Tag: Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman #AtoZ

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This post is part of the 2016 April A to Z Challenge.

There is something magical about books that transport you back to your childhood, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman is one of those special books,

After a family bereavement, a man returns to his rural childhood home and heads down the lane to the old ramshackle farmhouse next door that he used to visit as a child.

And he starts to remember fragments, of how he used to play with a little, remarkable girl called Lettie Hempstock, who lived on the farm with her mother and gran. Who took him to the pond behind the homestead and called it her ocean.

Neil Gaiman beautifully weaves a tale of magic and half-remembered childhood days. The man had not thought about Lettie and her family in decades, and yet, fragments of his past come back to him that seem too strange and frightening to have happened, let alone to a seven-year-old boy. Something incomprehensible happened in the man’s childhood, which unleashed a darkness on the small community on the lane, and set in motion a devastating chain of events.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a beautiful study of what makes us human, and also on how we perceived the world when we were little. Lettie and her family could not really be witches, could they? But which part of the remembered past are true, and which are childish imagination? Maybe there is no distinction between them at all.

Neil Gaiman seems to have found the perfect mixture of truth and imagination, magic, reality, joy and sadness, wit and dry humour, happiness and fear, which gives the story a sweetly melancholic atmosphere. The book captures the reader’s attention from the first page to the very last, spinning a tale of mystery, old wisdom, love, and resentment. Parts of the story hit close to home, in every sense of those words, while others are endearingly whimsical.

Even the physical book itself insists on being whimsical and that little bit different and special, with its intentionally rough, untrimmed edges of the paper.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane stretches imaginations and definitions of what is possible and what is not; and whether one thing could not simultaneously be another as well. And maybe, just maybe, the fantastical stories we thought we made up as children turn out to be real after all. Not remembering properly may simply have been less painful.

This is one of those rare books whose message you have to digest for a while after you finish reading it. It will make you question your childhood memories and the limitations of your imagination, and Gaiman’s exquisite style will immerse you so deeply in the story that you think you are really walking alongside Lettie Hempstock and the boy searching for the ocean behind the old homestead at the end of the dusty lane.

 

My Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥

Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Release Date: June 18, 2013
Pages: 181
ISBN:  978-0062272348

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman #AtoZ #Audiobook

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This post is part of the 2016 April A to Z Challenge.

Did you know that London is split in two parts? And I don’t mean the cities of London and Westminster. No, it’s London Above and London Below.

London Above is the city most people know. The one with corporate jobs and ultra-modern buildings. But the London Below of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is a whole different world, full of Rat-Speakers and shadow dwellers, with their own rules to abide and secrets to keep.

The version I am reviewing is the BBC Full-Cast Dramatization, although the print copy is just as marvellous. James McAvoy voices Richard, who by chance finds a way into London Below, where he discovers that what he only knows as landmarks, suburbs and tube stations are real people in the city underneath. There is an Earl at Earl’s Court – an old man with a tendency to go berserk – voiced by Sir Christopher Lee; Knightsbridge is guarded by actual knights, the Old Bailey is an old, kind man feeding pigeons played by Bernard Cribbins and Benedict Cumberbatch lends his voice to the all-too-real Angel Islington.

The cast also includes the likes of Anthony Stewart Head, Johnny Vegas, David Harewood, Sophie Okonedo and Neil Gaiman himself. And what a cast it is! This particular version is dialogue-only, as the voice actors do an amazing job of bringing the world below to life. Even without a narrator the story is easy to follow and all the characters are so well defined and different that not a single one of them seems flat or unimportant.

Neverwhere is urban fantasy at its finest. It takes a familiar place and turns it into something incredibly more complex than you could ever have imagined. The way Gaiman brings all the landmarks and places to life borders on genius and begs the question: why has nobody else wondered where such places as Ravenscourt or Knightsbridge got their names from? And if they were people, what would they be like?

Only very few people Above ever catch a glimpse of London Below or the people who inhabit it. They choose not to see. For them, some of the folk from Below look like homeless people, and the people Above are used to ignoring their problems.

Neverwhere is the perfect gateway story for those wanting to get more into urban fantasy. And whether you read it or listen to it – you’ll never see London in quite the same way ever again.

 

My Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥

Title: Neverwhere
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: William Morrow
Release Date: July 7, 2015 (originally published in 1996)
Pages: 336
ISBN:  978-0062371058

BBC Full-Cast Dramatization
Release Date: September 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1471316470

#WeekendCoffeeShare: If We Were Having Coffee… On March 26

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Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, a blog hop by the lovely Diana over at Part Time Monster. Every weekend we get together for virtual coffees and a little casual chat.

As a book blog, I will do my best to keep my topics bookish.

Have you read any good books recently? Can you recommend any? I am currently reading The Assistants by Camille Perri as an ARC. It’s a corporate story about embezzlement and education getting you no further than a PA’s job.

I am also currently still reading Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, as well as The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman. I usually have at least one eBook and one paperback at the same time.

What I really got into this year is audiobooks. It’s really nice to listen to them in the car,sort of like having someone in the car with you who is talking to you. So far, I’m on my 9th audiobook. Currently, I am listening to a full-cast production of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (can you see a trend there?). I love this one! Narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, with a cast including Robert Madge as Bod, Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Owens and Mrs. Lupescu, Andrew Scott as Jack the Man, as well as Lenny Henry, Reece Shearsmith, Emilia Fox and Neil Gaiman himself.

What’s your opinion on audiobooks? Do you listen to them? Do you prefer a “proper” reading or a full-cast production with voices and sound effects?

Anyway, I’m on a bit of a deadline with one review, so I need to get back to it. But thank you for having coffee with me today! Check out the other Weekend Coffee Sharers as well!