An Amateur's Exegesis of THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE (and CORALINE)
NOT an endorsement of monster s*x!
It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond this world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has to stay alive. His only defence is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.
It’s funny because I just finished reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane last week, and two days ago Netflix released The Sandman, which— sorry, hold on—
*screams into the ether* JENNA COLEMAN!!!!!! THE MAKEUP. THE COAT. THE SASS!?!?! OFF THE RAILS. SHOWSTOPPING. BEEN HAULING ASS SINCE EMMERDALE IN 2005 AND DOCTOR WHO IN 2012 AND FOR WHAT!!! 20 MINS OF SCREENTIME??? LITERALLY THE MOST UNDERRATED BBC QUEEN. WE DO NOT DESERVE HER.
Okay, I’m back. What was I saying? Ah, yes. Politely, Neil Gaiman can step on my neck.
Here’s the thing: Ocean is my second N.G. book, the first being Coraline (“not Caroline!”), and I wasn’t as impressed by it as much as the latter. If I’m being honest, I began typing this review and realised I’ve already forgotten the main character’s name (is he even named??). At the same time, it does have its merits and deserves all the recognition it got, including the stageplay. Yeah, this book has a stageplay (trailer: here. S’pretty col.) Like, Gaiman gave us nothing with this book but also everything.
I will attempt to explain.
It opens with the main character, whom we shall call Tom — because it’s set in Sussex and Tom seems like a quintessentially English name — returning to his childhood home in the rural English countryside. He reminisces about when he was seven and met Lettie Hempstock, who lived in “the house at the end of the lane” with her mother and grandmother.
Tom and Lettie become besties or whatever, and he quickly discovers that the Hempstocks are not precisely what they seem. Meanwhile, his family has taken in a new lodger, an opal miner, who is dodgy af and also nonchalantly runs Tom’s cat over upon arrival.
When said opal miner steals the family car and commits suicide in it, a kind of extraterrestrial monster is unleashed into the human world. It appears to Tom’s family as a housekeeper-nanny and wastes no time in hoeing her way into their happy, idyllic life. … Yes, literally.
With Tom being the only one immune to the monster’s charms, he and the Hempstocks must band together to battle this monster — with the help of an old brand of magic that only Old Mrs Hempstock seems capable of.
If, like me, you aren’t familiar with Neil Gaiman’s works, allow me to start off by telling you what this book is NOT. And that is a lot of things.
For starters, this isn’t a slow burn. Things already start to happen in the first two chapters, and it picks up momentum so quickly I got stitches trying to keep up. This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your preference.
Secondly, this book is a fantasy, but not in the way Harry Potter or Narnia is. Despite the abundance of supernatural occurrences and interesting creatures, there's not much world-building. Everything is kept within a narrow scope, and nothing is properly fleshed out — we only know what Tom knows.
Thirdly, this book isn’t exactly a poster child for poetic prose. You won’t find underline-able dialogue that is hashtag-deep, or obscure vocabulary that forces you to stop in the middle of a sentence to pull up Google. Quite the opposite. Things are described just as a child would see them: a black-orange-white cat is just a cat, not a Calico, and blue eyes are blue, not ‘oceanic’ or ‘azure’. These straight, clipped descriptions definitely took me back to those halcyon days when gross adult terms like ‘gaslighting’, ‘capitalism’, and ‘income tax’ did not exist — a big win in my books.
At this point, you probably think this book couldn’t sound duller, but that’s another thing it isn’t.
Like pieces of a jigsaw, the factors above come together to tear down the wall of pages between Tom and us. Suddenly we’re 50 inches tall, blinking at a great, wide world in which fields stretch on like oceans, and we cannot look into the mirror above the sink without climbing a stool. You quickly understand how difficult Tom’s mission is and the validity of his anxiety and desperation. The plot is simple, and reading it as an adult, you probably won’t feel any real sense of threat — but you will be immersed nonetheless.
