neil gaiman the ocean at the end of the lane

The suicide stirs ancient powers, chief among them a nanny named Ursula Monkton, who appears sometimes as a beautiful gray-eyed woman and other times as a “thing” with a face like ragged rotting cloth and limbs like broken mainsails. A magic first unleashed by a lodger who steals the family car, drives to the end of the lane, runs a hose from the tailpipe to the window and fills his lungs with smoke. When the narrator remembers his life 40-odd years ago, when he was 7, he remembers magic. And maybe Lettie’s grandmother really can make the moon full every night, maybe she has been alive long enough to have witnessed the Big Bang. A cavernous fort turns out to be a cramped, dusty burrow beneath the stairs. Anyone who has ever returned to a childhood home after so many years knows how small everything seems now, how outsize everything seemed then. Memories are waiting all around, beckoning him, and when he tosses a hazelnut into the water, the ripples carry across his mind as he remembers “everything.”įirst, that he and Lettie used to call the pond the ocean. When he rambles through her farm, when he follows the trail to the duck pond, he might as well be traveling through time.

The novel begins when a man, the narrator, returns to his childhood home in Sussex, England, where he long ago knew a girl named Lettie Hempstock. “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet,” Neil Gaiman writes in his slim, dark dream of a new novel, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” “But they are never lost for good.” Who we used to be sometimes seems like a faint shadow of who we are now, but Gaiman helps us remember the wonder and terror and powerlessness that owned us as children.

Neil gaiman the ocean at the end of the lane