Neil Gaiman: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

So, as my sister pointed out in the comments of my last post I have completely forgotten to write about the book that shall henceforth be known as Ocean because TOATEOTL is a pain to type. Although oddly pleasant to say. Also, sounds like Cthulhus lesser known and less sinister younger cousin. Since I borrowed it from her (and nagged her for it) she naturally has wotsit Reasons to Ask, if only to ever know if she can demand it back wot wot wot. So yes, I have read it.

In the novel a middle-aged author returns to the place where he lived as a child, and as he's walking around the changed neighborhood he comes across the Hempstock's farm, and suddenly remembers The cover of Ocean is best from the back - I just ambitiously attempted to take a picture but since it's dark now there was flash and it didn't work; also, it was hard to also not get my ratty pajama trousers, messy living room and thumb in the photo so I abandoned the project and my oft-spoken-of promise to make the blog more interesting by adding pictures. The front is a girl in water, but the back is a photo of Neil himself, as a child, half-way up (or down) the outside wall of a house, balancing on the pipes. And it's just perfect for the book, which is clearly based to some extent on childhood memories (in the acknowledgments he phrases it as a thank you to his family for letting him plunder the landscape of his childhood). The beginning of the book even reads like a genuine autobiography, to the point where I almost decided to put it down since I'm not that interested in Gaiman's writing to read his genuine childhood memoirs. The back blurb doesn't give much away and I hadn't read up on the book in advance. But I stuck with it for those few extra pages and soon it all swerved into more familiar fantasy territory. And then the strength of the book became the little boy's story and relationship with his family, with the fantasy story just a vehicle to explore how vulnerable children are, exposed to their parents' whims. (The scenes that stick with me are the ones where his parents, influenced by the Creature, completely betray him. This is the work of the Creature, but that's just in the story. In real life we know that kids are betrayed all the time - in fantasy we can pretend that some outside magical influence causes it so that the parents are not to blame, but that's just in fantasy. The escapist solution for tormented kids.)

Anyway, so the end goes on a bit and doesn't feel really - true? necessary? believable? Ha. But I  liked it, and it wasn't long, so yay. I'd like to re-read it sometime.

Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book

Oh I think I like Gaiman's children's books the best, and I even think I've pinpointed why: he can't be too long-winded in a children's book. He is forced to be a little briefer, and it's for the good. I loved this story about a toddler who escapes the massacre of his family and is adopted by the ghosts in the nearby old graveyard. It's beautifully imaginative, yet has familiar characters - ghouls, werewolves, possibly vampires - that are all given the Gaiman touch. Very scary and doesn't shy away from the brutal truth (the killer wiping the blood from his knife as he goes upstairs to find the baby), and I think children sometimes need to read stories like this that send a genuine tingle of horror down their spines, to process all the horror they read every day in the headlines.

Very pleased. One quibble: we kinda glide over the whole evil guild of assassins thing really. It just suddenly appears and then is resolved. But for a kid's book that's fine.

Neil Gaiman: American Gods and Neverwhere

On loan from my sister, natch.

I read American Gods first, since I wanted the background to Anansie Boys, and because I find the whole idea of the ancient gods walking the not-so-paved-with-gold streets of the United States, desperate for somebody to worship them at least a little, very imaginative and appealing. However, let me do the negatives first. In my post about Anansie Boys I wrote specifically I believe that Gaiman might have a problem with writing novels as though they were comics - that is, with too much focus on describing a scene, you can tell as a reader that the writer has imagined a comic frame and now wishes to put this frame into words - but that he always stays on the right side of the line. Well, frankly I think he toes it a bit here. Possibly he was a bit new to the novel racket and hadn't learnt that you don't always have to be supervisual? The upshot is that the book, in my opinion, is a trifle long and I actually found myself a tad bored towards the end. However, it's entertaining and clever. He's possibly the only writer who could ever have conceived of ancient fertility/sex goddesses working as prostitutes to find worshippers. And not make it seem cheap, mind. I also like that we never get a firm grip on exactly why Shadow, our hero, ended up in prison, except that it had something to do with assault, a robbery and his wife being "left out of it". The story is that just as Shadow is set to get out of prison and go home to said wife after doing his three years, the warden summons him to tell him that she's died in a car crash. Feeling adrift, Shadow agrees to work with Mr Wednesday, whom we find out is the god Odin in his North American form, left over from the Vikings early visits. Oh, and that is another of my positives - I really like the bits where there is a story about how the gods ended up in North America, the "historical" fiction as it where. There is the story of an early Viking settlement, before Leif Eriksson. The men joyfully sacrifice the first Native American they meet in Odin's honour, and obviously get killed in retaliation. Or the first people to cross onto the continent from Asia, who sacrifice the skull of a mammoth, and how this god is gradually abandoned by the people's descendants. Or the twins, boy and girl, who are shipped over on a slaving ship, bringing a whole religion with them, a religion that the girl to her frustration watches become reduced to merely magic and witchcraft. These parts must have been thoroughly researched and show wonderful imagination, and Gaiman deserves great praise for this. I'd recommend it, definitely, on the whole. Plenty of blood, gore, maggots and sex. I don't know if you think this is good or bad.

