Why is Neil Gaiman’s “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” an exceptional work in magical realism

I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.

Memories are fragile things, waiting at the edges of fantasy and reality. A man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. He finds himself walking to a small duck pond at the end of the lane: Lettie’s pond, the one she called the ocean. And he finds himself remembering his own childhood. Fragments float up from the forgotten – an opal miner’s waxy lifeless face at the back of a stolen car, a country girl who has been eleven years old for a long time, his father hugging the housekeeper in a way he didn’t understand.

Illustration by Elise Hurst from the book The Ocean at the End of the Lane

He remembers his father’s face. How could he not, when it looked at him back in the mirror every morning. He wore a white shirt and black tie. It was his father’s funeral, wasn’t it? He also remembers what his father wore when he was angry that night. There was water all around him, he was struggling to breathe- he remembers all that; or does he? Memories are unreliable, no two people remember things the same way.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.

Illustration by Elise Hurst from the book The Ocean at the end of the Lane

The Ocean at the end of the Lane is about being a seven year old in a world full of adults. It’s a scary, terrifying world. And in a fight between the children and the adults, the adults always won.
This book is about family. It’s about loneliness. It’s about friendship. It’s about how we sometimes need a bit of magic to conquer our demons.

My copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane

It’s about how we don’t pass or fail at being a person. We simply live. And we learn to grow a heart. The ocean is not always blue and endless. Sometimes it comes in the shape of a grey pond in the backyard, a black cat who seems to find us in unexpected ways. An innocence and a childhood we left behind somewhere along the way, waiting for us to come back.

Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world

There are no grown-ups. Only children who pretend to be adults.

Picture taken at the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. If you look closely, you can see Lettie’s pond