Let's Review Books: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

We've gotten so used to thinking of massive tomes when hearing the phrase "Fantasy Novel," that it's almost impossible to think that's what Neil Gaiman's book The Ocean at the End of the Lane is. But rest assured this is in fact, a fantasy novel. It's not A Song of Ice and Fire, or The Wheel of Time, where one series can take up an entire row on your bookshelf. No, Gaiman's fantasy novel is quite slim, but a lot is packed into this quick little novel.

The story starts with the narrator returning to his childhood home to attend a funeral and making his way to the neighborhood he grew up in. There, at the end of the lane he comes across a pond and a family that he seems to have remember, but then as he sits there, all the events of his childhood come flooding back to him.

The book then takes us back to when our narrator was just a young boy who learns that things are not exactly what they might appear to be. He meets the girl who lives at the end of the lane and insists that the pond on their property is an ocean, and may be right about that. Events at the beginning of the book spark a bit of magic in the world that require our narrator and the young girl, Lettie, to go to another place to return the magic. But, as one might expect, things go wrong leading to more and more events that can upset the nature of our world.

Because the book is so short, it's difficult to give the short summary books reviews are usually supposed to have. I don't want to give anything away here, because it's really worth taking the time to read the book. It's such a quick read and so much is crammed into the few pages that it has. Gaiman has said that some events in the book are autobiographical, such as the theft of the father's car that happens at the beginning of the novel, but it's clear that other parts are autobiographical as well, such as the protagonist's love for reading at such a young age.

The way that Gaiman builds the world of the story is almost like a fairytale, or a fantasy novel from a time before they had to be sprawling epics with hundreds of characters. There is a fair amount in common with books such as The Wizard of Oz, or Alice in Wonderland, where a young child find themselves in a new world and must be guided through their new and magical circumstances by a person or group of people who are more familiar, and thus more equipped to deal with the magic.

I've always been a big fan of the shorter novels that Gaiman writes. It's not that these novels are really for a younger audience, but the allow a younger audience to experience his work, and the difference between childhood and adulthood is often explored, just as it is in this case, a theme that seems to be one of Gaiman's strong suits.