Neverwhere is a book written after a TV series that I've never seen, but that my sister watched an episode of and says is a bit rubbish. The book might therefore be better, since there are no rubbish special effects in a book unless your mind creates them, in which case the fault is your own. But the book seems too obviously chained to its predecessor. I get the feeling that a lot is put in just because the writer doesn't want any fans to miss a favourite scene, and this includes comedy oneliners. Also, the comic book as novel thing, again, although here the problem is the TV thing. I don't really need a description of the heroines gothy-something clothes, in layers of ragged lace and velvet and what have you. More than once. Not being a Londoner I don't find it quite as oooooohhh to have the normal London echoed in a darker, magical Underworld, in which Knightsbridge is Night's Bridge and you DIE crossing it, and an angel is called Islington (incidentally, I picture the angel Islington as looking like the archangel in Lennart Hellsing's classic ABC-book). I suspect there are many jokes in these comparisons that I didn't get. But it's entertaining enough all the same, and stays on the right side of too long.

Neil Gaiman: Anansi Boys

As you may have noticed, I do read Neil Gaiman, but I seldom seek him out. I don't know why actually (and it may change now), but I suspect I was scarred from the Sandman comi... sorry, graphic novels, a genre I do not understand at all. However, Gaiman is a bit of a genius actually. I should really have borrowed American Gods first, since this was his first foray into novels (not comics) on the theme of modern mythology and what-would-the-gods-be-doing-now type of thing. But the cover of Anansi Boys said it was funny, so I went for the comedy.

Fat Charlie Nancy learns that his father is dead, which doesn't upset him at all, since the old man was always making a spectacle of himself and playing practical jokes on people, including him. But at the funeral he learns that not only was Daddy a god, the spider god Anansi, but Fat Charlie has a brother, who leans more to the magical side of the family. Getting to know brother Spider unleashes the supernatural into Charlie's life, and gets them both chased by an ancient enemy of the Anansi bloodline.

I'm quite thrilled with this book, thrilled to the point where I'm pondering whether it shouldn't be required reading in schools, to introduce kids to the wealth of African storytelling and mythology. Gaiman manages something which many (white) authors fail at: he writes about African mythology and black people without falling into the trap of making either of them extra-sweet and super-heroic out of some sort of sense of guilt. The book is suffused with the joy of storytelling and a genuine admiration and respect for the oral traditions of black culture. But people are people, with weaknesses and all. He also is clever enough to never specify someone as black Black's the default. I love that he thought of that - perhaps it even came naturally to him? I have to admit that I would have had to make a conscious decision to not specify race unless white, so more credit to him if he didn't have to. Also, although there is a hint of someone who either enjoys the cinema and writes with that in mind or someone who is an author of graphic novels, he NEVER goes too far. He never puts in a load of one-liners as though desperate for Paramount to make a call. I LOVE THAT. (According to Wikipedia someone wanted to film it but make it "white", and Gaiman turned it down. If so, well done. I'd like to see this filmed, but not by just anyone. A subtle touch is needed.)

Neil Gaiman: Stardust

My sister lent me this in FECKING NOVEMBER if I'm not mistaken. And I read it then. Took me a day or so, no more. This blogging business is one embarrasment after another.

Anyway. So I'm not a huge Gaiman fan, although I can appreciate that he's talented and all, but his "graphic novels", or comic books as I call them, go right over my head. Hang on, I think I'm repeating myself. I think I wrote the same thing when writing about Coraline. checks* Yup. How boring of me.

