Sometimes a memory is just beyond us, a heartbeat away but impossible to touch. A smell or a taste or a sound reminds us that there is something lost from the careful histories we construct of our lives. But after a moment, a hand on the shoulder, a voice, pulls us back into the shades of reality that surround us.
English author Neil Gaiman captures the essence of a once forgotten memory in his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was published in 2013. Intertwining elements of fantasy and reality, Gaiman reminds us how the memories and people that we think we lose can come to shape our lives.
"Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet," Gaiman wrote in the The Ocean. "But they are never lost for good."
When the narrator, an artist, returns to the rural landscape of his childhood home in Sussex, England, to attend a funeral, the once-lost memories from his seven-year-old life begin to pull him back under their absorbing power. The narrator wanders down the half-remembered paths of his childhood to the old farm house where his only friend, Lettie Hempstock, lived with her mother and grandmother. As he looks beyond the farmhouse to the small duck pond that Lettie believed to be an ocean, he remembers "everything" of the harrowing events that created an enduring "hole in [his] heart."
And just as the narrator quickly becomes submerged in the frightening stories of his memories, readers will likewise sink easily into the engrossing depths of Gaiman's eerie story about friendship and loss.
"Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either," Gaiman writes. "Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."
With a simple eloquence, The Ocean at the End of the Lane carries us back to the sense of powerlessness belonging only to children. The narrator's resurfacing memories remind us of the childhood terrors from which parents prove to be no source of protection.
Set against a fantastical landscape populated with birds that consume reality and monsters that try to give people what they want in harmful ways, the friendship between the narrator and Lettie remains one of the most compelling aspects of the story. While in his memory, the narrator is a lonely, solitary child who thinks that "books are safer than other people anyways," Lettie is a powerful 11-year-old girl who says she came across the duck pond's ocean from another world, "the old country."
When the narrator makes the mistake of letting go of Lettie's hand after she tells him that he must not, a chain of consequences occurs that comes to influence the courses of both of their lives.
In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gaiman artfully threads together elements of fantasy and reality to explore the layers of experience and memory that make up who we are.
In heartbreaking simplicity, Gaiman asks if the events of our past, even if we forget them, can impact the rest of our lives.
Gaiman writes, "That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together."
Yet he then asks, if memories fade, do they still matter? Can they still define us? If something is gone from our memories, is it ever truly gone from our lives?
In depicting a small duck pond that holds the magic of an ocean, Gaiman illustrates how something big can be hidden inside something small, and how a seemingly forgettable childhood experience can hide a frightening and heartbreaking power.
And in this small book, readers will find an absorbing ocean of story.
- By Amy Krivoshik
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