The book does touch on heavy topics such as suicide, cheating, and parental abuse, but their topical nuances are smoothed out by its protagonist’s blissful ignorance, making it an enjoyable experience.
In short, Ocean is an easy, accessible read with everything you could possibly want from a Gaiman fantasy. It’s definitely creepy (I had goosebumps multiple times) without falling onto horror tropes, simple without being bland, and emotional without being dramatic. In many ways, it felt like the more mature sister of its predecessor, Coraline, which also has similar themes and motifs shot through very straightforward prose.
Okay, now that the review is done, we can finally get into the things I actually wanted to discuss.
❛Adults follow paths. Children explore.❜ — A read on ‘hustle culture’?
A considerable similarity I noticed between Ocean and Coraline is that the main villains are insidious female villains who try to manipulate children to gain possession or control of them. And they do this by means of seduction.
In Ocean, the monster appears as a beautiful young woman named Ursula Monkton. She then insinuates herself into Tom’s life and turns his family against him. She hones in on Tom’s father in particular, and eventually succeeds in getting him to cheat on his mother with her. This poor Tom unfortunately witnesses. But since he doesn’t understand the act of sexual intercourse, we’re mercifully spared the details.
Ursula’s long-term business goal? Total world domination. Her method of achieving that is by tempting people with precisely what they want. Most of the time, this is money.
One motif that pops up several times in Ocean is pennies and old coins. In the Hempstock’s pond, which Lettie claims is an ocean, Lettie and Tom find a dead fish that had swallowed a sixpence. Lettie lets Tom keep it, and he goes to put it in his piggybank, which he (symbolically) notes is “far from full”.
Then, their gardener digs up a bottle filled with pennies and farthings, and that night, Tom wakes from choking on the coin, which had been somehow lodged in his throat. He manages to spit it out, though it cuts up the insides of his mouth pretty badly — his body literally rejects it (this will be important in a bit). All of these are doings of the monster, of course, who is trying to give him money like she did her other victims.
Ironically, it is the adults, who are supposed to be wiser and more discerning, who fall for their monsters’ tricks. His parents are completely enamoured by Ursula Monkton, and according to Lettie, surrounding neighbours have gone mad after coming in the way of sudden good fortune.
In Coraline, the Other Mother also seduces Coraline with experiences and material things her real parents did not let her have. When Coraline starts to see through her façade, she kidnaps Coraline’s parents in hopes that Coraline will give up her soul in exchange for their lives.
While the Other Mother’s objectives differ slightly from Ursula Monkton’s, their M.Os are the same. They recognise that humans are inherently greedy — we are constantly searching for bigger, better, brighter. This is especially pronounced in an era when overworking is glorified, taking time off means you’re a lazy malingerer, and impossible beauty standards continue to be perpetuated by traditional and social media alike.
These worldly, materialistic ideals are embodied and weaponised by the Other Mother and Ursula Monkton to maim and destroy, while Tom and Coraline, both bold, imaginative kids who enjoy exploring and seeking out wonder in the mundane, serve as their direct foils.
However, instead of sermonising on the consequences of material greed, Gaiman presents this message by bringing us on Tom’s journey to overcome his unfounded fear and admiration for the adults in his life. Gaiman’s ability to do this effectively without completely shattering his protagonist’s childish optimism and naivete can only be attributed to pure genius, is all I can say.
In a nutshell: death to capitalism.
❛The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one in the whole wide world.❜ — The preservation of innocence
To my limited knowledge, Gaiman is more than capable of expounding alternate worlds and magic, as seen in his Sandman comics. However, he chooses not to do so in Ocean and Coraline despite having unique and fascinating lore.
Old Mrs Hempstock, who is so old she remembers the Big Bang, is adamant that Tom knows as little as possible, even verbalising this sentiment multiple times. She never states her reason for this, and it’s unlikely to be a case of “the less you know, the safer you are” because of the bucket scene, so this is very obviously a conscious, stylistic choice by Gaiman.
But why?