So, moving on: the premise in Stardust is that there is a town called Wall in England that borders on to Faerie, and every nine years on May Day there is a market on the field on that border, to which humans and fairies go. On one such night a little half-Fairy boy is fathered and later sent to his human father to live. As an adult he falls in love and sets off on a quest into Faerie to bring back a fallen star for his beloved. Adventures, magic, violence. All there. It's pretty good actually, very imaginative and original. I like. I had some quibbles with something but by now I've forgotten. Arse.

I'm slowly working my way through the book I got for Christmas from my husband. It's taking quite long since a) I've been working a lot on my translation and b) my son has decided that sleeping a waste of time. Just noticed that book has an entire website devoted to it, must check that out and see if it improves my opinion of it.

Also and most excitingly there have been some new adaptions of literary classics on the telly! We had the new version of Jane Eyre, one of my most favourite books ever, so romantic! A bit disappointed in the series though, overly modernized and changed, and I didn't think mr Rochester was that great at all. Also, IMO they missed the whole beautiful heart-wrenching morality of Jane's flight from Thornfield Hall. Then we had the Austen films, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Now, I love Austen tremendously, and I'm also very fond of what I think of as the "first" Persuasion film (in other words, first one I saw), maybe mostly because nobody is beautiful in it. Brave and realisitic decision! *applauds* Not to mention that the novel myself is my second favourite Austen novel (first place goes to Pride and Prejudice, obviously, then comes Persuasion, then Sense and Sensibility, then Emma, then the rest). So had high hopes, but found Rupert what's-his name's acting a tad wooden. Also, the makers succumbed to the temptation of inserting new dialogue to cover the parts where men speak amongst themselves. No no no no no. You're breaking the spell, dudes. Other than that, not bad. Northanger Abbey is of course a weak(er) book, so I was curious as to how they'd film it. It was fairly well done, to have Catherine dreaming all the "novel-inspired" bits, but not great. She wasn't that great. And her sister told her that "Mama said to come in straight away", where I feel "directly" would have been more Austenish.

Okay, baby situation. Feck it all anyway.

Neil Gaiman - Coraline

To start off - I finished Eleven on Top yesterday, and it left me craving more. That's the trouble with chicklit; you end up needing more sexual innuendo. I get totally absorbed in the Ranger/Morelli dilemma poor Stephanie Plum has going on. And I sincerely hope that if the series ever gets filmed they cast somebody relatively normal-looking as Stephanie - because part of the joys of the books is that she seems quite average and nevertheless has these two gorgeous fellas drooling and fawning over her. To join the shallow madness, visit http://www.evanovich.com/ . The storyline is sort of the same in all the Plum books - in this one Stephanie quits her job as a bond agent, which leads to some new situations, but we don't see any new characters to speak of. Apparently Evanovich is contracted for another good few books, so we'll see if she can invent some new criminals in the Burg, or if she's going to have to turn all the seemingly stable citizens into criminal masterminds.

I also wanted to write about Neil Gaiman's children's novel Coraline. I borrowed it from a friend who is a huge fan, and was very pleasantly surprised. I myself have never been so enamoured by Gaiman's writing - sure, I've read Good Omens and enjoyed it (mental note: re-read book in order to blog about it), but that was a collaboration after all and I probably saw more Terry Pratchett in that. As for the comics... I don't get comics really. Unless they're funny. Comics should be funny to me, or else I feel cheated. My husband is a Sandman fan - as for me, I go berserk with all the bolding done in comics, forcing me to stress words in a very exaggerated manner.

But anway, I enjoyed Coraline. It was spooky though. Talk about your dark fantasies! Where does he get it all from? I'm very impressed.

Coraline has just moved with her parents to a new house. Her parents work all the time and don't pay her enough attention, so when Coraline discovers the mirror world where the Other Mother reigns she is, at first, very happy. But when the Other Mother wants her to have button eyes like her own (ew ew ew) Coraline runs away. The Other Mother then wants revenge, and Coraline has to save the day. It's nice to have a female heroine in a children's book - of course, in this particular genre it's not so uncommon, but as a mother of daughters I still appreciate it. The lesson to be learned is that you love your parents and your family, and will do whatever you can to save them. It's traditional, but not rammed down our throats. It certainly isn't the main point of the story. The spookiness is, and the distorted mirror world that holds people captive to the Other Mother's will. An absolute must-read, in my opinion.