The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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**Spoilers** The OCEAN at THE END of the LANE is the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve read the last sentence. The story spotlights a disturbing aspect of the human condition: often, broken people can't be fixed. We recognize this in the nameless protagonist and in some people around us, but we fear it might also be true in our lives. The protagonist comes back to his childhood home for a funeral. We aren’t sure who has died, but by the end of the book our best guess is that it’s his father. After the services, instead of returning to his sister’s home, he takes a drive and ends up at the farm at the end of the lane, which is where the duck pond/ocean was. Both the farm and the three women who live there are magic, filled with an ancient magic that goes back to a time before the earth was formed. The farm girl, Lettie, her mother, and grandmother befriend the protagonist when he was a lad of seven. The mother still lives on the farm and allows him to walk to the pond, where he sits and remembers what happened when he was seven-years-old. Two things are apparent almost from the beginning: the narrator/protagonist is unreliable, so we can’t trust his judgment, and he is a broken, misfit. He’s a friendless boy whose world becomes bearable through the books he reads. This is a story about how unfair, chaotic, and frightening childhood can be. It’s about a lonely boy, living through a time when money is scarce, parents are inattentive and neglectful, and fantasy become more real than anything else. It’s a story about how books and perhaps imaginary friends can help a child survive. Our hero is surrounded by strong women: the three farm women, who are strong, powerful, and protect him from the evil that has entered his world; his sister, who is an annoyance and has no clue the trouble he’s in, but takes pleasure in making his life miserable; their new governess Ursula Monkton, who is an evil entity from another realm and tries to imprison, harm, and finally wants to kill him; the mother, who is mostly absent and inattentive. Ursula gives people what they want: money to those in hard times trying to make ends meet; sexual favors to the father; attention to the sister; freedom to leave the house to the mother. These gifts bring negative consequences. Ursula only wants to take from the protagonist--he was her entrance into this world, and she will use him or kill him as it suits her. The father is the second villain of the story. What kind of father scoops up a seven-year-old boy and takes him to see a body? At first, I thought he was clueless. Later, I began to realize the father does not consider the needs of his son. Whatever the father’s reason, the protagonist was traumatized by seeing their lodger’s body after his suicide. It's the police officers, not the father, who suggest the boy go with Lettie away from the crime scene. The father’s insensitivity foreshadows greater cruelty to come: a father trying to drown his son. Water imagery abounds in this book. The pond is really an ocean, and it's magic: it can heal, carry things out of the world, and bring things into the world. The bathtub scene reeks with the kind of terror and betrayal that scars someone for life. It’s obvious that the father suspects that his son has seen something and will tell the mother about his affair with Ursula. In the end, even the father's death does not release the son from the brutality of his childhood. The story ends with the protagonist leaving the farm to return to his sister’s house and re-enter the real world. As he moved away from the pond, he already starts to forget the story, that Lettie isn’t in Australia but in the pond, that the farm is magic, that for a while he remembered. Lettie's mother knows he'll return, the reader knows, and at some deep unconscious level he knows. But for now, all his memories slide away as he returns to his adult world, the same broken man he was when he drove to the farm.

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Rating 3.5 My first experience with a Neil Gaiman book, and the creepiness was so vivid that I wanted to stop . . . But I went back to it and ended up thinking NG is an astounding author because of the strong reaction I had to his storyline and the imagery. Let's just say that monster Ursula Monkton enters the story as a very vivid attachment to our narrator's boyhood foot! A story of nightmares, isolation, family dysfunction, strong women and a little kid who loves to read. Great writing but due to the scariness, only a 3.5. I'm willing to try more!

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This is definitely an unusual book. It starts out sedately and one almost wonders if it's nothing more than a children's fantasy. But slowly and surely the narrator takes us back to fantastical events forty years back and we are kept turning pages to find out how things turn out. There is a lesson here for those of us who are always wondering whether we passed or failed and it is that, "You don't pass or fail at being a person."

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A children's book that's not for children? It's difficult to describe. An adult fairy tale? It's beautifully written, and captures the feel of childhood instantly. A short book, but BIG on story. It's fun & furious, uplifting & downtrodden, scary & scarier, and impossible to put down! It's a great starting point if you haven't read Neil Gaiman before.

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An unnamed well developed main character narrates his life shaping childhood memories. Economy force reduced living conditions on his small family. A live-in sitter is hired for him and his sister. Only he feels trapped and aware as the new sitter Ursula becomes their sinister adversary, causing bondage unknown to their parents. Situations become unbearable for him and he stumbles upon his new friend Lettie. “Children as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths while adults take roads and official paths.” Suspense builds at each new turn of events. Common spells are replaced with recipes sometimes, his friend Lettie explains. Ursula begged Lettie to send her back while not looking even faintly human. Turning on Lettie and the main character Ursula becomes evil in her deadly attack, using ancient deceptions. Lettie and the main character confront Ursula. This descriptive fable plays out courageous times in the lives of two determined children and their resourcefulness. Many demonic gripping dangers could win in this thrilling children’s story.

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Once again, Gaiman delivers. A brilliantly and imaginatively rendered modern fairy tale that never fails to surprise and move the reader. In this slender novel, he plays with the uncertainties of memory, what's real and what's imagined. It is a tightly focused narrative that creates a whole new mythology that reads as if it has always existed. It is easily one of Neil Gaiman's best books.