Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane
My interest roused by Tony Ortega’s review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane entitled “In His New Book, Is Neil Gaiman Exorcising His Scientology Past?” (a question, by the way, the book does not address directly), I read the first chapter on Amazon and immediately downloaded the Kindle version, jumping it to the top of my otherwise long reading list. I’d never read Neil Gaiman before—for shame and I’ll remedy that—and I admit to curiosity about the possible autobiographical content (I was aware of his family’s role in the enigmatic “church” of Scientology), but I stayed for the pure pleasure of an enthralling story.
I already knew, given Tony Ortega’s reproduction of a news clipping about a South African who committed suicide in the Gaiman driveway when Neil was a boy, that the author had drawn some on his personal story, and it is safe to assume that the rest of the book, no matter how fantastic or magical, is analogous to of his own story. Those who have been through the Scientology experience, where science fiction is promulgated as dogma, can perhaps better track with the reality behind the myth: how a mere child, born into an environment where there is more fear than love, compensates creatively with the material he has (books, in this case) to build a cocoon in which he ultimately feels safe. Jenna Miscavige Hill’s Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape (2013) is a no-holds-barred non-fiction description of this same traumatic experience.
But specifics aside, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a stellar example of the Visionary Fiction genre, certainly not to be tossed into the Fantasy bin. Visionary writers, says Professor Edward Ahearn in Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age, seek a personal way to explode the normal experience of the “real,” using prophetic visions, fantastic tales, insane rantings, surrealistic dreams, and drug- or sex-induced dislocations in their work. Their fiction expresses rebellion against all the values of Western civilization—personal, sexual, familial, religious, moral, societal, and political. Ahearn describes such writing as exhilarating, immensely disturbing, vital, and subversive.
But Visionary Fiction, while it can be dark as Ocean is at times, is not fatalistic. According to the Visionary Fiction Alliance website, the first characteristic of Visionary Fiction is: “Growth of consciousness is the central theme of the story and drives the protagonist, and/or other important characters.” Appropriately, Gaiman does not spell out the lesson intended, if any in Oceans; but at its conclusion we know that a subtle something in our vision of life has been stirred up and changed. All the better that it lingers well past the end of the story, perhaps even finding its way into our own ponderings and dreams.