The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (2008)

I'm going to let you know right now that I'm a fan of Gaiman. My friend introduced me to Neverwhere when I was just entering adulthood, and has since remained one of my favorite novels. His short story "Other People", found in his collection Fragile Things, is short, bitter, fantastical, and human (like all things Gaiman), and is one of the best short stories I've had the pleasure to read. But I had yet to read Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, and since it was one of his more recent works, I placed the library hold almost as soon as I remembered it existed.


The Facts
Length: 307 pages.
Publisher: HarperCollins.
This is Gaiman's eighth novel in Young Adult Fiction.

Quick Summary
Cryptic man Jack (the name "man Jack" is kept up throughout the novel; if you've read Gaiman before, you'll notice he likes this kind of repetition) kills an entire family except the baby, who climbs to apparent safety inside a graveyard. The inhabitants of this place - dead witches, dead doctors, dead teachers, werewolves, vampires, et cetera - protect the child, Nobody "Bod" Owens, through his journey towards adulthood. The novel is told of a kind of vignette/chapter-style breaking up of things; it reminded me of T.H.White's The Sword in the Stone.

The story is told in third-person.

The Good
What isn't good? Gaiman manages to get creepy correct right in the first few lines of the novel. The man Jack's just torn through Nobody's family, but it's the knife wielded that gets all the attention (it "had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet"). The reality of the murder just gets me - an entire family decimated before the novel even began.

Gaiman seems to capture reality through unreality - working through the realm of fantasy and myth and half-remembered dreams in order to write about something we all feel. I mean, who doesn't fall in love with the ghost-witch Liza Hempstock, in all her plainness, and feel the pain when the romance between her and Nobody can never really develop?

Hell, I still get texts from ghosts.

The Questionable
Gaiman definitely has set out his realm, and through that, somewhat of a style. And the thing is he never really changes. Fantasy/reality (Gaiman is the version of the "magical realism" genre, or fantastical reality, or whatever) is where he rests. It's a great style, but there's a little lack of surprise that I find myself wanting. Maybe I just haven't read enough Gaiman.

On a related note, another thing I wasn't too keen on were the antagonists. The shadowy organisation of ne'er-do-wellers just seems rather blank and flat. The main man Jack doesn't change at all - he's still the same at the end of the novel as he is in the beginning, albeit with white hair instead of black. Furthermore, he's easily fooled: the first chapter highlights his nonchalance at murder, but then almost makes a fool out of him when he loses, of all things, a baby. I remembered, when I was reading, the commentary from Joss Whedon during the Serenity film - he had deleted a scene because he felt like he was making too much of an idiot organisation of "The Alliance." I felt Whedon's words here. The Knaves are intelligent and surprising and evil and ingenuousness, but you never see evidence of it.


The Good
It's tragic, really. The novel has a - whoops, spoilers - happy ending, as all YA fiction probably should, but throughout the novel there are two premises which Gaiman continually reminds us of: one, that Nobody's entire family has been brutally murdered, and two, that Bod, being "alive", can never be fully integrated into his graveyard home. He's stuck between two worlds. And sure, that's been done before, especially in YA fiction, but I haven't ever seen it as effectively delivered throughout the entire novel as in here.

It's haunting (pun intended).

Final Thoughts
Do you like Gaiman? Read it. Have you never read Gaiman before? Read it.
Are you tired of Gaiman? Don't. Does your child still not know what suicide, or murder is, and you don't feel like explaining? Don't (get it for them).

But all in all, it won't cost you much time. I read GB in just over a day. A quick read compared to what I'm used to - heavy Victorian lit - but still well worth the time, in my opinion.

Arbitrary Score: 4.0 out of 5.

Next book: Cross Currents, by John Shors (2011)

The Lantern: A Novel, by Deborah Lawrenson (2011)

A bit of a blind "buy" for me (thumbs up to local libraries). The only reason I know this book existed was because - I think - I found something about it on Vancouver Public Library recommendations, or a "New and Exciting Fiction" list somewhere. Tired, bored, and a bite curious, I decided to place it on hold.

The Facts
Length: 387 pages.
Publisher: HarperCollins.
This is Lawrenson's first novel.

Quick Summary
Protagonist "Eve" falls in love with the older Dom, and they move into a decaying but lovable house in a whirlwind romance. Set in Les Genévriers, France, in 2011, Eve soon suspects that Dom is hiding something about his former wife, whom he absolutely refuses to talk about, and Eve's idyllic romance soon shatters as winter descends.

Every chapter, the novel switches perspective to that of Bénédicte Lincel, a farmgirl born in 1925. Bénédicte takes us through her troubled relationship with her family, but the two narratives converge into one at the end of the novel.

The Bad
I think this might be "chick lit."

