Book Report: The Graveyard Book

11. Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (2008) (5/29/2020)

A while back a friend on FB mentioned a book by Neil Gaiman—or perhaps a bunch of books, since he is a favorite of this friend and he's written at least 36 books. I confessed that I had only read American Gods (which I very much enjoyed), The Ocean at the End of the Lane (ditto), and Norse Mythology (ditto again), plus I've seen the movie Coraline—twice. My friend responded that I must read The Graveyard Book. So I ordered it. Of course I did.

And there things stood until the other day when I was casting about for something that would grab my scattered attention. I dived in, and as has happened before with Neil Gaiman, I was swept away. The man's imagination and understanding of the mythical—and of the importance of myth to our human psyche—are immense.

The main character in The Graveyard Book is a boy, Bod (short for Nobody, because "he looks like nobody but himself") Owens, who one night, at a mere eighteen months old, wanders away from his house, even as the rest of his family are being murdered by a man named Jack. He wanders up the hill, to an old graveyard. The ghosts, understanding that he is in danger, offer to protect him. Mr. and Mrs. Owens, who have been married 250 years but never had children of their own, take on the role of parents; and the mysterious Silas, who lives between the dead and the living, becomes his guardian and makes sure that he gets fed and educated.

Bod has adventures, naturally, some of them sweet—as when he befriends a young witch; some scary—a trip to the land of the ghouls that almost spells his end; or upsetting—an attempt, when Bod is older, to join human society and go to school.

Ultimately, of course, . . . well, I won't give anything away. But you won't be surprised to learn that Bod makes it out of the graveyard alive.

I won't quote from the book itself this time, but rather from Neil Gaiman's 2009 speech upon being presented the John Newbery Medal, "for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children."

The idea has been so simple, to tell the story of a boy raised in a graveyard, inspired by one image: my infant son, Michael—who was two, and is now twenty-five, the age I was then, and is now taller than I am—on his tricycle, pedaling through the graveyard across the road in the sunshine, past the grave I once thought had belonged to a witch.
 I was, as I said, twenty-five years old, and I had an idea for a book and I knew it was a real one.
 I tried writing it, and realized that it was a better idea than I was a writer. So I kept writing, but I wrote other things, learning my craft. I wrote for twenty years until I thought that I could write The Graveyard Book—or at least, that I was getting no better.
 I wanted the book to be composed of short stories, because The Jungle Book [a favorite book of his when he was young] was short stories. And I wanted it to be a novel, because it was a novel in my head. The tension between those two things was both a delight and a heartache as a writer.
 I wrote it as best I could. That's the only way I know how to write something. It doesn't mean it's going to be any good. It just means you try. And, most of all, I wrote the story that I wanted to read.
 It took me too long to begin, and it took me too long to finish. And then, one night in February, I was writing the last two pages.
 In the first chapter I had written a doggerel poem and left the last two lines unfinished. Now it was time to finish it, to write the last two lines. So I did. The poem, I learned, ended:

Face your life
Its pain, its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken

And my eyes stung, momentarily. It was then, and only then, that I saw clearly for the first time what I was writing. I had set out to write a book about a childhood—it was Bod's childhood, and it was in a graveyard, but still, it was a childhood like any other; I was now writing about being a parent, and the fundamental most comical tragedy of parenthood: that if you do your job properly, if you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away. And they have lives and they have families and they have futures.
 I sat at the bottom of the garden, and I wrote the last page of the book, and I knew that I had written a book that was better than the one I had set out to write. Possibly a book better than I am.
 You cannot plan for that. Sometimes you work as hard as you can on something, and still the cake does not rise. Sometimes the cake is better than you had ever dreamed.
 And then, whether the work was good or bad, whether it did what you hoped or it failed, as a writer you shrug, and you go on to the next thing, whatever the next thing is.
 That's what we do.

Finally, just for fun, here is a link to a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Neil Gaiman about The Graveyard Book.

And here is Neil doing "the interview I've waited twenty years to do," with Tim Ferriss, from 2019:

6:32 Home life vs work life  

10:53 Neil's biggest rule for writing  

19:50 What notebooks does Neil prefer for writing first drafts?  

25:58 Fountain pens Neil has known and loved  

43:59 Does Neil tend to work on multiple projects at once?  

50:12 Advice to aspiring novelists  

54:47 Genesis story of The Graveyard Book 

1:10:49 Good Omens  

1:32:40 Apprenticeship with Terry

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The numbers for Monterey County are worsening: confirmed cases as of today, 477 (up 8 since yesterday); hospitalizations, 57 (up 2); and deaths also up 2, to 10. The largest age group of cases is 24–34.

Stay healthy. Find a good story to read. Dream about the paths not yet taken—because this won't last forever ("this" being the lockdown, but also our lives).