Author: Chad Wyszynski
In the wake of Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, books aimed at “tweens,” or, more honestly, everyone who is somewhat of a kid at heart, have seemed to flood the market. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s latest novel, is another of these fantasies aimed at nearly all ages. Entertainment, not sophistication, tends to be the focus of these kinds of novels, and The Graveyard Book is no exception.
The book begins with a familiar scene: a failed attempt to murder a family. The toddler crawls his way to safety in a nearby graveyard, but his parents and sibling aren’t so lucky. The murderer pursues the child to the gates of the graveyard, but the spirits of those buried there protect the boy. With the murderer gone, the departed residents of the graveyard decide that the safest course of action is to adopt the boy and raise him as a resident of the graveyard. Nobody “Bod” Owens, they call him, the live boy.
Despite its setting, the book refrains from morbidity. Gaiman portrays the graveyard as, first, an interesting place to explore, then as a sort of home. As is the case in most novels in this genre, each chapter reveals a little bit more of the strange world in which Bod lives. In one chapter, Bod learns about unhallowed ground, and then meets a witch buried there. In another, he falls through a grave and ends up in another world. The episodes strike me neither as unbearably cliché nor brilliantly inventive. They are, I think, ways for Bod to interact with the real highlight of the book: the dead people.
What’s a graveyard without dead people? The graveyard’s quirky denizens are the real life of the story. Gaiman wisely set the book in England so he could populate the graveyard with characters such as Roman soldiers and Victorian gentlewomen. Each graveyard dweller has a fully-formed personality with unique idiosyncrasies and a humorous epitaph.
My personal favorite is Nehemiah Trot the poet (1741-1774 “Swans sing before they die”). He advises Bod to seek out the girl whom Bod has befriended and call her “your Terpsichore, your Echo, your Clytemnestra,” who are, respectively, the muse of dance, a nymph, and the wife and murderer of the King Agamemnon. A certain amount of literary and historical knowledge is required to understand the humor here; it’s a sort of reward for Gaiman’s older readers.
While each of the dead people has unique personalities, I find the main character surprisingly lacking in complexity. The book is ripe for great character development, as it follows Bod from his earliest years to his mid-teens, but that development never comes. Since much of the book’s tension arises from physical danger, such as the vague threat of the murderer still on the loose, Bod never develops the interior life that he could have. He occasionally yearns for revenge, but, in the end, it is somewhat pointless to wonder about Bod’s psyche when he’s trying to escape from carnivorous ghouls. Perhaps Bod’s bland personality is a conscious effort to preserve an everyman quality in him.
Where the main character let me down, Gaiman’s prose kept me reading. He usually takes a tongue-in-cheek stance toward his characters, and this creates the humorous tone of the story. In response to Trot’s loony wisdom, for example, Bod feels “glad he had thought of asking the Poet for advice” because “really… if you can’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?” Moments like this abound, and, in my opinion, are what really sets this book apart from others in its genre.
Though the prose usually flows well, there are a few phrases which made the snobby literary critic within me turn up his nose. When Bod hurts his leg, it feels “as if he had been bitten…by some arctic viper and it was starting to pump its icy venom through his body.” Not the most elegant of phrasing. Fortunately, such glaring instances are rare, and Gaiman’s witty narrative voice more than makes up for the few clumsy similes.
The Graveyard Book is, in the end, an enjoyable work of genre fiction that does not break any new ground. Some of the episodes entertained me, some bored me, but none really showed the range or richness of Gaiman’s imagination that I’ve come to expect from his other works. The book was a refreshing break from the semester’s intense academic reading, but I would be disappointed if I read it over winter break.
That being said, the audio version of The Graveyard Book is in an entirely different category. Gaiman’s reading of his own work improves it significantly. His understated yet theatrical tone emphasizes the strengths of the work so much so that the weaker aspects of the novel fall to the wayside. Even if tween genre fiction doesn’t spark an interest, listening to one chapter of Gaiman’s reading is well worth the time. I didn’t realize that I could sit still and listen for such a long period of time until I heard this.
Gaiman’s reading of the whole book is available online at http://www.neilgaiman.com/. Look for the link to the “Graveyard Book Video Tour” underneath the enormous ad for the book.
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