Maciek's Reviews > The Ocean at the End of the Lane

In the acknowledgments section of his latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman admits that the project was initially meant to be a short story, which grew to be a novel - not a very long novel, but a novel nonetheless. For fans it was big news, as it would be his first novel for adults since 2005's Anansi Boys.

I was never really into Gaiman's work - I wasn't crazy about American Gods or Neverwhere and Coraline, all of which are routinely mentioned as fan favorites. I loved Stardust, though - his short fantasy which I thought was beautiful and had to read in one sitting. The Ocean sounded like a a welcome return to the familiar field, and I was compelled to give it a try.

Gaiman's narrator is an unnamed English man in his forties, who returns to his childhood home located in the English countryside of Sussex. There he is drawn to familiar places which he has not seen for ages, and which evoke memories long buried. He ends up by the house of his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock, and remembers when he was seven years old and how Lettie used to call the pond beside her house an ocean.

Ultimately, this is a lazy book - for several reasons. The first one is an enormously flat and dull narrative voice. The narrator is obviously remembering his youth from an adult perspective, but the end effect is reduced to sentences in vein of "I did this and that" "And then this happened". There's absolutely no childish joy or fear, or even the adult's surprise at a sudden recollection of a forgotten memory of youth. The language is lackluster, flavorless and as flat as the steppes of Kazakhstan, to the point of becoming downright dull and distracting because of its dullness. How are the readers supposed to give a damn if we can barely muster the strength to turn the page?

Perhaps it's my own recent personal experience of spending a week in an English village while visiting my friends, but I thought that the setting of this book was another lost opportunity. The countryside is beautiful, but all the the reader will get from it in this book is the fact that people live on farms and sometimes have small ponds near their houses. There's no sense of place specific to Sussex or England in this book at all; it could as well have taken place in the suburbs of Chicago.

Not that long ago I read and reviewed The Land of Laughs, the debut novel of Jonathan Carroll, a fan favorite considered to be classic of fantasy - which I found to b a bland play on fantasy tropes without much originality, I have the same complaints about The Ocean - which really is nothing more than an overly stretched short story, employing all the well known staples of the genre and made up to resemble a short novel. The protagonist is an obvious stand-in for the author, but besides waxing nostalgia and melancholy the novel doesn't seem to have any real goal or accomplish anything in particular. It reads almost like Neil Gaiman's rushed assignment for a creative writing class he took ages ago - full of pretension of powerful statements about human beings, deep as the ocean, but in reality being little else than the well-known drizzle deep no more than an ordinary puddle, which evaporates after a few days and leaves absolutely no mark.