4/24/20: I for the first time heard Neil Gaiman Himself read this to me via audiobook, his wonderfully mellifluous, seductive voice carrying me along.4/24/20: I for the first time heard Neil Gaiman Himself read this to me via audiobook, his wonderfully mellifluous, seductive voice carrying me along. I once heard him read an excerpt from it when he was on his book tour. A former student had bought me a ticket to come and get a signed copy and hear him read and talk, and that is a wonderful memory, but this was also a fine experience. Of course I can't help but think of certain books as pertinent to the things I (and the world) are going through, and this is no less true for this book, that teaches us how to meet--as best we can--daily, ever-present horror, with courage and hope, through story and imagination.
If you haven't read it yet, there are spoilers in here, but if you are a Gaiman fan, none of it would surprise you.
Neil Gaiman says this is a book for adults (rather than all ages) because it focuses more on helplessness than hope, but I disagree with him, though if what he means is that this might be a little too scary for kids, I might at this point agree. It is told from the perspective of an adult coming home for a funeral, visiting his old neighborhood, remembering a terrifying time in his child hood, that might just make it more an adult book than a children’s story. But it also does have hope in it, lots of it.
I am a Gaiman fan. I teach a graphic novels class and sometimes introduce students to his Sandman series, epic in the field. I like reading his children’s books like Coraline and The Graveyard Book. Ocean is a relatively short book, sort of a stretched out short story, as he claims himself; he was asked to write a story and it just grew, and now is a novella. He says he wrote this for his wife, Amanda Palmer, who doesn't like or understand the kind of writing he does (horror, fantasy), to help explain what he does, to help her see where the stories came from, and where they continue to come from, and where he has always lived. So in this sense it is a teaching book, though much of what I read from Gaiman seems to be teaching us things, not in a didactic way, as in telling, but in an evocative, lovely way, as in showing you what he means, which is just a basic principle of great storytelling.
Gaiman is in this book teaching us, as with other books, about the power of myth, story, language itself, and place, the natural world, community, family friendship--all these good things, in the face of childhood fears, and other, adult fears, since we are all potentially still children inside, at our best, and we have our own fears to face, too. But this book focuses on what it might mean to grow up, centered on a seven year old boy living with his little sister and parents in what would seem to be the area where Gaiman grew up in England; he takes his wife and us there to show us the power and mystery of this part of rural England, where a boy mainly reads to create a foundation of imagination and courage in the face of childhood isolation and scary things. Reading and nursery rhymes and poetry are shot through this book; they are what saves the boy, revives him, protects him, heals him.
There are also in this book three women with psychic powers, Old Mrs Hempstock, Ginny--the Mom, and Lettie--the 11 year old girl, who are among the most delightful (and hopeful) characters you will ever meet in a book, three generations of psychic strength against the powers of darkness, three women emanating out of Goodness against a panoply of truly creepy, and sometimes disturbing and sometimes really kind of terrifying emanations of Darkness, living in a house at the end of the lane, a house we are told is registered in the ancient Domesday book, a house with a pond that Lettie calls an ocean, which IS an ocean, finally, and you'll see why her naming it that is crucial for children and the imagination. Names and naming figure in this story powerfully.
So we are led to see that the struggle between darkness and light we read in this book has been at it for centuries, for eternity. And the Hempstocks are So Good as they run warm baths, making delicious warm food Gaiman seems to call up out of memory, recipes of warmth and community. Nostalgia runs through this book, as Gaiman gets homesick a bit for these aspects of his past, and helps us miss and recreate for others such goodness for others. The past is where these stories emanate from, that Gaiman reveres: Narnia, Lewis Carroll, Gilbert & Sullivan. The things that sustained him.
The boy's new black kitten, Fluffy, dies, run over by a boarder, an ex-opal miner, who borrows the boy's Dad's car, drives to the end of the lane and kills himself, unleashing the powers of Darkness all over the place, in part in the form of scary nanny Ursula Monkton who is almost as delightfully frightening as the Hempstocks are delightfully strong and funny and good. We face these dark powers through the boy, and what he learns to do to face them, we learn: We read, we sing and tell ourselves stories, we hold hands with and learn from our friends, we stand strong in the face of fear, we use the potential in our vivid imaginations to overcome what we have imagined, conjured up, that we imagine will leave us hopeless, and yes, sometimes we are overcome by these powers, it happens. Just at the point we might really be scared in this story, we see how the boy quietly copes with the horror. We learn from this boy how young, read-all-day kids, learn to cope with the world as it is. We find ways to hope out of the toolbox of our imaginations, and by binding ourselves to powerful spirits of friendship and community and story and song and beauty.
