New York Review of Books Review

"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. 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. When he rambles through her farm, when he follows the trail to the duck pond, he might as well be traveling through time. 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." First, that he and Lettie used to call the pond the ocean. Anyone who has ever returned to a childhood home after so many years knows how small everything seems now, how outsize everything seemed then. A king bed turns out to be a twin. A cavernous fort turns out to be a cramped, dusty burrow beneath the stairs. An ocean turns out to be a duck pond. Or maybe not. Maybe it actually is the ocean. 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. When the narrator remembers his life 40-odd years ago, when he was 7, he remembers magic. 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. 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. Ursula seduces the narrator's family, and he is the only one who recognizes her as a monster. His sole hope lies at the end of the lane, where the powerful goodhearted Hempstocks live - 11-year-old Lettie, her mother and grandmother - on a farm that is a portal to other worlds. The narrator is frightened, as you would expect, but he has been frightened his whole life; he sleeps with the door open and the hallway light on. He has been alone, too; no one comes to his seventh birthday party. We all know the vulnerability of childhood, when terrors lurked in the dark and bossy, moody adults judged our every move like impossible gods. This novel is at its most powerful and frightening when it exaggerates that defenselessness, as when the father kicks down the door of the bathroom, fills the tub with cold water and shoves his disobethent boy beneath the surface while Ursula observes them with her rotting-cloth eyes. "People kept pulling their faces off to reveal new faces beneath," the narrator observes of the adults in his life. He finds consolation in books, in adventures and fantasies. They offer him the cues and answers the human world cannot. Lewis Carroll is quoted more than once, appropriate given Gaiman's Mad Hatter imagination and the novel's rabbit hole imaginings. "They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers." Gaiman has said much the same in interviews, and it's interesting to consider how he and other fantasy writers have inherited and revised the genre. Anyone attracted to fairy tales and fables should check out the stories and criticism of Kate Bernheimer. I'll bastardize some of her thoughts here by saying that the fairy tale normalizes magic. If a baby turns into a pig or a wolf speaks in a pleasing baritone or a star descends from the sky and changes into an elderly woman with three wishes to spare, the characters do not question the illogic of the circumstances but freely accept that the surreal is real. Rarely does someone say, "This can't be happening," in a Karen Russell story, a Kevin Brockmeier story, an Aimee Bender or Matt Bell story. Because Gaiman's adult narrator is unreliable - he admits to chasms in his memory - and because he is describing his adventures as a fanciful 7-year-old who spends his days lost in books, the reader can effortlessly accept the extraordinary made ordinary. Whether it is real, or the wild dreams of childhood, doesn't matter so much. Because to a child the jungle gym is a pirate ship, the shadow in the closet is a monster, the pennies in the belly of the piggy bank are gold. Imagination is reality. As a writer, there are two ways you can go about this. Give in to whimsy. Let the imagination run free. Werewolves attend boarding school (as in Russell's "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves"); a black obelisk descends on Earth (Brockmeier's "Ceiling"). Alternately, you can try to persuade the reader that magic is perfectly reasonable. Patrick Rothfuss, whose fantasy novels rival those of George R.R. Martin, spends a great deal of time explaining his magic system. There is an almost slippery science behind the spells and potions, so convincingly described the reader feels enchantment within reach. I wondered about this - whimsy versus logic - when reading Gaiman. It feels rather curmudgeonly to say, but I'm not sure you can have it both ways. Gaiman talks about "Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find," and riffs his way into a kind of quantum physics school of magic. This aligns nicely with the Hempstocks' ability to snip out pieces of time, channel energy, remember the Big Bang. But then something more whimsical will pop up, as when a character mentions that Cousin Japeth "went off to fight in the Mouse Wars." That sort of silliness feels like a slight to the more substantial worldbuilding Gaiman has achieved. THOUGH marketed to adults, this book would be equally at home on a young adult bookshelf. Aside from one scene of sex (described abstractly and confusedly through the eyes of a 7-year-old), it feels like a family-friendly nightmare, its tenor akin to that of Gaiman's Newbery-winning "Graveyard Book." The two novels are close cousins in other ways as well. A young boy faces horror and finds himself expelled from his family, alone and insecure. He befriends a girl who grants him access to another world. He finds sanctuary in a supernatural family. He flirts with supernatural powers that aren't fully reachable to them. And in the end, as the protagonists grow into men, they lose their ability to access the extraordinary. This is not a reductive summary - each novel is a distinct treasure - but an effort to highlight a preoccupation: Gaiman is especially accomplished in navigating the cruel, uncertain dreamscape of childhood. There is a moment, toward the end of this novel, when the narrator drops into the duck pond (or ocean, as the Hempstocks call it), and his mind melts and achieves a kind of transcendent understanding: "I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger." Which replicates the experience I have whenever reading one of Gaiman's books. His mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown. Benjamin Percy's new novel, "Red Moon," was published in May.