If Stephen Hawking wrote children’s literature

If there’s a literary genre that exists somewhere at the nexus of fantasy, horror and children’s fiction, Neil Gaiman may be its modern master. His latest, The Ocean at the End of The Lane, never strays too far from its narrator’s childhood experience, but manages to peep around the corner into adult themes of suicide, illicit marital affairs, child abuse and corruption. Yet Gaiman still keeps a leash on the pure darkness, presenting a story that’s both captivating for kids and compelling enough for adults as well.

The narrator has no name. The book opens with his adult character leaving a funeral near his old home in the country (His mother? His father? It’s not made clear) and wandering down a lane where he once played as a child. Half-recalled bits of his past begin to surface: “Memories were waiting at the edge of things,” the narrator informs us. This leads into a tale interwoven with fantasy elements familiar to Gaiman fans by now: shadow people who exist outside of our notion of time, who are as old as “the moon’s birth” and know all about the evils of the unseen world; creatures that sweep the earth from other dimensions and gobble up physical reality; ancient lolas who can snip away bits of time from the world’s fabric with a handy pair of scissors.

The unnamed narrator lives in the country with his younger sister and parents, but his real experience begins under the guidance of neighbors Lettie Hempstock, her mother Ginnie and Old Mrs. Hempstock, who live across the field at nearby Hempstock Farm.

Real life intrudes in sudden, unsettling ways: a South African lodger takes over the narrator’s room (the family needs the income), but ends up dead in a Mini Cooper — a suicide. This unleashes a series of strange incidents in the town, prompting Lettie to take the narrator along on an adventure to try and restore balance to the unseen world. Lettie tells him about the “fleas” that have come over from the unseen world to attach themselves on ours; she claims that the pond in her backyard is actually an ocean, though few people can see or understand what she means. She guides the narrator through a place in the fields where the sky is orange, and where kittens are plucked from the ground like carrots.

As fantastical as it all sounds, Gaiman keeps the narrative grounded in reality. The author, who has made a successful transition from illustrated worlds (Sandman) to fantasy worlds constructed purely of words, writes here with a formal elegance and economy: his character remembers childhood with crystal clarity, from the textures of the bread down to the taste of homemade soup. His similes are carefully crafted, yet vivid; you can see it all clearly when he describes his new governess thus:

Ursula Monkton wasn’t real. She was a cardboard mask for the thing that had traveled inside me as a worm, that had flapped and gusted in the open country like old rags under that orange sky.

Ursula is the nanny all English kids fear the most: the one who presents one face to parents and another, much scarier one to children — particularly the narrator, who doesn’t trust her “pretty face” from the start and is progressively punished for his rebellion. Gaiman gifts his “old world” watchers, the Hempstocks, with humor and a penchant for lapsing into north country English when they’re peeved — which is often. (“If you en’t telling me your name, I’ll bind you as a nameless thing.”)

Along the way, Gaiman takes the reader to the edges of imagination, and even the unknown corners of the universe (dark matter), almost like the Stephen Hawking of children’s literature. What starts as a simple narrative of childhood memory becomes a much deeper meditation on being and accepting.

 What spurs a novel like The Ocean at the End of the Lane? Gaiman himself says it started when a friend asked him to write a short story — which quickly unspooled into this short novel. But one captivating clue is also found in the photo printed on the back cover: it’s a shot of a young English boy, his head cropped out of the picture, standing on a rainspout, looking for all the world like he’s hiding from something. The boy, of course, is Neil Gaiman; the photo was taken when he was seven years old. No explanation is given as to why he’s standing on a rainspout at that particular moment of his real-life childhood, and none is required. Sometimes a detail like this — a puzzling photo from one’s past — is all an author needs to kick-start the launch into an ocean tide of invented worlds. Gaiman has emerged from this one with his swimming skills even stronger.