Childhood for Gaiman is not a place of innocence and simplicity, it is a place of scary, spooky, often frightening and alienating stuff, and we have to figure out how to get out of this maze to adulthood. Gaiman seems to tell us how he did it and others like him--we readers, perhaps?--do or can do it. This book is a myth or allegory Gaiman tells like other myths, and myths always teach us things. And this is essentially a simple myth; a very bad and disturbing set of things happen, a downhill snowball of bad things happening, and with help the boy figures out what to do to overcome this bad scene. And he does, that's what happens in most myths, magic happens, though the ending of this one has lots of questions, or makes you think about various meanings, and this is good, it's not simple, you will have to reread it, as you are supposed to do with myths. I need to reread this for what it seems to say about memory, but I like what he says about the way experience gets integrated into our identities and is even often literally forgotten for a time.
Gaiman can be a really, really great writer. This is a simple story with not a lot happening, one central set of battles, but the language you encounter along the way teaches we writers the power of metaphor and analogy and subtlety. I wasn’t when I first read this really a horror fan, and neither was Gaiman's wife, apparently, so he seems to teach us one reason to read and write and view horror, not to become devastated, not to just become terrified, to get to despair, but to figure out how to conquer the fear, the terrors, the devastation. I liked it very much and recommend you check it out if you haven't read it (or heard it) yet. Some reviewers felt it was "slight" but I disagree; I think it is focused and deft and lean and filled with sweet and scary touches. And it's not about helplessness, Neil, it's about hope, like so many of your scary books also seem to be.
Just reread it for my class, again, and it is even better the fourth time!!! Lovely, lovely book. Read it!
A masterpiece collection of short stories published in 1953.
Flannery O’Connor must have been a bizarre phenomenon at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, whereA masterpiece collection of short stories published in 1953.
Flannery O’Connor must have been a bizarre phenomenon at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where I imagine mostly atheist urbane sophisticates shaped their literary fictions. O’Connor was not an atheist; quite the contrary--she was a devout and passionate Roman Catholic. As she once said, “If the Eucharist is just a symbol, then I say the Hell with it.” Regarding the question of whether people are Innately good, I think she would say there is a Heaven and a Hell, and Evil is real. Maybe she would say they have the capacity for good but almost never come through. As she says about most of her characters, many of them are offered the opportunity of grace, of better options, and they don’t usually choose these options.
Flannery O’Connor is known for comically depicting physical and mental and decidedly Southern “grotesques” as part of her literary landscape. Southern gothic. I won’t review every story, though I love them all, having read them many times over the years. I think she basically points out hypocrisy and prideful ignorance, with sardonic humor. And that includes hypocritical religious people who get skewered by her razor tongue, those who are shown routes to redemption, those roads untaken. Hilarious characters and amazing writing.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is a story--and a(n brutal) American classic--about a “Misfit” wandering the country, robbing and killing. Grandma, Bailey, his wife and two kids get lost on a trip, roll their car, and sure enough, the Misfit and some of his “companions” find them. The Misfit has a kind of theological discussion with Grandma, a self-absorbed ludicrous character who begins to argue passionately for the Misfit to do the right thing. In the end the Misfit says this iconic line: “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." This is one of her stories that makes me think she is kind of Catholic Jim Thompson (a brutal noir writer).
Here’s some of the crazy good writing from the story:
“Lady," he said, and turned and gave her his full attention, "lemme tell you something. There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart-the human heart," he repeated, leaning forward, "out of a man's chest and held it in his hand," and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, "and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady," he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay-colored eyes brightened, "he don't know no more about it than you or me." "That's right," the old woman said.”
“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is about a woman raising her disabled daughter on a small farm when a traveling handyman comes in and offers to help do stuff around the place. The woman wants her daughter married, and sort of offers the man an opportunity to have a wife, a broken-down car, and eventual ownership of the place if he stays and helps them. Right, she sort of barters her daughter for a car. Depressing, okay, but the story has a kind of manic hilarity to it as we see the self-interests of the man and woman vie for ascendence. Here’s a chunk:
“A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.”
“The Artificial N--ger” is amazing, too, about Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson who visit Atlanta and get lost. Head is racist and in these stories, one generally has to pay for treating people badly (and one of those people he mistreats is Nelson):
“A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.”
The last one I’ll mention is another personal favorite relevant to today’s refugee crisis,”The Displaced Person” about a woman on a farm who takes in a “displaced” Polish family, the father having survived a concentration camp. He’s an amazing worker and so disrupts the largely dysfunctional indolence of the farm, but when he states his intention to bring others from Poland to join them, this crosses a line for her:
"It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world."
