The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a peculiar children’s story: its most striking moments are not those of joy, adventure, discovery, or magic, but those that are violent and realistic. The wondrous elements serve almost as an excuse to deal with these issues: fantasy is not the goal of the story, but its pretext.

The protagonist – his name is not revealed – is an introspective boy with no friends. He spends most of his days wrapped up in books and exploring the woods around his house.  He is a curious, innocent boy who likes his cat named Fluffy and the quiet atmosphere of his home. His life, however, changes when he meets a strange girl, Lettie Hempstock, on a nearby farm.

The Hempstock family introduces him to the unimaginable: the existence of several impressive worlds where cats are born from the ground and ancient creatures roam free. Upon returning from his first expedition with Lettie, the boy discovers that he’s in great danger for having brought with him something from the other worlds: a monster that looks like “a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time,” which, taking the form of a beautiful and nice housekeeper, is hired by his parents.

The book is narrated in the first-person, from the perspective of an adult version of the protagonist who, observing the lake Lettie used to call an ocean, plunges into nostalgic thoughts about his childhood.

The notion of the passage of time is an important element in the book. The narrative is packed with comparisons between children and adults (“Adults follow paths. Children explore”) that help contrast their narrative function: whereas adults cause fear in the protagonist – his father’s outbursts used to make him cry – children around his age, especially Lettie, give him comfort.

The Hempstocks are, as it turns out, immune to time. They are the epitome of the book’s fantastical elements, being capable of doing anything: sometimes they sew time, cutting out passages from it; sometimes they shape their own constellations, leaving the moon in the shape they like best; sometimes they manage to make an ocean fit into a simple bucket. The apparent inexistence of limits to the family’s powers provides fun passages, like the moment when Mrs. Hempstock reveals how she managed to precise the age of a coin after facing it for a few seconds: “It’s electron decay, mostly. You have to look at things closely to see the electrons. They’re the little dinky ones that look like tiny smiles. The neutrons are the grey ones that look like frowns. The electrons were all a bit too smiley for 1912.”

Their immeasurable power, however, can be a bit problematic. Since the Hempstocks are capable of doing everything, we know that they represent an invincible safe harbor for the main character. Therefore, the constant threats the canvas creature makes rarely land, as the tension completely evaporates whenever the Hempstocks are around, making the villain sound more foolish than scary.

This is, however, one of the main reasons why the complicated family relationship at the core of the protagonist’s story stands out. The Hempstocks and the canvas monster are fantastical, ethereal beings that deal with each other according to their own laws and usually cancel each other out. The protagonist’s father, on the other hand, with his anger and his screams, is an immutable part of the boy’s reality, and there is no one to help him at home. The moment his father says that he would never hit him like his own dad used to is especially striking, as the protagonist wonders if he should really be grateful for that, believing that it would all be over faster if his father would just beat him up and be done with it.

Neil Gaiman makes it very difficult for us not to cheer for the main character. He’s a charming boy who, mixing equal doses of innocence and cleverness, is always trying to understand the world around him, albeit with mixed results: “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.”

The intense journey that the protagonist goes through, then, is one that makes him more mature. Neil Gaiman creates impressive images during the climax as the boy confronts his family and his fears. If, at first, the canvas monster is seen mocking the child, ridiculing and diminishing him as he runs away (“Oh, sweety-weety-pudding-and-pie, you are in so much trouble“), by the end of the book the boy appears much wiser, choosing to take responsibility for his actions and protect those he loves instead of just himself.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane excels at dealing with strong, tense themes, such as family violence. In the end, it is not the canvas creature that is the most terrible monster in the book, but the human being. Fantasy, therefore, though abundant in the narrative, is only a tool for Neil Gaiman to discuss family abuse in a brief but immensely touching story.

January 23, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 09, 2014.