f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] The Ocean at the End of the Lane [Author] Neil Gaiman [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2014/06/28 [Review] 
A Gaiman novella of ~54236 words. It uses the device of a frame story around a flashback which is the meat of the novella. The frame story is a sad divorced English artist returning to where he grew up for a funeral, and recollecting the circumstances. This aspect is dry, mannered, and reminscent of Mitchell’s Black Swan Green or Kazuo Ishiguro. The flashback is vintage Gaiman, with a plot predictable by anyone’s who’s read his young adult works (particularly Coraline): an ordinary person meets uncanny folk, gets inadvertently involved in deep matters, goes through hell, defeats the enemy, and survives more mature for it. The narrator is wry, with many acute observations (indeed, why do so many people destroy pea by overcooking them when they’re tasty on their own?), and the antagonist is exceedingly cruel & clever in seducing & turning the protagonist’s family against him. It’s a quick read of perhaps 2 hours, and is not especially complex: the work is almost entirely set at the protagonist’s home or the Hempstock farm, and shows its origins as a short story. What makes this more than Gaiman going back to the well of mythos he has drawn from so many times before (oh look, another triune of mysterious powerful women! oh look, the fairy tale motif of the one forbidden action & of course the character does it) is the frame story’s tone of sadness and loss and wasted opportunity which otherwise shows up rarely in Gaiman’s fiction - it’s comparable to the death of the Sandman. By the end, the protagonist is pitiable: it was his fault, time and again, and ultimately the sacrifice was for him, and what has he done with his life? Little enough. As the shadows warn him, “There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived.” At the end, the best the trinity can say for him is that he’s growing a new heart. Not that he’ll remember even that faint progress report. It’s an interesting combo, and helps excuse some of the lamer bits. (Talk of electrons is jarringly out of place in a Gaiman work, and some aspects are too explicit about fantasy elements better left for the reader to wonder about.)
Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net
Review