Business aside, I would like to take a moment to talk about my decision to stick to one book to cover.
Firstly, I am in LOVE with this novel so far. I have finished reading about 5 chapters so far which is completely unlike me. I am the kind of person to rush my way through the journey because I find myself getting lost in the story. This is often to my downfall because then I put my book in priority over my school work and my poor husband. I
Secondly, I decided to cover the novel chapter by chapter, rather than review the entire novel at once. I made this decision early on when planning this blog. I feel like jumping between books chapter by chapter will cause the blog to lose its focus.
Third - and last point, I promise! - I will try to do more than one chapter per post, just so I can get into the meat of the story. I'm impatient to finally tick this book off my Goodread's list!
Now! Follow me onward; onward to the ocean. The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Chapter One
What Happens
Nobody came to my seventh birthday party.
Our main character is seven and celebrating a birthday
alone. He got a cake with a book on it in icing, unusual for a young boy. He blew
out the candles and ate a slice of his cake after it was obvious no one was to
show, then opened a “pass-the-parcel” gift. He was happy to receive a Batman
action figure, but still sad that no one showed up. He also received a Narnia
box set and promptly lost himself in the stories.
Books were safer than people anyway.
One day he came home to a stranger in his kitchen. He was an
opal miner from South Africa. He spoke in a clipped accent, unusual and brusque
to the boy’s ears. He told the boy there was an accident but he disposed of the
corpse. Not to worry, though, tit-for-tat, he bought the boy a replacement in a
cardboard box. The boy opened the box and found a truculent ginger tomcat
missing half an ear. He was mean and hissed at the boy. His name was Monster.
The boy went upstairs to his room and wept for the dead
little kitten. He couldn’t talk to his parents about it because the debt had
been repaid. A cat for a cat.
The damage had been made up.
Commentary
Oh. My. God. This has got to be one of the saddest chapters
in a book that I have read in a long, long
time. I teared up just writing my summary.
It is interesting that the first memory of our MC’s
childhood that we see is a sad one. Does that say something about strength of
emotion or what? The first memory he recalled while sitting by the “ocean” was
that of death and loss. To a child, the concept of death is not often
established as a concrete fact. They don’t realize the finality of it until it
happens. This was the beginning of a life, the kitten, and just like that, all
the possibilities in his future were snuffed out. Replaced by a Monster.
This chapter really puts the stark contrast between adult
and child at the forefront of my mind.
No one showed up for his birthday, but life moves on. Open your presents.
Eat your cake. Move on. A guest of the house kills your kitten. He gets you a
cat. You move on. The damage has been
made up. The child dared not cry to his parents about the kitten. He
believed they wouldn’t understand. They would have been surprised, he believed,
because he still had a cat. Not his Fluffy, but the debt had been paid.
Chapter Two
What Happens
I was not happy as a
child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books more than I
lived anywhere else.
The family had to make some drastic changes due to economic
hardship. The boy had to move into his sister’s room. He was sad because he
could no longer leave the door of his room open to hear the comforting voices
in conversation. He did like the fact that he could sleep next to a window in
his sister’s bedroom though. He could climb out onto a brick balcony and sleep
with the window open. His sister liked to argue about leaving the door open.
They had to compromise and open or close it depending on the day.
His old bedroom was rented out to various people: a fat
Austrian eccentric, a student from New Zealand, an American couple who – gasp! –
were not married, and the opal miner from South Africa. The opal miner had
given them each stones but the boy could not forgive him for his kitten’s
death.
On the first day of spring holidays – three weeks of no
school – the boy woke, expecting to receive his weekend copy of Smash! comics. His
dad said he left it in the car but when the boy went out to get it, the car was
not in the driveway. After speaking with the police, the boy’s father brought
him to retrieve the car which had been located at the bottom of the lane.
When they reached the car, the father noticed there was
something in the back seat. The boy looked back there expecting to see his
Smash! comic, but instead he saw… him.
After visiting Madame Tussaud’s waxworks when he was younger,
the boy recalled the almost-lifelike appearance of the wax bodies. The man
laying in the back seat reminded him of that. The body looked like the opal
miner but didn’t. He noticed the copy of Smash! under the body.
Quickly, the boy was moved aside by policemen and there was
a bustle of activity in which he was mostly forgotten. A girl spoke to the
police from behind him saying that she could watch over the boy. She was eleven
and had short brown hair and freckles. She spoke in a very matter-of-fact way,
stating she was sure he killed himself and would you like some milk from
Bessie?
She brought him into the barn where an old woman was
standing next to a cow. She demonstrated the milking apparatus and offered him
a cup of warm fresh milk.
I remembered that milk
after I had forgotten everything else.
The little girl’s name was Lettie Hempstock. They all went
into the kitchen for porridge and jam and tea. The older woman and a stockier,
younger woman started speaking to each other about the business outside. They had
a precognitive sort of sense to their words, discussing how many people would
end up being there and had the police found the note yet. They even discussed
the contents of the note, extrapolating detailed information from just a few
short sentences.
The older woman was Old Mrs. Hempstock, and the stocky woman
was Mrs. Hempstock, and there was Lettie Hempstock as well. They discussed how
the farm had been around since William the Conqueror and that it was in the
Domesday Book. After a while, they suggested Lettie take the boy out to the
pond – the ocean, Lettie insisted. There the boy asked why she called it an
ocean. It was larger back then, Lettie explained, back when she came over from
the old country. The boy was confused, but then noticed a fish in the water
that distracted him.
The fish was dead, swallowed a sixpence. This was strange to
Lettie Hempstock. She insisted the boy take it, but he didn’t think stores
still took sixpence coins. She told him to put it in his piggy bank when he
went home. When they went back to the farm, the boy’s father thanked the ladies
for watching him and then brought him back. The boy had a question for his
father.
“Could you have an
ocean that was as small as a pond?”
“No,” said my father. “Ponds
are pond-sized, lakes are lake-sized. Seas are seas and oceans are oceans.
Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. I think that’s all of the oceans there are.”
Commentary
Wow this chapter was hard to summarize. If you have not
already read this book, do so NOW! I wanted to just quote the entire chapter.
As a matter of fact, I will just place a quote here in my commentary, just
because it is so beautifully and eerily written. I’m having a difficult
condensing this novel into a short summary paragraph and small commentary. Neil
Gaiman is a master of character development. We don’t even know our MC’s name
and I already have a picture in my mind of a curious, quiet 7 year old boy.
This book is packed full of prose and imagery.
This scene is when the boy is recalling Madame Tussaud’s
waxworks.
…I had wanted to visit
the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I’d
read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and
Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a
seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and
women who had murdered people – usually lodgers, and members of their own
families – and who were then murdered in their turn: by hanging, by the
electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims
in awkward, social situations – seated around a dinner table, perhaps, as their
poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told
me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to
anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I
did not know what anatomy was. I knew
only that anatomy made people kill
their children.
Next time I shall be covering chapters 3 and 4! Hope you
return having read this beautiful tale!
