Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book Reviewed
The New Novel From The Author Of The Best-Selling Stardust
May 28, 2009
From the writer of the best-selling Coraline, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (Harper Collins 2008, 320pp, ISBN 978-0060530921) is another 2009 Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel, and like Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is aimes at young adults --officially, at least. It's a singular year when two YA novels feature on the Hugo ballot, but they both deserve their place.
Dave McKean
Like the Harry Potter novels, the UK edition of The Graveyard Book has been released in both adult and children's versions, and is lavishly illustrated by Gaiman's regular collaborator, Dave McKean, who has illustrated both Coraline and The Wolves in The Walls.
One evening an assassin murders a young couple and their daughter. However, when he goes up to the nursery to dispatch the remaining child, an eighteen-month-old toddler, Jack the assassin finds that the boy has already clambered out of his crib to go exploring. "Ever since the child had learned to walk he had been his mother's and father's despair and delight, for there never was such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for getting into and out of things." (p. 10)
Bod
Jack follows his quarry to a nearby graveyard, but the last action of the ragged ghosts of the murdered parents is to implore the ghosts of the graveyard to protect the toddler, and so Mrs Owens and her slightly less enthusiastic (but only slightly, for he loves her) husband agree to look after the child. The killer is befuddled and misdirected, and so it is that Nobody Owens, or Bod as the boy is named, comes to the graveyard.
The Graveyard Book is made up of eight sections set roughly two years apart. The first five sections are picaresque and seem at first to be largely separate and devoid of plot arc. In the second section, 'The New Friend,' Bod is now about four and makes his first living friend, Scarlett, a five-year-old girl who visits the nature reserve --as the graveyard has been designated by the local Council- with her mother. Bod and Scarlett (who is convinced by her parents that her new friend is imaginary) meet the serpentine Sleer, the inhabitants of the oldest mausoleum on the hill. Both will feature heavily in Bod's last stand against Jack, and his employers, The Convocation.
Of the episodes that comprise the first half of the book, 'Danse Macabre' is the best, despite having the slightest plot. On one day in perhaps every eighty years, a white flower blossoms in the middle of winter which enables the living to see the dead, and at midnight the living dance with the dead as time stands still. It's a beautifully written passage, with its final image of white flowers strewn through the streets like snow.
The Convocation
The section titled 'The Convocation' marks the interlude, and the point at which plot takes charge of the novel. The section features a dinner at which meet Bod's mysteriously malevolent enemies. From there on the pace quickens considerably and it becomes a much more conventional narrative.
The Graveyard Book is both beautifully produced with its wonderful Dave McKean illustrations, and beautifully written. Gaiman admits in the afterword to taking inspiration from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, and at times there are hints, especially in 'The Witch's Headstone' and 'Danse Macabre' of Keith Robert's Kaeti stories, with their glimpses of an ancient world hiding in plain sight of our ordinary one. It's without doubt one of Gaiman's finest works, and at the poignant end as Bod leaves to explore the world of the living, the reader wants to go back to the beginning and start reading all over again. There are hints that the reader has not seen the last of Bod, but any sequel will have to be exceptional to surpass this wonderful book.
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