The Graveyard Book
It’s not often I literally completely read a book within a day of receiving it, in fact I’m trying to remember the last time I did that and I can’t, but I managed it with Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book
Billed as being like The Jungle Book, I have to admit I haven’t read The Jungle Book and I haven’t actually really seen the movie beyond those Christmas cartoon clip specials they used to show at Christmas when I was a kid (do they still do that?). The Graveyard Book reminded me, more in feel and atmosphere than in content with my all time favourite children’s book series, The Dark is Rising Sequence (that of the same series brutally mucked about by that awful film adaptation, yes I’m still bitter), in particular the chapter in The Graveyard Book ‘Danse Macabre’ where the inhabitants of the graveyard dance with the inhabitants of the Old Town, I like the way how the supernatural collided very genteelly with the living. I thought the book was also surprisingly very English considering that Gaiman lives in America, although yes I know he’s British. The other book that reminded me of The Graveyard Book was Susan Hill’s The Battle for Gullywith, again in it’s quintessential Englishness and the way how magic and the everyday co-existed.
Telling the tale of Bod (short for Nobody), a baby who has escaped the evil killer Jack, who had killed the rest of his family (touch of Harry Potter there), he finds shelter in the graveyard at the top of a hill. He is raised by two ghosts, the Owens and is under the guardianship of Silas, who is able to leave the graveyard to find food for the boy. Each chapter is in effect a short story describing an event in the year of Bod’s life, culminating in the final battle between Bod and his friends and the evil killer Jack.
I really liked this book, although coming after reading The Gargoyle, which had an incredibly visual style, The Graveyard Book was harder work, requiring more effort from the reader (still I managed to read it in a day). I’m a big fan of Neil Gaiman and reading his blog makes me feel like I ‘know’ him more than I know other writers and as a writer I would love to have just the talent he has in his little toe nails, so I think when reading his work I am perhaps a little more unforgiving than I am with a writer I don’t know (I had a similar sensation reading Stephen King’s Duma Key after reading his book On Writing). Still even with me being in an unforgiving mood I still thought this book was brilliant, I just have two nit-picky criticisms and one of them isn’t even to do with Gaiman;
- The opening page of my (Chris Riddell) version shows Jack, the evil killer clutching a knife with bare hands, in the text Gaiman mentions several times that he’s wearing black gloves. Other than that the Chris Riddell pictures are really spooky!
- When Bod goes through the ghoul gate he meets the ghouls and they have some intriguing names such as the 33rd President of the United States and the famous writer Victor Hugo. There is a passage in the book which says that the ghouls are so named after the main course of their first meal (they eat decomposed corpses) but the rest of the chapter makes it sound like they are the 33rd President of the United States or ‘the famous writer Victor Hugo’ (which how the Victor Hugo ghoul is always described after the first time we meet him).
Sorry, nit-picking. I really liked this book, honest! I particularly liked the ending and the message of (trying not to give too much away) Bod having his whole life to live and all the opportunities he had. To finish though I can only echo the quote from Garth Nix on the back of the book;
I wish my younger self could have had the opportunity to read and reread this wonderful book, and my older self wishes that I had written it.
