THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

author:
NEIL GAIMAN

Fiction
320 pages
HarperCollins

If there’s one thing ‘common pleasure’ Neil Gaiman excels at, it’s pitching a book so that it’s suitable for children but also compelling for adults. The Graveyard Book does this beautifully, as an episodic adventure story telling the tale of a boy who survives the brutal murder of his family only to be brought up by the dead.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as ‘Bod,’ is a likeable everyman; he’s the perfect foil to characters that include ghouls, the ghost of a fractious young witch, a (dead) Romantic poet and the shadowy un-dead guardian of the graveyard, Silas. Silas is the real star of the piece, with Gaiman receiving marriage proposals for this—pardon the pun—deadly serious character. It’s an admirably clever touch embodying the moral core of the story in a character whose nature (hint: he doesn’t go out in the daylight) might be considered inherently evil. Gaiman spends much the book subverting stereotypes, which is always to be applauded in a book that children might read.

Still, this is definitely a book for adults. The murders and the relentless stalking of a child are genuinely unsettling, and the lessons learned are generally just as valuable to adults as well. It’s as well not to be fooled by the structure, which grew up around the fact that the book started with chapter four, “The Witch’s Headstone,” as a short story. Although the dead are having a fairly relaxed and mundane life in the graveyard there is no sense of frolicking beyond the veil. The death and the living mix only under exceptional circumstances—the distance and permanence of death is never sugar coated.

In addition, despite their simplicity the more descriptive passages are beautifully evocative. I did not need to read the acknowledgements at the end to know that several key sections were directly inspired by the Egyptian walkway and overgrown gravestones of Highgate Cemetery West in North London. The deliberately evasive “modern” setting mingled with the dead characters who all exist on their personal timelines makes this a curiously timeless creation.

Despite the heaped plaudits on the flyleaf, this is not Neil Gaiman’s best book ever. For a start it would have to go several miles to catch up with the brilliance of Neverwhere, which is far more complex, clever and original. But as a relaxing yet thought provoking read, it’s a winner and it would make an excellent introduction to fantasy writing for those who claim not to like it.

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