(I’ll probably never be able to interview Neil Gaiman in this lifetime, so I’m left only with my bookmarks, speculation, and tears — bear with me.)
Tom observably admires and looks up to adults very much, even if they’re crusty-ass monsters from another dimension. He has zero faith in the autonomy of children, and baselessly attributes ‘adulthood’ to wisdom and dominance. He expresses this during Lettie’s face-off with Ursula Monkton:
But Lettie is just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.
She was power incarnate […] she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
…and again when his father, under the spell of Ursula Monkton, tries to drown him in the bathtub as punishment for insolence:
He had not chased me. Perhaps he thought it was beneath his dignity, chasing a child.
The adults know this and try to use it against Tom, constantly abusing their authority to silence him. Here’s Ursula spitting some cold trash talk before attempting to devour him:
“You’re just a little boy. I’m a grown-up. I was an adult when your world was a ball of molten rock. I can do whatever I wish to you.”
This sentiment of adults being superior to children is repeated very often, which is why the way in which Tom saves himself from being drowned by his dad stands out to me.
He pulls on his father’s tie (a symbolically-adult article of clothing) so that he can no longer push Tom into the bath without going in himself. The moment his father allows his humanity to be debased by the desire to stamp out goodness, magic, and compassion — all traits that Tom embodies — being a ‘grown-up’ means precious little.
Tom is a physical symbol of childhood innocence, which is also why the Hempstocks strive to keep as much as possible from him. They are keenly aware of his purity and ignorance, and try very hard to preserve that. They don’t want him to know because he doesn’t need to. Not yet, at least.
This is a stark contrast to, say, Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, wherein our young heroes are flung headfirst into complicated worlds before they’ve even grown a strand of facial hair. Right off the bat, they are overloaded — suffocated, even — with information and must-dos, all to fulfil the expectations of some pre-ordained role imposed on them by other adults.
My point is that when it comes to knowledge, sometimes less is more.
When ruminating on this (because I obviously don’t have a life), one fable that comes to mind is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. If ‘hubris’ had a mascot, it would be my man Victor Frankenstein — his biggest folly being his desire to know all the secrets of the universe, which ultimately leads to the deaths of literally everyone several people.
Many of such characters, in an interminable pursuit of knowledge and godhood, fail to see that the beauty of the universe is left in the unexplained and unknown; to our imaginations. Its sheer vastness is what keeps us humble, and is a constant reminder that there is something bigger than our selfish needs and earthly wants.
It’s probably also why adults often express admiration for the hilariously frank attitudes of children. They don’t know much of the ‘real world’ (as we adults like to say), but their untarnished hearts and minds allow creativity and honesty to flow uninhibited. Their smaller statures do not hinder their tenacity in any way, shape, or form — just like how Tom doesn’t let his not-knowing deter him from fighting a monster that created a literal hole in his foot and r*ped his dad!!!
In essence, Ocean and Coraline are not really about Child vs Monster. They actually illustrate the push-and-pull of our inner child fighting against the disfigured figures of the hatred, pride, and disillusionment that have festered within our battle-hardened selves over the years. Those are the monsters we should fear, not the cackling, palm-rubbing caricatures of evil that have been tirelessly reiterated across pop culture and children’s literature.
I don’t know if it’s worth unpacking that both the Other Mother and Ursula Monkton are portrayed as pretty women who use temptation and seduction to fulfil their evil missions. It’s lowkey giving sexism, but I’m still undecided.
Besides that, I also noted many other similarities shared between the two books, such as the significance of tunnels and the dichotomy of light and darkness, but perhaps that’ll be for another time :D
To sum it up, Ocean is neither groundbreaking nor objectively ‘better’ than its older twin Coraline, but Gaiman certainly has a unique way of creating eerie, fantastical worlds that don’t require much expounding to be effective. And, like Coraline, its shortcomings are overshadowed by a strong core message: Listen to what children have to say — they possess more knowledge of the immaterial world than you think.