There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife: A review of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book”

Neil Gaiman wasn’t good enough to write The Graveyard Book. I know because he told me. Last week, Neil wrapped up his nine-city reading tour in promotion for the new novel, which debuted atop at New York Times Children’s Book List, with a reading of the novel’s final chapter in St. Paul. As he told the some one thousand people in attendance, The Graveyard Book had its beginning in a small English graveyard some twenty-two years ago. Neil, then a journalist, would walk across the street to the graveyard, where he would sit on a bench and watch as his then three-year old son wound his way through the headstones on his tricycle. Neil remembers thinking, “He looks so at home here,” and the idea for the book that would take a major cue from Kipling’s Jungle Books came to him, but instead the creatures of the jungle, the young boy would be raised by the ghosts in the graveyard and would learn all of the secret things the dead know.

Neil started writing the book soon after, but put it aside after a few pages, saying, “I’m not good enough to do this idea justice. I’ll get better, and come back and do it right.” Several years later, after success with Sandman, Neil dug the pages out again, and again, he decided he was not good enough to do the book properly. Then, some twenty years after the idea came to him, he realized that he was not getting any better. And so he wrote the book.

After the reading in St. Paul, an audience member asked what his headstone would say where it to be found in the graveyard described in the book. Neil shuffled through various humorous answers he had given on other stops (Neil Gaiman. Missing, presumed under here), and finally suggested, rather soberly “Neil Gaiman: He Wrote The Graveyard Book.” From hearing him speak, I got the sense that the completion of this new novel was a point of immense pride for him, something like the culmination of twenty years of creative work. It is the book he’s been waiting much of his career to write.

And so this all begs the question: is the book any good?

The short answer: yes.

The novel sees Gaiman returning in part to territory first explored in his last novel for young adults, Coraline. It is written in Gaiman’s familiar, sparse, stripped-down prose, a deceptively simply writing style that often is inspiring in its clarity. The story follows a young boy named Nobody Owens, orphaned as an infant when a man murders his parents and older sister. The infant Bod (as he’s called for short) scoots down the stairs and toddles out the open front door, narrowly eluding the murderer. The child, not yet a toddler, finds his way up the hill and into the graveyard where the ghosts who live there take him in, and grant him The Freedom of the Graveyard, meaning he can do things within the graveyard that other people would not normally be able to do. From there, the story begins.

Each of the novel’s eight chapters begins with beautiful drawings by Gaiman’s long-time collaborator Dave McKean, and each are in themselves complete short stories, taking place approximately two years after the one previous. Each chapter chronicles a specific stage in Bod’s development as he grows up, learns about life outside the graveyard, and begins to seek the answers to his family’s murder.

Gaiman has crafted a likable protagonist in Bod, but given the fast pace of the narrative, and the significant jumps in time, there is little consistent about him to latch onto. There are significant differences between eight-year old Bod and twelve-year old Bod. As a balm against this shifting protagonist, Gaiman supplies a steady stream of secondary characters—Bod’s guardian Silas, who is neither dead nor alive; the cantankerous teacher Miss Lupescu, who makes Bod eat gross things and learn strange things; and the mysterious Indigo Man who lives under the hill, in the oldest grave in the graveyard—who act as narrative landmarks as the novel progresses. We gauge Bod’s development partly in reference to his changing relationship with these and other characters, especially his adoptive parents, Mistress and Mr. Owens.

Gaiman has an incredible talent for divining universal themes from extraordinary situations. Bod loves the graveyard, has lived his entire life in the graveyard. His family is in the graveyard, everything he knows is there, but as he gets older, he begins to understand that he is not meant to stay there. The dead have lived there life, and eventually Bod will have to start his.

Gaiman is one of our foremost imaginative minds, and The Graveyard Book, its imperfections aside, stands as a testament to his abilities as a storyteller. I can’t imagine anyone to whom I would not recommend this book.

Read it.

If/when you have children, read it to them, too.