cross posted - ocean at the end of the lane

crossposted from here: c. pindimiriyam

by Neil Gaiman

My least favorite thing about this book is that it has turned Neil Gaiman into a pop star. In my mind, he went from being indie and poor to a stadium-concert-level rockstar and it's annoying the hell out of me. </snob> (I know perfectly well that he was pretty famous even before this book. Psh.) My most favorite thing about this book is that it deals with one of the most interesting contradictions; of the magicness of magic.

Most good fantasy deals with it in one way or the other: that it exists, and people who don't know this are just not cool enough to be in on it; or that it is so in your face that it's not really magic anymore. Neil Gaiman takes a third route with his latest.

He sets it up by telling his story as a flashback. An adult is visiting the town he grew up in, walks to the end of the lane where his best friend used to live, meets her mother and gets talking. As he is talking, he is allowed to remember what really/"really" happened to them as children. By the middle of the book, you know why it's a Neil Gaiman book.

You know it because he has expertly managed to trick you into assuming that he is telling the first kind of fantasy story (in which you only know about magic because you're that cool) and then suddenly makes the switch into the second kind of fantasy story (in which everything is so magical anyway that it's not really magic anymore).

About three quarters in, you have no idea what you're dealing with. You don't know what sort of world this is set in, you don't know if you're meant to know, you don't know if it's just the delirium of a man at a funeral (although, if we're guessing, somebody's surely on something.) But the truth is, you're so into the magic of the book itself that you don't want to think of it in any other way. At least, that's the way it was for me.

He lays out this first contradiction alongside the adult/child contradiction in the flashback. What the adult assumes, a child questions. What the child knows, the adult is undecided. This is important in this context, because most of us have it all the time. You are taught to demagick yourself as you grow up. You start to see the world differently. The way you saw it as a child is either forgotten or dismissed. You never once think like that again. (I'm not even slightly comparing, but the best set of books that brings out this contradiction is Pullman's His Dark Materials.)

So read it, and tell me what you think!