Infuriatingly lazy, shoddy and smug. I was never the world’s biggest Neil Gaiman fan, but this book is just him coasting on his popularity. It’s essentially a twenty page short story padded out to two hundred and fifty with worn-out scraps from his fantasy rag-bag.
The sheer sloppiness of the plot was infuriating: the eldritch horror is released into the world because the boy - who was only taken to Weirdo Alien Dimension Land because, um, Look! A Coming of Age! - fails to follow instructions to the letter. The Gaiman who wrote Instructions would never have been that slapdash.
Then when they are finally being assailed by the Cleaners, whose reach and puissance seems to vary depending on where you are in the book, the all-powerful Crone can’t assist them because, um, she’s asleep. Probably been reading this book. No, wait, she’s awake.
I think the most annoying part, though, was the epilogue, with all its shout-outs to his author and musician friends, and breathlessly solemn accounts of how it was shaped and polished in writers conferences and lecture tours. And breathless, treacly thanks go to Amanda Palmer because I loves you snuggle-pumpkin mwah mwah.
Fuck you, Gaiman, you’ve gotten lazy, complacent, self-satisfied and spoilt.
For all that Gaiman was poking fun at the cosily worn-out plots of the books the boy was reading, his own story is just as reactionary, without the excuse of having been written 60 years ago. The comfortable, traditional English countryside and its sprawlingly cosy homes and gardens with trees to climb and rhododendrons to hide in is going to be bulldozed by evil developers, and eternal truth is only to be found at the end of ancient flint lanes in farm cottages that exist outside time where twinkling apple-cheeked maternal wisdom serves homebaked bread and porridge made from fresh cream? What is this shit, C. S. Lewis?
In a world-shattering example of ‘each to his own’, I absolutely LOVED this book. I’m a raving Gaiman fan girl in any case, and despite its many flaws American Gods is one of my absolute favourite books. But this one - I found it gentle, lyrical and completely unexpectedly touching. I was sobbing at the end. Loved, loved, loved it.
I agree that it’s a very comfortably English book, in an English-that-never-really-existed way. I’m prepared to acknowledge that the circumstances in which I read it - having just emigrated from the England of my birth - may have coloured my reaction to it. However, I honestly thought it was beautiful and heart-aching.
For me, the book was about reality as perceived by children vs. how it is perceived by adults. I never felt that Gaiman imbued the narrator’s perspective with absolute truth, and therefore it is likely a flawed memory. What is real; a creature from another dimension wreaking havoc, or just his father sleeping with a bitchy tenant? The play between the children’s world and the world of the adults is where the meat of this story is.
How much of remembered childhood has become a sort of fantasy anyway?
I was also really moved by the boy’s relationship with his father. Not that I ever experienced anything even in the same realm as him, but there was a point in my life that I realized that the father of my childhood is not the same man walking around today; I love my dad a lot, but still mourn the loss of the ‘dad that was,’ who now lives in memory/fantasy. I think a lot of what happens between the narrator and his father in the book can be viewed symbolically, particularly if you are willing to take everything reported/remembered by the narrator with a grain of salt; as true-but-alternate rememberings of experiences that were completely mundane and natural to other actors in the story.
Pretty maudlin for a Tuesday night with no alcohol; I blame Neil Gaiman.
Except that it’s made fairly explicit that it did happen but that he only remembers it each time he revisits the farm and sits by the pond, except that the old bat wipes his memories each time he goes back. And the plot resetting status-quo preservation button is a hallmark of sloppy plotting and lazy characterisation, since nobody ever has to live with the consequences of their actions. The narrator’s father almost drowns him - in the book’s most authentically horrifying sequence - and then fucks the eldritch succubus, except that the old woman snips that out of reality and tah-dah! it never actually happened. Sheer laziness.
I’m ambivalent about Gaiman. I like* Sandman *and his short stories, but I think he struggles a bit with novels, except American Gods, which was excellent. I used to admire his work ethic and how much he’d grown as a writer simply by writing, except that now he seems to be falling into the Douglas Adams trap of endlessly self-congratulatory reworking the same material: TOatEotL had far too much of Coraline in it, with the author avatar he’s used in a lot of his short stories.
I thought it was an excellent book by any measure and gave it my Nebula vote.* It’s silly to argue that the story has been done before; there was nothing about the plot of Coraline, for instance, that was particularly new; what made it work was the characters. The main thing about Ocean that set it apart was that it was an old man’s story, looking back on his childhood, which gives it all a psychological depth.
*It won’t win, but that’s due more to current SFWA politics than anything to do with its quality.
Gaiman fan who loved it, treasured it. I found the journey it took me on enchanting and emotionally satisfying. Gave it to a couple of family members for Christmas and they had similar responses.
Eh, I don’t know. Going from memory here, but the only person who has any recollection of these events happening are the narrator himself, and the faeries/witches at the farmhouse.
I also don’t mean that it’s a child’s imagination super-imposed upon reality. It is that separate realities are existing on top of each other, and that says something profound about how we all create our own realities. The boy didn’t imagine anything, it all really happened the way he remembers it . . . but it also all really happened the way his father remembers it.
The details of anything that happens anywhere become instantly twisted when experienced by different people, and particularly so when filtered through memory. Where does my truth end and yours begin? What is the difference between fable, myth, and memory? A lot of Gaiman’s writing asks these questions, and this book asks them in a very direct, in your face kind of way.
See, I found it almost wholly lacking in characterisation, except for the barest of outlines. The narrator was standard coming-of-age bookish boy, the Wise Women were, well, wise women, and the only interesting idea about the Lamia/Succubus/Shapeshifting Eldritch Fiend was when she wanted to give people money to make them happy - and Terry Pratchett did that much, much better with the Hiver in A Hat Full Of Sky - and that glimmer of interest was discarded early on in favour of standard Sexy Wicked Step-Mother.
