The Ocean at the End of the Lane Just Doesn't Make Big Waves

I was given this book for my birthday or Christmas this past year, and I was interested in it to explore what a popular (and supposedly successful) magic surrealism novel reads like. Spoiler Alert on this one: this book is horrible, so don't bother reading it.

The general plotting of the story is mainly a flashback, where the narrator returns home for one of his parents' funerals. He goes to visit his old friend, Lettie Hempstock's house to feel nostalgic, and finds the friend's grandmother still alive. He (we think it's a he) asks if he can go out back to sit by the old pond where he and his friend used to play.

From there, the story goes into flashback of his childhood when his parents moved into the house down the street from the Hempstock's to save money. He and his sister (we never learn the main character's actual name which is entirely unimportant, but just didn't appeal to me). are young and his parents are working, and so they hire a babysitter for them. Our narrator quickly discovers that the babysitter (Ursula Monkton) is evil and is ruining his life, because she is mean and mistreats the narrator, and he finds out she and his father are having an affair. This angers the narrator so much that he runs away one night in the middle of a storm, and he basically stumbles his way over to his friend Lettie Hempstock's farm. From there, he tells them why he has run away and Lettie and her mom and grandma determine that this babysitter is like this evil creature called Skarthach who is killing and taking over control of people, and Lettie and her grandma have now recruited the narrator to help get rid of him. Before I go on, a MAJOR MAJOR plot fail in the book occurs here, because the author gives us NO, NONE ZERO 0 exposition about the following: What is this monster, why is it here, why does it want to overtake people (that's the best way I can describe it) what purpose does it have, what type of monster or anomaly is it really? Why is it evil as opposed to it just doing what it naturally does? So at this point, I realized how disappointed I was going to be; this was another thriller/monster novel with NO reasonable explanation for the existence of this monster. No legend, no spell re-enchanted, no residual evil manifesting itself, NOTHING. It's just Hey, there's this monster who takes on human form and does weird and evil stuff. I'm sorry, but this is POOR writing. It's lazy and uncreative in my opinion.

From there, the narrator and Lettie discuss ways of trying to stop this evil thing, but then never really formulate any plan. They discover that the evil thing wants to kill/take the narrator when our narrator (remember he has no name? Yeah, lame) and his friend Lettie must go confront the monster. So Lettie confronts this lady monster and defeats it by telling it it has no power and isn't real. She keeps saying things like, "You're not real, You have no power, blah blah, and this basically kills this Ursula monster. (Yes, the plot is that crappy.) But, since that was so lame, the denouement occurs after, when a group of random monster minions, whom we have no context or backstory for, show up on the Hempstock's property. These birds are described more or less like flying stony creatures who have no faces (I guess monsters from The Mummy meet The Wizard of Oz here), threaten to attack since they did not give the babysitter Ursula Monkton monster what she wanted. So they attack the narrator (remember, the main character with no name) and Lettie runs out and throws herself on top of the boy to protect him, and they kill Lettie and go away Yeah. really.

The story more or less comes out of the flashback and the narrator is sitting on the bench by the pond. Old Lady Hempstock comes out and says Lettie didn't really die and that she will come back to life again someday because the narrator keeps coming back to visit her and honor her memory. I guess the moral being: Remembering those who have died has power (supernatural in this case.) I'm probably trying to give Gaiman some validation here with this observation, but I don' think he deserves it. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it because the author fails to finish a plot thread: the little affair that the narrator's dad was having with the Ursula Monkton mo ster lady? Yeah, I guess that ended and the mom never found out and the dad isn't mad at his som, and vice-versa. Everything's fine there I guess, since the author left that wide open.

Okay. this story has to be given a very low F for horrible, non-existent exposition. You can't write a fantasy, surrealism novel and not EXPLAIN the implications of the world in which the story takes place. There has to be history, conflict, legend, that coincides with and creates an arena for the conflict to seem believable within the reality of the world in which the story is set. Gaiman gets an F for this. No background to make us able to say, "Okay, yeah, that could happen in this world." You know why? Because he spends 0 I MEAN 0 nada no chapters, no pages, no paragraphs, NO WORDS AT ALL on exposition for this world and the context. Namely: What is this monster, why does it reside here, why bother the Hempstocks as opposed to others, when was it first discovered--none of that. Okay I'll stop. This book is a rarity in my grading scale and I will give it a very low F. Very disappointing. F F F F

Up next: I'm going to restore my faith in British lit by reading a Renaissance classic: Ben Jonson's Epicene.

Cheers,

Scott