Criticult.Com

I rarely buy hardback books on day of release. The only exception to the rule is Neil Gaiman. When I was younger I was a Stephen King Constant Reader until I started to become Constantly Disappointed. I bought all of sai King's books the day they came out and then went home and devoured them. A quick glance to my book shelf reveals 3 King books unread (Lisey's Story, Duma Key and Blaze)and I really have no idea when I'm going to get to them. It' s not a question of not having time, I make time to read. But there is just no motivation to tackle them. Now that The Dark Tower is over everything he is releasing since his "retirement" just feels like epilogue. I will defend the man to the day I die for The Eyes of the Dragon, IT, The Shining, and The Stand but he just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Which brings me to Neil Gaiman. I first came upon him like a lot of people it seems, through Good Omens, his collaboration with Terry Pratchett. From that point forward I began reading all the Gaiman works I could get my hands on. There is nothing quite like the sheer joy of finding a new writer and in short succession I went through Neverwhere, Stardust, and Sandman. I still remember to this day where I was when I finished American Gods (I played hooky from work to finish it and spent the afternoon in the garage getting more and more drunk on Captain and Coke and nicotine) and his short story collection Smoke & Mirrors contains some of my favorite short stories by any writer. This is long and rambling way of saying I'm a fan and I bought The Graveyard Book when it came out. I would have finished it sooner but I was half way through Terry Pratchett's Making Money and had to finish it first.

In the afterword to The Graveyard Book Gaiman says the novel owes a debt to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. I can see that. But there is another more recent work that I think was at least subconsciously influencing Gaiman: Harry Potter.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

This opening line of the book sets the tone and hooks you immediately. On the night his entire family is murdered by the man Jack, a toddler unknowingly escapes to a nearby graveyard. The ghosts of the graveyard protect the child and raise him as their own until he grows to adulthood. The child, given the name Nobody Owens, is granted the Freedom of the Graveyard and gains most of the powers of the ghostly inhabitants. But outside of the graveyard, the killer Jack still seeks for the child that got away and won't give up until he finished the job.

The novel is broken into separate chapters, each one a short story that reveals part of a larger story arc. As in Harry Potter, it starts when Nobody (shorted to Bod) is 4 years old and each chapter finds him a few years older. As his age increases, so does the danger until he is forced to use all of his knowledge and powers of the graveyard to defeat the man Jack and stop an ancient prophecy from claiming Bod's life.

Like all of Neil Gaiman's works, there is a poetry and ease of language to a lot of his descriptions and dialogue. I was consistently surprised by the story as things never go quite how you expect them to. Unlike JK Rowling's style, Gaiman allows his story to breathe with details that end up not having anything to do with the overall plot. I am a fan of Rowling and enjoyed all of the Harry Potter books, however characterization is her weakness and every event in those books has some connection to the overall story. There is a chapter in The Graveyard Book in which the ghosts leave the graveyard to dance with the living people of the village and it is a beautifully rendered scene that has no purpose to the overall story. It's a "throwaway" scene that helps to round out the characters even more and is haunting, beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time.

There are many touches like that and some action scenes barely described that it really makes you wonder why Gaiman didn't write a longer work than this slim 300 page novel. I'm not a fan of this new mandate that any story worth telling is certainly worth telling in a trilogy but in this case I wanted more. The Graveyard Book is beautifully written and deserves a place on your shelf next to Gaiman's best.

Labels: Cannonball Read, TylerDFC