It takes a graveyard to raise a child...so is the premise of Neil Gaiman's new book, The Graveyard Book. Nobody Owens is a baby when his family is murdered in their home. Nobody has slipped out right before The Man Jack with his knife enters and wanders up to the graveyard. Nobody is taken in by the residents of the graveyard who promise to raise him. The graveyard is old, and the residents don't really know how to raise a modern boy whose life may still be in danger. Nobody is curious about both the graveyard world and the outside world, even attempting to go to school.
There are adventures and as Nobody becomes an adolescent, there is a final confrontation with The Man Jack (and other Jacks) at the end. The setting was perfect, but I sort of felt that the combination of the setting and story end up outshining the characters.
This is really a coming of age story, and I can see the appeal for young teens. A Coraline for boys of sorts, I didn't love it, but I wouldn't hesitate recommending it to fans of Gaiman and other adventure or fantasy readers.
1 comment:
Nobody Owens has lived in an old graveyard in a city in England since he could barely walk, following the murder of his family by a mysterious man named Jack. He has grown up loved and educated by the shades of those buried in the graveyard, and protected by the neither living nor dead Silas. As long as he remains in the burial ground he calls home, he is safe from those who would finish the job done to his birth family, and possesses the abilities shared by the ghosts who make up his family - walking through walls, disappearing from sight, raising fear in the living, and walking their dreams. But as Nobody grows into a teenager, he realizes that he needs to learn more of the world of the living, and his increasingly frequent trips to their world put him at risk from the ancient and deadly Brotherhood of Jacks.
Gaiman is at his usual best exploring the meeting of the seen and unseen worlds in this book, and often creates an atmosphere that is spooky rather than terrifying, yet always filled with wonder. He is especially skilled at examining the many human attitudes towards death, including wonder, peace, fear, resignation, and even beauty. His handling of the denizens of the graveyard is a masterful juggling act, matching personalities, speech patterns, and customs from many different eras of England to each spirit in an offhand manner that seems effortless and belies the great difficulty involved in offering so much detail in so few words, enriching the story without turning it into a history lesson. Historical detail is thus as a spice to Gaiman’s narrative recipe, and will be savored by readers in the United Kingdom and outside.
If there is a weakness to this book it the overarching storyline of the threat from the Jacks, which often disappears in the individual chapters between the beginning and end of the book. Because Nobody is mostly in the graveyard and the Jacks elsewhere, the reader often loses track of the danger to Nobody, and sees little of their machinations against him, making their development as characters difficult and unsatisfying. Perhaps Gaiman’s skill at writing short fiction (at least one of the chapters in The Graveyard Book was originally published as a short story) does him a disservice; individual chapters work as brilliantly realized and self-contained episodes, but the greater story loses something when they are strung together. In this sense, the book is similar to Gaiman’s American Gods books, full of wonderfully fantastic and fully realized stills, but not adding up to a wholly satisfying motion picture such as his masterpiece, The Sandman comic book series. Nevertheless, Nobody Owens and his gentle struggle to reconcile life with death is a character that readers young and old will identify with and cherish. Some mild violence, including the opening chapter recounting Nobody’s family’s murder, mostly offstage, and brief descriptions of bodily decay
Post a Comment