The
Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
or
The
most dangerous place is our childhood
A
middle-aged
man returns
by accident to his childhood home.
He start walking towards
the lane in front of his former house and whitout thinking
he comes to the Farm at the end of the lane, Hempstock Farm.
Here
is welcomed by an old lady that resembles the grandmother of Lettie,
a girl who was his childhood friend but it can't be her because
Thirty years has passed. How can be
her if she don't seems aged a bit?
Beyond the farm there‘s
a small duck pond where he start to reminiscing his past. But the
past is not always as we rember it and sometimes monsters and marvels
are hiding in it.
Neil
Gaiman is worldwide known for is acclaimed and award winning comic
books series, the Sandman, in which he describe the story of the lord
of the dreams, combining myths, stories and ordinary people. This mix
is one of Gaiman's distinguishing features and the Ocean at end of
the lane has it too. Gaiman is able to make a miracle: give back to
the reader the point of view of a twelve years old. Trowing back the
readers in a time when a courtyard was a pirate ship, or
when a weeded wild
garden was a dangerous Jungle, when the life was full of magic and
fears. Another one of
the Gaiman's distinguishing features is that the human beings are
more important than all the myths and magics. This concept stated
with Sandman but it's became clearer from his book American Goods in
which Gaiman portrays a series of acient goods who lives amongst
humans disguised like them, because they‘ve lost their powers as
people gives gods strenghts if they believe in them.
It's not like
the human race exist because the gods exists, but the opposite: the
gods exists because the human race believes in them. In The Ocean at
the End of the Lane Gaiman adopts this concept one more time and make
it more ambiguous: the creatures from another world are connect to
ours by our history. This book have some influences that are new for
Gaiman's style: his rapresentation of childhood was similar in
Coraline but this time it seems influenced by Sthepen King's It and
Clive Barker's The Thief of Always and the first volume of Arabat, in fact this time the horror
elements are more relevant. So, The Ocean at the end of the lane is a
book for a reader who wants to revive is childhood and is not afraid
of what can be found in it.
Gaiman, the Tardis (Suranne Jones) and the eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) |
A review by Davide Schiano di Coscia
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