The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

A middle-aged man returns to his home for a funeral, only to be drawn back into the long-forgotten events of his childhood, when he travelled through an ocean, visited another world and brought back something that did not want to leave.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Neil Gaiman's first novel for adults for eight years. It started off as a novella and grew larger than he first intended, though at 250 pages it's still on the short side for a novel. This is a book that touches on a number of themes, such as nostalgia, memory (and how it is mutable) and how a child's perception differs from that of an adult's. The book also ties in with some of Gaiman's other work, bringing in the Hempstock family from Stardust and The Graveyard Book. This is a novel that operates primarily as a mood piece, evoking the feeling of a childhood idyll and then darkening it with a nightmarish intrusion from another place. It's a classic trope, taking the idea of childhood as a sacrosanct time of warmth, fun and protection and then violating it with a force of darkness and evil.

That said, it's a story that Gaiman seems to shy away from exploring fully. Our unnamed protagonist has a rather capable of group of allies in the form of the Hempstock family, who know everything that's going on and have a solution for every problem that arises. It's difficult to build tension when your main character has a group of powerful magic-users on speed dial (effectively) to call upon at every turn. The book's structure is also odd: the novel is short, but it's quite a long time before the evil force arrives and it departs some time before the end of the book. It's almost like Gaiman wanted to write a moody piece about childhood but then decided he needed some sort of existential threat to be introduced and defeated because, well, it's a fantasy novel.

It's all well-written, as you'd expect, and there's some very nice moments of humour, characterisation and even genre-bending (the Hempstock occasionally evoking atomic physics and dark matter to explain magical events). But it's also a slight novel, with an odd structure and some fairly straightforward plotting. Gaiman seems to have always struggled a little with plotting in his novels, oddly as it's something he does very well in his comic and TV work, and Ocean doesn't address that issue.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane (***½) is a readable, enjoyable and, ultimately, disposable book. It passes the time but does not lodge in the mind the way Sandman or Neverwhere did. So, the wait for the undisputed Gaiman masterpiece novel continues. Ocean at the End of the Lane is available now in the UK and USA.

Cover art: Feist and Gaiman

Some cover art for upcoming books. First up is Raymond E. Feist's Magician's End (US version):

Normally I don't post much about Feist (that whole, 'Fourteen years since he last published a good book' thing tends to get in the way), but this is somewhat noteworthy as Magician's End concludes the entire 30-volume saga begun way back in 1982 with Magician, bringing to an end the cycle of riftwars and interdimensional chaos to plague the world of Midkemia. Feist plans to move onto other works and worlds (including an apparent SF series) for a while, which can only be a good thing for the quality of his writing. Magician's End will be published in May 2013.

Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman's first full-length-novel-for-adults in eight years, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, will be published in June 2013. Cover blurbage:

“They say you cannot go home again, and that is as true as a knife . . .”

A man returns to his childhood village seeking comfort in memories of his youth and the friend who long ago transformed his life.

Once upon a time in a rural English town, an eleven-year-old girl named Lettie Hempstock shows a little boy the most marvelous, dangerous, and outrageous things beyond his darkest imagination. But an ancient power has been disturbed, and now invasive creatures from beyond the known world are set loose. There is primal horror here, and menace unleashed—within the boy’s family and from the forces that have gathered to consume it.

Determined to have their way, these otherworldly beings will destroy a meddling little boy if he dares to get in the way. It will take calm, courage, and the cleverness of the extraordinary Hempstock women—Lettie, her mother, and her grandmother, to keep him alive. But his survival will come at an unexpected cost. . . .

Storytelling genius Neil Gaiman delivers a whimsical, imaginative, bittersweet, and at times deeply scary modern fantasy about fear, love, magic, sacrifice, and the power of stories to reveal and to protect us from the darkness inside—a moving, terrifying, and elegiac fable for every age.

Neil Gaiman announces new novel

Neil Gaiman's new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, will be published on 19 June 2013. Gaiman discusses the novel on his blog and has also released a cover blurb:

 "The Ocean At The End of the Lane is a novel about memory and magic and survival, about the power of stories and the darkness inside each of us. 

It began for our narrator forty years ago when he was seven: the lodger stole the family's car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed.  Creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and a menace unleashed -- within his family, and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. 

His only defense is three women, on a ramshackle farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac -- as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark."

This will be Gaiman's first adult solo novel since Anansi Boys was published in 2005. This news was a slight surprise as it was assumed Gaiman would be working on American Gods II, since the in-development American Gods TV series at HBO will be covering the second book as well as the original and some new stories.