The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "It Takes a Graveyard to Raise a Child" An assassin named Jack has come to murder a family, but after taking care of the parents and their daughter, he discovers that the baby boy has absconded from the house. The infant has toddled up the hill to the old graveyard (now a nature reserve), where the Owenses, a childless couple dead for a few hundred years, decide to raise him as their own son, while a refined man named Silas, who seems neither dead nor alive and who possesses formidable powers of persuasion, decides to be the boy's guardian. Silas names the boy Nobody. Nobody, Bod for short, is given "the Freedom of the Graveyard" and will be taught to read and write and Fade and Dreamwalk and so on by centuries-old ghosts. Silas will bring him food from the world outside the graveyard, which is off-limits for the boy, for that assassin is still a-lurk somewhere out there. The rest of Neil Gaiman's Carnegie and Newberry winning novel The Graveyard Book (2008) concerns the education and growth of Bod, each new chapter taking place later in the boy's life among the dead (and undead) and forming what is partly a Gothic fantasy re-telling of Kipling's Jungle Books (minus the non-Mowgli stories). Bod is Mowgli, the Graveyard the Jungle, the Owenses Mowgli's wolf parents, Silas Bagheera, and Jack Shere Khan. It's not an exact mapping, because Gaiman focuses on human nature, monsters, and civilization rather than on nature, animals, and civilization, but both works relate the extraordinary education of a boy in his ideal world and his maturing out of it. Chapter 2 relates the friendship between Bod and Scarlett, a spunky girl from the outside world. Chapter 3 involves lycanthropy and Lovecraftian ghouls and night-gaunts when Bod meets a new teacher/guardian, the unappealing Ms. Lupescu, who forces beet soup and lists of seemingly useless things on the boy. In Chapter 4, Bod learns about witches, potter's fields, Fading, and the returning nature of precious artifacts. Chapter 5 depicts a festive, floral dance of death featuring the living and the dead (but not, poignantly, the undead). In Chapter 6, 11-year-old Bod forgets to keep a low profile in a "normal" school outside the Graveyard. Chapter 7 features the climax of the novel, as well as poetical advice, an avuncular historian, a showdown, the limits of human imagination, and pizza. In the last chapter, Bod learns what you lose and gain by growing up. I like the concept of "monsters" bringing up a living boy in an old graveyard in England. The ghosts are funny and moving, their headstone phrases splendid, like "Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish (Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykwise?)" Gaiman does funny things with the two different ages of ghosts, personal (their age at death) and historical (the year in which they died): "The Bartleby family--seven generations of them--had no time for him that night. They were cleaning and tidying, all of them, from the oldest (d. 1831) to the youngest (d. 1690)." Bod is appealing: brave, thoughtful, curious, loving, and just rebellious enough. Silas is a great supporting character. By never writing the word vampire, Gaiman gives readers the pleasure of gradually confirming that the guardian is one, and Silas' attempts to hide his emotions from Bod are charming. I was moved by Bod's relationship with Silas, the Owenses, and Liza, the ghost of a young witch. I like Gaiman's reversal of traditional genre elements: cemeteries, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches, even mummies all become protective, safe, good, etc., while the true monsters are humans who don't mind hurting weaker people. The themes are fine, about the need to challenge life to the point of pain and pleasure, the concept that most people cannot handle the impossible, the usefulness of learning, and the belief in moral ethical action. The writing is usually just right, evoking a fine dark wonder, or uneasy suspense, or witty fun, or creepy fear. There are many fine moments in the novel: Neat similes: "Silas's unmoving exterior was like the hard crust of rock over molten lava." Compelling magic: "Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind, Now slip, now slide, now move unseen, Above, beneath, betwixt, between." And funny exchanges: "Name the different types of people," said Miss Lupescu. "Now." Bod thought for a moment. "The living," he said. "Er. The dead." He stopped. Then, ". . . Cats?" he offered, uncertainly. I did have some troubles with the book. First, Bod's friend from the outside world, Scarlett, is finally both under-used and badly-used: passive and unfair. Perhaps Gaiman is demonstrating the superiority of a graveyard upbringing over a normal one, but he sets her up so promisingly and then… Second, Dave McKean's illustrations do not always work well. For instance, he draws Bod wearing regular clothes when he should be wrapped in a winding sheet, and his Silas looks little like the Silas of Gaiman's words. Third, the whole Bod as Special Destined Boy and the Secret Society of Jacks business is unconvincing, by the numbers YA fare. Fourth, the ghosts are all essentially good, when you'd think there'd be some baddies, just as there are baddies among the living. Gaiman must be trying to reverse our idea of ghosts, but in The Jungle Books many wolves follow Shere Kahn and want Mowgli out of the Jungle. Finally, amid his wonderfully creepy and creamy writing, Gaiman occasionally plays a false note. When Bod, raised by centuries-old ghosts and surrounded by vintage English expressions on headstones, says, "It seriously sucks to be frightened," he may be imitating the idiom of his schoolgirl bully interlocutor, but really. And Bod sometimes seems too canny and mature for his years, as when he sends some policemen packing. Anyway, fans of Gaiman should love this book, and readers who like reassuring dark fantasy with an edge should like it, too. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University