Chris reviewed The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
None
4 stars
Neil Gaiman's style does of course take you in, he is a very clear storyteller even when as here the narrator might not be entirely reliable. I took it through out that the story was not supposed to be a metaphor (at least not within the text) for the narrator's father being abusive and adulterous, but that the events do literally happen to the narrator. One thing I was not clear about: the three women presumably represent the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone - however limiting and artificial a distinction that is - and at some points they talk about breeding new members of their tribe (the men tend to go off while the women stay) and presumably when the eldest dies they all shift up one. But elsewhere it is suggested that they are eternal, and that when the narrator returns he assumes the old lady is the …
Neil Gaiman's style does of course take you in, he is a very clear storyteller even when as here the narrator might not be entirely reliable. I took it through out that the story was not supposed to be a metaphor (at least not within the text) for the narrator's father being abusive and adulterous, but that the events do literally happen to the narrator. One thing I was not clear about: the three women presumably represent the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone - however limiting and artificial a distinction that is - and at some points they talk about breeding new members of their tribe (the men tend to go off while the women stay) and presumably when the eldest dies they all shift up one. But elsewhere it is suggested that they are eternal, and that when the narrator returns he assumes the old lady is the Mother he knew as a child and she has grown old; but corrects himself, no, it is still the woman he knew as the Grandmother. Perhaps they are just very long lived. Also at times I wasn't sure whether it was set in our world (with a Masquerade concealing the existence of Faerie) or in a parallel one. Certain things were said, and until I convinced myself that the narrator's timescale was the same as the author's (thus the action takes place in or around 1968) I wasn't even sure when it was set. If it is our world in the late 1960s then it is a bit of a correlative to the dewy-eyed nostalgia for that era that we have seen in recent years: the period was by no means ideal, and certainly not for anyone other than the well-off white middle classes.
