"The dead should have charity"
This is, as promised, my review of The Graveyard Book. I am working on a review of Gaiman's work in general, but that is still in progress.
For the past week I've listened to the audiobook of The Graveyard Book, read by Gaiman himself, with an arrangement of Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" by Bela Fleck. Keep that format in mind as you read my review, for it means I'll probably misspell things from time to time ;)
The genesis of this novel--at least, if you believe Wikipedia--was that years and years ago Gaiman decided he wanted to write "The Jungle Book, with ghosts," and it's an idea he kept coming back to again and again, deciding time after time that he wasn't a good enough writer. Finally he determined he was, and he wrote it, and he won a Hugo and a Newbery for his trouble.
So what you have is the story of boy, four years old, whose family is killed by a man named Jack. The boy escapes to a local graveyard, where the ghost of his mother appears and pleads with the residents to care for him. He's raised by a couple of ghosts from the 18th(?) century, the Owens--who name him "Nobody," or Bod for short--and his guardian, Silas, who is quite clearly a vampire, even though the actual word is never invoked. Each chapter is an adventure Bod experiences as he grows--visiting the barrow of a Celtic hero beneath the graveyard with his friend Scarlet, getting stolen away by ghouls, trying to buy a proper headstone for a girl who was burned as a witch in the 16th century, etc, etc, finally facing down the man Jack at the end of the novel.
When I first turned on the audiobook, and heard Gaiman narrating it, my first thought was, "Huh. This is really simplistic language. I wonder if it's because this book is YA." But I see I've noted the simplicity of Gaiman's language elsewhere, too--in my review of American Gods, I write, "I'm delighted how expressive Neil Gaiman is with such simple language."
Going deeper into The Graveyard Book, it dawns on me what tremendous parsimony Gaiman has with words. He is the master of strategically holding back. When he tells us a character says or does something, he often doesn't need to tell us how, because it's already obvious from their behavior.
Nowhere is this more obvious than what he does with Silas. Man, Silas. We all know I'm a filthy neffer, so this should be no surprise, but I loved Silas and the way Gaiman chose to portray him. From chapter one? Two? it's clear what Silas is. First we see him charm the man Jack away from the graveyard, then shortly thereafter we get the lovely description of him, during the famous banana conversation, who consumed only one food, and it was not bananas. At various times during the story, we see him descend face first down a chapel, fly, and not cast a reflection, but the word vampire is never used, not even when Bod asks Miss Lupescu straight out what category of being Silas falls into.
For a while I thought I recalled Silas being the first name of Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre, and I was convinced that was who he is, but I guess he's no literary vampire in particular.
Perhaps what I loved most about this book is the world Bod inhabits, a world of long-forgotten knowledge that exists between the living and the dead. He's an odd boy, with odd knowledge--he knows how to decipher the Latin on tombstones, and he writes in copperplate, and he dresses in a winding sheet. He's also described time and again as loving books and libraries, as hungering for knowledge, and I identified greatly with that intellectual curiosity. I imagined the graveyard he lives in as one of the great garden cemeteries of the Victorian age--like Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, MA, or Swan Point in Providence, RI--even though it dates back far, far longer. There's a scene, though, where they describe Bod as standing under a monkey-puzzle tree--a kind of tree that is often found in garden cemeteries and just about nowhere else--that made me smile.
I also couldn't help but notice that there were some Lovecraftian influences here--notably the ghouls and night-gaunts. Ghouls are pretty generic, true, but night-gaunts aren't, and it's pretty clear nonetheless that HPL's ghouls were what Gaiman had in mind. They even "glibber." I loved that he managed to work in that description.
There's stuff I don't like, though--most of it plot-related. The entire justification for the Jacks trying to kill Bod and his family is, in the end, pretty flimsy. They are a cabal of death magicians, and there's a prophecy that Bod will destroy them? What kind of death magic? What have they done? Why do we not even have hints of this until Bod convinces the Jacks to play, "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond...?" What exactly are Silas and Miss Lupescu trying to accomplish--okay, I guess they're trying to destroy the Jacks, but how?--and why does all that action happen off stage?
Also, I'm minorly irked by what he has done with Miss Lupescu, whose ethnicity can't be described any better than "generically Slavic." She has what I'd consider a Romanian name, but she ends her sentences with "da?" as if she were Russian. (She also serves Bod food that is vaguely borscht-like). I'm not even sure what language her term of endearment for Bod--it sounded like nimini?--belongs to.
Overall, I'd rate this book as one of the better Gaiman works I've read. It's richly atmospheric, and the language is superb, but the plot has... if not holes, then some questionable worn patches.