In the process, O’Connor shows us how the woman and others on the farm who resent the “displaced person” themselves become "displaced" from their own self-satisfied ways of living. The story becomes ultimately tragic, but is very powerful, and moving, and as I said, relevant to today's immigration politics.
"The Displaced Person" is actually novella-length. It was also developed into a one-hour film I actually saw (and taught, as a high school teacher!) first when it came out in 1976. Here's a trailer for it, but you can see the whole thing on YouTube for free:
Nate Powell worked for several years with young people with developmental disabilities, something I also did for a shorter tiRevision of review 4/9/17
Nate Powell worked for several years with young people with developmental disabilities, something I also did for a shorter time. He also ran a punk record label and performed in several bands, and oh, yeah, produces these amazing, detailed graphic novels and stories, including the series that took him and his co-authors to The National Book Award in 2016, March, the graphic memoir from Sen. John Lewis of the Civil Rights movement in the US, which Powell illustrated. But Swallow was my very first encounter with him, a story about a family dealing with a dying grandmother who is losing it, and a brother and sister dealing with early onset schizophrenia, something that statistics tell me is something much more common than I had imagined.
The focus in Whole is on the two kids, with primary focus on the girl's more serious, less able to hide, experiences, her visual hallucinations and obsessions. I read this initially and again as a parent whose son has been hospitalized for related issues, so it was scary for me, in the sense that it felt a little more real to me than just any graphic story, of course. In my late teens and twenties, too, I worked in a psych ward with some teens who were schizophrenic, hallucinating, paranoid, what they then called manic-depressive, so I have had some powerful experiences with this stuff. Powell wants us to try to experience what it may feel like to live in two worlds, the "real" world and this hallucinatory one that is unfortunately just as real, and with some folks, this secondary world takes over your “other” life. Sad, and frightening, though Powell also captures the anguish (and some attractions/fascinations associated with it) beautifully, I think. Reminds me a bit of David B's attempt to depict what he imagines his brother's epilepsy to be, which is of course another sad and anguished story, and also Craig Thompson's Blankets, where he tries to mostly visually capture the swirling, romantic falling of first love. What I’m pointing to here is the way comics can attempt to “capture” the emotional aspects of experience, through metaphor.
I've now taught/read this book several times. I had the occasion to meet Powell, who said this was his favorite, his most personal book. Some students don't like it for the very reason I do like it: his almost indecipherable hand lettering, which I think helps you understand auditory hallucinations in a way as happening sometimes just on the edge of “normal” hearing, and also helps you recall the mumbling of quiet, alienated young people, their sometimes disjointed, fanatical and unexplained experiences, which are told here to help us understand the experience of hallucinations.
Some of the images are very scary, the stuff of horror, which is what schizophrenics may regularly wrestle with. It's not fun to read, but there's a kind tenderness to the relationship between the brother and sister, who both suffer from the disorder in different ways. The fear, and the coming to terms (in part) with themselves as humans possessing these unwanted perceptions, that's heart wrenching. Powerful, I thought. Not for everyone, maybe. But as I said, I connect with it in part for family and work reasons. As a teacher, you know you have kids in your classrooms that hear voices and have hallucinations, and are medicated, but you don't always know this.
The medication can help a lot, by the way, and very much has helped my son, I write years later.. It's a muh better world for schizophrenics than in the seventies when I worked in the hospital,or even when Powell worked with folks decades later. Oliver Sacks in Hallucinations makes it clear that what we think of as misperception (think: mirages, and so on) is much more common than most people think.
This last reading, completed April 9, 2017, feels like the grimmest time I have read this book, because in part the future seems scary for my now-17-year old son (and now repost it in July 2024). It's like looking deeply into the heart of darkness, into madness itself. It’s terrifying, really, though. I sometimes ride the trains to work here in Chicago with plenty of homeless people, some of whom I see are having psychotic episodes, who used to be better protected in and by institutions. The world seems like a meaner, less supportive place to me for people that Powell writes about, for people like my son, than when I worked in the psych hospital in the seventies....more
8/25/23: Rereading with a class I am teaching with a focus on ghosts/liminal space. And also witches, which are kind of related entities. And appariti8/25/23: Rereading with a class I am teaching with a focus on ghosts/liminal space. And also witches, which are kind of related entities. And apparitions, visions, smoke and fog and filthy air. And another kind of liminal space of sorts: Madness, a kind of alternative way f experiencing the world involving hallucinations (such as Lady Macbeth's handwashing of "blood" we never see). You don't believe in ghosts? You may also not believe in witchcraft or witches. Well even the most hardened rationalist believe that hallucinations happen. And dreams.
