Monday, December 04, 2006

Let Us Now Praise Neil Gaiman


(with apologies to James Agee and Walker Evans)

I just finished Neil Gaiman's Coraline. What an odd little book. Gaiman wrote one of my favorite books, American Gods, and I just discovered his children's literature. While my first thought was that this man should not be writing for children, upon reflection I think that his horrifying stories are as necessary as fairy tales used to be, before they got all sanitized and pretty.

Just this morning, the kids and I were listening to Jonathan Stroud's second Bartimaeus book, The Golem's Eye, on the way to school. One of the characters is watching a play and thinks,
Show us a little of what we fear . . . only take away its teeth. . . . Make the demons frighten us, then let us watch them die.

That's rather what fairy tales do for our children, isn't it? They provide a way to confront our deepest, animal fears and deal with them rather than pushing them back into our psyches, ignored and ready to fester out when we are least prepared.

Back to Coraline. The little girl walks through a closed-off door into an alternate reality, one in which her parents give her the attention and presents she craves, but are creepy and have sewn-on black buttons on their faces in place of eyes. Which life she chooses, and how she fights for it, make up the story.

The story is terrific, and what keeps the chill factor under control is the quiet, stubborn strength of the heroine. If this unassuming little girl can hold herself together in the face of such terrors, so can the reader. My 11-year-old daughter read it before I did, and while she didn't proclaim it her favorite book (it would have had to have dragons in it for that), she did talk about it and wasn't frightened senseless.

As good as the story is the writing. I don't know how to describe Gaiman's craftmanship. It's a spare text, finely honed. His sense of timing, the rhthym of his sentences, his use of just the right words is, well, poetic.

The blurbs on the back cover are by Diana Wynne Jones (who compares it to Alice in Wonderland), Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors), and Lemony Snickett, who goes off on his own amusing riff:
This book tells a fascinating and disturbing story that frightened me nearly to death. Unless you want to find yourself hiding under your bed, with your thumb in your mouth, trembling with fear and making terrible noises, I suggest that you step very slowly away from this book and go find another source of amusement, such as investigating an unsolved crime or making a small animal out of yarn.

(Too bad I don't like the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. I love his writing here.)

Pratchett notes,
This book will send a shiver down your spine, out through your shoes, and into a taxi to the airport. It has the delicate horror of the finest fairy tales, and it is a masterpiece. And you will never think about buttons in quite the same way again.
And the illustrations by Dave McKean are fantastically creepy. I hope Gaiman doesn't mind if I reproduce one here (I'm fairly certain he's not one of the 3 or 4 regular readers of this blog):

The pen-and-ink drawings are spare but detailed and evoke the text's atmosphere perfectly.

I can't wait to read more.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

That does sound excellently creepy! Reminds me a little of that experiment with the baby monkeys -- they always chose the soft, plush momma monkey with no food over the wire momma monkey who offered food.

futuregirl said...

Oh, it's been years since I read anything Neil has written. I loved Good Omens, and Sandman, of course.

Coraline sound wonderful. :)

Laura Sue said...

I'm one of your 2 or 3 regular readers! LOL! And I LOVE Neil Gaiman as well as Terry Pratchett. I listen to audiobooks while I knit -- listened to American Gods and am making my way through the Discworld canon. Can't beat it! Also listened to Coraline (where I learned it was pronounced core-uh-line, BTW!), and loved it. Thanks for reminding me of this marvelous book.

normanack said...

Knitting plus audiobooks = a combination made in heaven!

One of the (many) things I love about British books is that, on audio, the narrator often has a yummy British accent. My current knitaudio is written and read by Robert Rankin, who has the most excellent voice.

LLA said...

Not to sound all Hollywood - "If you loved "Pretty Woman" and "Hostel", you'll love this movie..." - on you, but if enjoyed Coraline* you must get thee to a library/bookstore/Amazon.com and get your hands on a copy of "The Wolves in the Walls". It's a picture book, and skews towards a slightly younger audience, but it is every bit as fab.

(And on a completely unrelated note: I'm delighted that you found Bad Fortune Cookie, and I am even more pleased to have found you!)

*and truly, what's not to love???

Lysnekate said...

It is an excellent book. Have you read Mirrormask? I have the dvd if you'd like to borrow it.

And the Sandman stuff by Gaiman is excellent.

Anonymous said...

Three or four readers, indeed! Subersive Suburban has become one of my favorite late night reads. My only complaint being that I can read faster than you can write.

Heather said...

My Mom just gave my step-daughter this book. Since I had already read your review of it, I grabbed it and read it last night. Great story! I was just slightly hesitant about giving it to SD since we are currently going through a lot of emotional crap with her birth mother and I thought the two sets of parents theme might be a little too close to home, but Coraline is just such a resourceful, strong girl I figure that she is the perfect role model.