Book Review: The Graveyard Book

I will confess without shame: I am a Neil Gaiman fanboy. I was introduced to him through the usual medium of The Sandman, then ate up Smoke and Mirrors shortly thereafter. In college I found my way to Neverwhere; then came American Gods, and the rest is really history. I have thoroughly drunk the Kool-Aid, and when I sit down with one of his books I expect nothing less than the superlative.

So please, hear me when I say how exceptional The Graveyard Book is.

The premise is simple, but where it goes is amazing. As Gaiman himself put it at a reading, The Graveyard Book is The Graveyard Book for the same reason The Jungle Book is The Jungle Book. In The Jungle Book, a boy's parents die and he runs off into the jungle, where he lives with the animals and learns the things animals know; in The Graveyard Book, a boy;s parents die and he runs off into a graveyard, where he lives with the dead people and learns the things dead people know. I cannot put it better than that, except to say that it is also about witches, and ghouls, and a man called Jack, and the difference, so rarely put down on paper, between the living and the dead. But more than any of these things, it is a return to stories we should have been reading all this time.

It is, in many ways, typical Gaiman: Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, lovingly acerbic and generally lyrical. Gaiman straddles the line between British comico-surrealism and Lovecraftian horror, and it is definitely in evidence here: every headstone the main character walks by comes with the dates and epitaph in parentheses, and one of the story's many monsters is a caricature of a foreign grandmother, right down to the horrid, ur-ethnic cooking. He uses the fantastic to talk about everyday life--Bod Owens' journey from 2 to 16 over the book's course will remind every reader, especially the men, of what it was like to be "that age". But what Gaiman has done here that I think is extraordinary can be encapsulated thusly: The Graveyard Book is being marketed as a children's book.

That in and of itself is not extraordinary, but one has to consider the content. Chapter 1 starts with both of the main character's parents dead. Not simply dead, though; murdered. By a man who, the story does not fail to tell us, plans to murder the little boy next. In fact, the initial hook for the story is the man Jack's pursuit of the little boy, along with some indications that the man Jack may be more than just a gentleman with black hair and a detached willingness to go about slaughtering little boys. From there, the story is wall-to-wall dead people, with a few stops in to introduce multiple sorts of monsters, the details of what happens during a witch trial, necrophagia, and incessant reminders that there is someone who very much wants Bod Owens dead (which launches some of the more interesting philosophy about why Bod should remain alive, a question that I'm sure the adults will ask).

And all this in a children's book; a genre that, generally speaking, has been a stomping ground for the most pernicious sorts of Moral Guardians, the people who seem to think that any indication the world is anything short of a perfumed Eden where we frolic 'neath candy-cane skies is going to turn the children out, in some way, "wrong"; people who, he said from a place of terminal education, have clearly never heard about what happened to Siddhartha. (Or maybe they have...)

What I am reminded of by The Graveyard Book, more than anything else, perhaps even more than the Kipling work it clearly takes its influence from, is the Brothers Grimm. The fairy tales with mild swearing and bits being chopped off; the stories that taught children that the world can be both bloody and fascinating, that the darkness is to be feared but also sometimes confronted. Stories about the real world and the really fantastic world; stories that don't always try to echo life, but that succeed at doing so a great deal more effectively than the spun-sugar creations of Disney and its various tendrils.

As should be obvious, I hate this. I hate how insipid books for young adults are; I hate this notion, in America at least, that children need their realities watered down for them, and that reading about anything more extreme than a slightly sped-up merry-go-round is going to leave them either shooting up drugs or knifing prostitutes at age thirteen. Not only does it leave children unprepared for some of the harsh truths of the world--though I know no-one likes to think their children will have to deal with those--but it leads to the conceit, pervasive even among the children of voracious readers, that reading is boring.

I do not think that Gaiman has solved this; don't hear me saying that; and I realize that the Brothers Grimm were themselves censors and bowdlerizers. I realize, also, that The Graveyard Book is to stories like the Grimms' Cinderella what Splenda is to a bag of Circus Animals. But in making this a childrens' book, Gaiman has gone a step farther along the path already laid out by writers like J.K. Rowling; a path which seems to lead, not to the pap that is "young adult horror", but to the idea that we can tell our children stories that don't shelter or condescend. To the idea that our children can handle some darkness, and the idea that reading about violence won't make a child violent.

It's a small step--the damage done by Disney, and yes, by people like Perrault and the Grimms, will take a long time to be undone. But in addition to being compelling, and poetic, and darkly charming, the thing which most touched me about the Graveyard Book is that it is what it is: a Neil Gaiman book for children, one that pulls no punches Gaiman didn't already pull, that doesn't hesitate to shine the flashlight on the icky corners of a rather unpleasant room. Kudos, Mr. Gaiman, on your success; may other writers, but no imitators, follow in your wake.