It was a pleasure to read Neil Gaiman’s . The winner of the 2013 National Book Awards Book of the Year and New York Times Number one best seller became an immediate classic in the fantasy genre. Gaiman has always been wonderful with his writing. His novels re
ad like a complex stream of consciousness from the innermost thoughts of a living Peter Pan, a man who has figuratively never grown up.
personifies that perspective literally. The novel follows an unnamed first person narrator who, in his forties, decides to escape from the solemnity of a funeral to visit his childhood home and the home of a childhood friend of his, Lettie Hempstock, who is apparently living in Australia. Snippets of the protagonist’s memory leak through into his mind and as he nears a small duck pond near Lettie’s house he remembers his story in its entirety. The Ocean, as Lettie dubs the duck pond, holds far more than just water.
As a child the protagonist is unhappy, yet finds escape in his older friend, Lettie. After an opal miner lodging with them breaks into his father’s car and commits suicide in it, opening a door to another world outside the boy’s house. Lettie sets out to seal the hole but a creature gets through and wreaks havoc on the boy’s life while attempting to please everyone else. The novel is purely magical. The writing is enchanting and the style is innocent. All too often you feel that the protagonist as a child lives in between two worlds, neither of which he can understand. The result of which is what Gaiman sets out for: “I hope, at its heart, it’s a novel about survival.”
There really isn’t much in a negative light that I can say about Ocean. The characterisation is as deep as Lettie’s ocean and the storyline weaves in and out of the supernatural and the harrowingly realistic. It plays with themes of life and magic in a magic realist universe and does so exceedingly well. An awoken supernatural being which is only known as what she really is to the protagonist plays with both her demonic nature and delves into the weakness of the human will. In the form of Ursula Monkton, the boy and his sister’s live in nanny and governess, she is a perfectly dissolved solution of seduction, malice and the paranormal. The boy’s parents are the typical bewildered adults, akin to those of the Lewisian universe, who don’t have the imagination to know what is really going on in their own child’s life. The story as a whole is a re-reader and one I am sure you can get more out of every time you read it. It’s a comfortable narrative, one which you can pick up, put down, really think about and overall enjoy.
Alexicon Reviews 