I've read maybe two novels that hands-down pandered almost entirely to female readers (I'm not including anything written in the Victorian era, viz. Brontë or Austen). One was about an ugly twin who was helping to piece together the disappearance of her more famous sister with the help of the latter's ex-husband, who also happened to have popped the former's cherry and is, in fact, her true love. The other was about something about a string of murders; anyway, the protagonist falls in love with the steamy cop next door. I never finished it. I got as far as I could in one beach day and then never read any of my mother's "summer reads" ever again. Entirely forgettable, but my mind was drawn back to them on the appearance of Dom, the mysterious and brooding Bluebeard of a romantic interest in The Lantern. He's got a dark past and Eve discovers inconsistencies in his life story. He refuses to talk about his ex-wife Rachel. His emotional highs often only showcase his boundless anger. His actions scream guilty, but we all know he's innocent. We've seen this guy before.

The Good
But before you chuck this book away, it has its moments. Published in 2011, it references "La Crise", the financial simmering that's been going on for the past three years. That took me by surprise (after all, I had just read Robinson Crusoe before this - modernity!? In my books!?). "La Crise" isn't a large portion of this novel, by any means, but it was still a relevant touch, especially in Eve and Dom's reaction to it.

The Questionable
I also found that Lawrenson did something I've never really seen before; she relies heavily on olfactory sensation to tell the story. One of the characters in the novel, for example, is Marthe Lincel, a blind perfume-maker (whose sense of smell has apparently increased with the decay of her sight, ala Daredevil). Because she's just so damn good at her calling, she can capture scents that other characters only subconsciously remember. But, like Bénédicte observes, it's almost impossible to pin down and describe scent. Frankly, I find that the theme of scent in The Lantern falls on its face (or nose!), perhaps for this very reason. But I've never stopped to smell the roses.

The Good
I loved the chilling, crime-scene Octoberish mood in The Lantern. Casual references by locals to "missing girls" never go unnoticed. Local hunters accidentally shoot joggers in the woods. Pierre, the brother to Bénédicte and Marthe, was freaky as shit (unfortunately, like Dom, perhaps a bit of a cliché). The fate of Bénédicte's father makes you wonder if the family is truly cursed, as rumored, or if there's some dark presence of human feeling at play, and which one is more frightening.

The Bad
The subtitle. I rage every time I see "A Novel."

Final Thoughts
I'd be hesitant to recommend this to readers used to crunching down on "finer" literature (Can you taste the elitism? Can you taste it?!). The story doesn't seem to be anything particularly new, and Dom's characterization as a watered-down Rochester leaves something to be desired. If I see Lawrenson again, however, she'd be a good enough writer to give a second glance. She definitely has the vocabulary (which, in my pea-brained head, seemed a tad overwhelming, at times - I mean "the effervescence of citrus zest"? What the hell?) of someone schooled in languages, and she did provoke thought on some more modern social developments (is Dom as morally "clean" as we might expect, after he reveals his full story? Where was the line in his dilemma?). I don't regret that I read it, but I wish there was more meat in it.

Arbitrary Score: 2.5 out of 5.


Next book: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman (2008)

Thanks to...

The Creative Commons licensing at flickr. Photo of Vancouver Public Library by Kama Guezalova.

Testing the Waters.

Erg, this is nerve-wracking. Writing for an audience. Without, currently, anything to say. Only a small idea:

Writing about books. New books.

I was going to say literature, but the definitions of what is and what isn't literature have been debated enough elsewhere (English professors, book burners, 4chan's /lit/ board) that I feel like one can make his own decision on what is or what isn't good (I guess that's the implication of the word "literature", eh? That it's somehow worthwhile to read and not utter shit). I tend towards the view that anything that has multiple chapters is, for better or worse, literature. But I may eat those words.

This blog is inspired by an upcoming event: An Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Well, slightly. One of my good friends is quite the fan of the duo, and I've always been keen on Gaiman as a short story master, but I got to thinking that, well, other than Mr. Gaiman and Ms. Rowling, "modern" literature is something that goes a bit over my head. I know nothing of it.

(You'll find out, quite quickly, I really know nothing about a great deal).

And so I ask you to come along this journey with me. Now that I'm out of the bubble of school, I've found I can't get my hands on enough novels. I've actually read a substantial amount in only a couple of weeks. I don't think I've ever read any more in the same period of time. But for every "modern" book (I'm thinking within the last decade or so*) I read, I'll hope to post a little bit of information regarding what it was about, whether or not I found it a good read (and the dreaded why), and various other tidbits that possessed my brain in connection with it.

The first "real" post might not be up for a spell. I'm currently at the other end of the spectrum of the novel, reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Modern? It was one of the first novels ever published.

(And it shows. God, Defoe can't stop using commas.)

Until then, adieu.

*I'll probably be very relaxed in keeping up with this. Perhaps I should only require that the author of the title still be alive.