ordinary boy struggling to find answers to the things happening around him and wading through the mire of creepy that resulted from the suicide of the Opal Miner. There was just so lovely and surreal at how seamless Gaiman made the mundane struggles of a boy co-exist with the mystical elements of the world.
On top of the delightful writing, another unforgettable part of this story is Lettie Hempstock, the brave and magical friend of the unknown narrator. Is it just me or is this book a crossover between The Graveyard book? We have a Lize Hempstock, a ghost witch, in the Graveyard book who also became a goodfriend to Nobody Owens. Is Lettie Hempstock a descendant of Liza as they’re both creatures not part of the ordinary world? But anyway, as I have said, Lettie and her friendship with our narrator was unforgettable and quite forlorn. The way she stood up and protected our narrator all throughout the story was melancholic and the fact that I was left wondering whether the ocean will giver her back or not made it all the more heart wrenching.
Curse you, Neil Gaiman, for wounding my faint heart. But I still love you for writing stories as moving as this one.