Are the witches even there? In Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, the witches appear to be ghosts, and the Lady Macbeth stand-in seems increasingly to become one. The chief ghost in Macbeth is Banquo, and that ghost becomes an instrument of guilt. Macbeth, out of control, fears his friend's ascent to the throne instead of him, foretold by the witches. But the ghost comes back to haunt him.
But I was just talking to a friend about this ghost theme and he eagerly opened his computer to show me the opening of the Michael Fassbender filmed version of the play, which opens with a funeral: The death of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's child, a daughter. The theory in this adaptation is that Macbeth/LM may be driven, not primarily by ambition, or greed, but by grief! "I have given suck. . ." LM says to Macbeth, and she makes other references to a child, so we know there was one, ignored by critics, largely? And me? So it's an interesting theory, one of many, about what drives the action (okay, violent murders).
I saw the film last night and was very moved by it. It's violent, but there's some ambivalence about it from Macbeth I hadn't seen before in any production. As he at battle, he sees and is dismayed by the death of so many young men. This is a grim interpretation of the (grim) play, but I have never seen so many kids highlighted in a production. At Duncan's party, a girl choir; at the killing of MacDuff's family (which historically takes place off stage), Macbeth, the grieving father, kills children, and in this production, Lady Macbeth more than hears about it: She is there, watching the slaughter, pushing the grieving mother off the edge into madness.
So we see reasons for the mental and moral decline of the Macbeths. Even the final swordfight to the death between Macbeth and MaCduff seems close to being suicidal for Macbeth. And I like the appearance of Fleance at the end, watching Macbeth die and taking his sword (Fleance, Banquo's son--who watched Macbeth kill his father in this version--was prophesied to be one day King).
So the usual interpretations highlight one of the usual motivations for the tragedy: Macbeth is ambitious and even ruthless for power; Lady Macbeth is a crazed madwoman who crazily pushes him to do what they both know is wrong; the witches manipulate the Macbeths to do all the killing. But in this one it is grief that is the driver. It's a new and exciting interpretation, which made me (more, not wholly) sympathetic to the grieving parents. It's not an excuse, but it's an explanation.
And this is the foggiest, smokiest version of the play I have ever seen. I loved it.
"Double, double, toil and trouble"--those pesky witches
3/26/19 update: In preparing to see a production of Macbeth as a chaperone on a class trip with my eighth grader, I dug out lots of materials to help him understand what is going on. Macbeth is my favorite Shakespeare, I have taught it many times, seen it many times; in other words, this is a recipe for disaster for my poor son, who might justifiably fear professorial pontification at every page he turns. To work against this tendency (in me) I just dug up guides to the play, such as MacBeth: For Kids (Shakespeare Can Be Fun series), Nina Packer's Tales from Shakespeare, a few dvd adaptations of the play, and oh, yeah, the play itself. And just left them casually strewn around the house, you know, IF you’re interested. . .
Luckily he is a very good reader, has seen a lot of plays performed, and was independently interested in the play without me breathing down his neck: “Oh, you know, I saw a Stratford [Ontario] production in 1979 with Macbeth AS one of the three murderers!” “In this Australian film version, the witches do drugs with Macbeth, obscuring his judgment!” and so on. . . which could, I know, have led to “Da-aaad!” The Chicago Shakespeare production was great, one of the yearly productions they do, done in fewer than 90 minutes with the witches at the opening dancing a kind of medieval hip hop, with strobe lights and surround sound, and a bloody (nearly headless) Banquo. My son loved it, and so did his classmates. And so did I, proud to see his first Macbeth with him (he’s seen one other Shakespeare play so far).
Original review, updated periodically:
Probably most works of literature can be read again and again to both recapture that experience you had when first reading it and become something new, given your changed life circumstances, theoretical and other reading you are doing, and so on. The basic English teacher's writing prompt about this great play is "who is responsible for the tragedy of Macbeth?" It fits the current call for making arguments in school, too. Yet the play is not just a summary of arguments you might make. It's a living, breathing entity. But this question of whodunnit is still an interesting question, because it causes you to make commitments about beliefs and what it is the play has to say about the world. This time around, I am interested in the insights the play provides about the nature of “madness”: Psychological instability, paranormal phenomena, altered states of consciousness, dream life, the foul/fair confusion of good and evil. I have kids with variously different minds: one with autism, one possibly with schizophrenia, one who would appear to possess psychic faculties, two have night terrors, go sleepwalking, strange phenomena that might have got you put in a dungeon for madness a few centuries ago. I’m interested in this play in part for personal reasons. As well as its being just damned good theater.