For the past week I've listened to the audiobook of The Graveyard Book, read by Gaiman himself, with an arrangement of Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" by Bela Fleck. Keep that format in mind as you read my review, for it means I'll probably misspell things from time to time ;)
The genesis of this novel--at least, if you believe Wikipedia--was that years and years ago Gaiman decided he wanted to write "The Jungle Book, with ghosts," and it's an idea he kept coming back to again and again, deciding time after time that he wasn't a good enough writer. Finally he determined he was, and he wrote it, and he won a Hugo and a Newbery for his trouble.
So what you have is the story of boy, four years old, whose family is killed by a man named Jack. The boy escapes to a local graveyard, where the ghost of his mother appears and pleads with the residents to care for him. He's raised by a couple of ghosts from the 18th(?) century, the Owens--who name him "Nobody," or Bod for short--and his guardian, Silas, who is quite clearly a vampire, even though the actual word is never invoked. Each chapter is an adventure Bod experiences as he grows--visiting the barrow of a Celtic hero beneath the graveyard with his friend Scarlet, getting stolen away by ghouls, trying to buy a proper headstone for a girl who was burned as a witch in the 16th century, etc, etc, finally facing down the man Jack at the end of the novel.
When I first turned on the audiobook, and heard Gaiman narrating it, my first thought was, "Huh. This is really simplistic language. I wonder if it's because this book is YA." But I see I've noted the simplicity of Gaiman's language elsewhere, too--in my review of American Gods, I write, "I'm delighted how expressive Neil Gaiman is with such simple language."
Going deeper into The Graveyard Book, it dawns on me what tremendous parsimony Gaiman has with words. He is the master of strategically holding back. When he tells us a character says or does something, he often doesn't need to tell us how, because it's already obvious from their behavior.
Nowhere is this more obvious than what he does with Silas. Man, Silas. We all know I'm a filthy neffer, so this should be no surprise, but I loved Silas and the way Gaiman chose to portray him. From chapter one? Two? it's clear what Silas is. First we see him charm the man Jack away from the graveyard, then shortly thereafter we get the lovely description of him, during the famous banana conversation, who consumed only one food, and it was not bananas. At various times during the story, we see him descend face first down a chapel, fly, and not cast a reflection, but the word vampire is never used, not even when Bod asks Miss Lupescu straight out what category of being Silas falls into.
For a while I thought I recalled Silas being the first name of Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre, and I was convinced that was who he is, but I guess he's no literary vampire in particular.
Perhaps what I loved most about this book is the world Bod inhabits, a world of long-forgotten knowledge that exists between the living and the dead. He's an odd boy, with odd knowledge--he knows how to decipher the Latin on tombstones, and he writes in copperplate, and he dresses in a winding sheet. He's also described time and again as loving books and libraries, as hungering for knowledge, and I identified greatly with that intellectual curiosity. I imagined the graveyard he lives in as one of the great garden cemeteries of the Victorian age--like Mt. Auburn in Cambridge, MA, or Swan Point in Providence, RI--even though it dates back far, far longer. There's a scene, though, where they describe Bod as standing under a monkey-puzzle tree--a kind of tree that is often found in garden cemeteries and just about nowhere else--that made me smile.
I also couldn't help but notice that there were some Lovecraftian influences here--notably the ghouls and night-gaunts. Ghouls are pretty generic, true, but night-gaunts aren't, and it's pretty clear nonetheless that HPL's ghouls were what Gaiman had in mind. They even "glibber." I loved that he managed to work in that description.
There's stuff I don't like, though--most of it plot-related. The entire justification for the Jacks trying to kill Bod and his family is, in the end, pretty flimsy. They are a cabal of death magicians, and there's a prophecy that Bod will destroy them? What kind of death magic? What have they done? Why do we not even have hints of this until Bod convinces the Jacks to play, "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond...?" What exactly are Silas and Miss Lupescu trying to accomplish--okay, I guess they're trying to destroy the Jacks, but how?--and why does all that action happen off stage?
Also, I'm minorly irked by what he has done with Miss Lupescu, whose ethnicity can't be described any better than "generically Slavic." She has what I'd consider a Romanian name, but she ends her sentences with "da?" as if she were Russian. (She also serves Bod food that is vaguely borscht-like). I'm not even sure what language her term of endearment for Bod--it sounded like nimini?--belongs to.
Overall, I'd rate this book as one of the better Gaiman works I've read. It's richly atmospheric, and the language is superb, but the plot has... if not holes, then some questionable worn patches.