Shakespeare wrote the witches that open the play into the story he borrowed from Holinshed's Chronicles in part to honor (in exchange for his patronage from) King James, who had written a popular scholarly study of witchcraft, so the play purports to take witches and the darker side of the spiritual realm seriously. To contemporary, sophisticated audiences, the three weird sisters seem to be there for entertainment purposes, mainly, yet they also seem to know stuff—have paranormal knowledge—about what is going to happen to Macbeth and Banquo's son Fleance (who preceded James on the throne), so something is going on we have to either acknowledge or dismiss as fantasy.
But, as I find out from my working class students, almost every one of them seems to have someone in the family that believes in or is actively involved in some way in psychic phenomena such as the prescience Shakespeare's witches seem to possess, sometimes in conjunction with their beliefs in more conventional religion. In other words, some who are religious also have experience with extra-religious ideation.
But Macbeth is more than witches, when we think of challenges to conventional thinking: Macbeth, which mostly takes place in the dark, is one of four Shakespeare’s plays that features ghosts, and has both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth envisioning daggers and bloody hands and other things. What’s the relationship between the dark spiritual realm, psychic phenomena and "madness"? Lady Macbeth seems to drive her hubby to kill Duncan, and yet then seems to disintegrate, seeing blood on her hands, unable to get that damned spot out. And Macbeth sees the ghost of his murdered friend Banquo (because who had him murdered?). Do the witches make that happen, these ghostly images? Are they guilt-induced hallucinations? All these questions interest you more than a mere whodunnit. Fait is foul and foul is fair! The world is turned upside down!
How do we limit the world when we limit our view of it to our (flawed) sense perceptions and rational deliberation? There are plenty of extra-sensory issues in the play to consider. The porter is drunk, and alters his perception through it. No one is sure what is happening because of the skewed relationship between appearance and reality. Stormy weather. . . Macbeth has murdered sleep, and sleep loss itself creates hallucinations. Visions abound. This is a dark and richly strange play in one sense about the madness of misplaced ambitions, ambitions possibly influenced by witches and/or a turn from good to “evil.”
My college Thespians put on a production in 1973 that featured a Macbeth that seemed to resemble “Tricky Dick,” Richard Nixon. A recent production here in Chicago featured Macbeth as Donald Trump with the witches as strippers he consults as life coaches. Rude? Funny? Macbeth is a canvas on which many theatrical productions have been painted....more
One of the best YA books ever, wonderful and surprising on so many levels. Very moving. As a parent of a kid with aRe-read for my Fall 2017 YAL class.
One of the best YA books ever, wonderful and surprising on so many levels. Very moving. As a parent of a kid with autism and another kid who is spectrum-y, it hits home for me in ways it might not for others. As with many mysteries, it features some misdirection; it appears to be about a kid with Asperger's Syndrome investigating a mystery about a dead dog in the manner of his hero (and also Aspergerish) Sherlock Holmes, but becomes an even richer and ever widening investigation of human tragedy and mystery and the complex nature of love and grief. I find it very moving, having read it several times.
My feeling this time? That almost half of the book is about the London trip when Christopher goes to see his estranged mother, and maybe that's a little too long; it makes the story into a kind of movie thriller of sorts, when the heart of the book for me is about mysteries, a dog murdered and just what that means for Christopher and his family, relationships, love, the grief and despair of dealing with a kid with special needs, that heartbreak, all stuff I have been through. I was divorced in the process of trying to deal with the anguish and despair and grief of discovering my son had autism, at the same time trying to do everything we could to try to reverse the process. So I could empathize with the parents.
One thing that is different in recent readings is that I have watched and rewatched the BBC Sherlock and the American Elementary and I have this as background for a very Sherlock-focused book (it's Christopher's favorite set of stories). I also have been reading Agatha Christie Poirot mysteries, so I have that related background. And, one course I have been teaching focuses on the relationships between psychiatry, the psychic/supernatural, horror/fantasy, spirituality, the literar vs the rational and logical, and some of that figures very much in this book. I had forgotten Christopher talks of faith and ghosts in this book with respect to logic and Reason. There's a consideration of metaphor and story for the purpose of making meaning, since this first person story is told by Christopher for a school project, a story of ever widening mysteries of life. I admit to tears in several places, earned tears from Haddon....more
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