Half-Adult

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

On the day I started rereading The Ocean at the End of the Lane something stung me beneath my right eye.

I didn't notice the stinging itself, but I did notice that my eye was itchy and puffy afterwards, and, going to look into the mirror, I saw that it was red and swollen. 

 

I was disturbed by the reflection looking back at me if only because it offered a glimpse of what my face might look like if I were old. It was as if I had suddenly become half aged. The skin beneath my one eye grew heavy and red, folding over itself like swelling wrinkles. 

I shuddered, for I knew that it was in a similar fashion that the fiend that calls itself Ursula Monkton enters the story, burrowing its way into the protagonist's foot in the form of a grey worm. The ancient and strangely powerful Hemstock's refer to its kind as a flea. I thought it a fitting picture and I in turn wondered what it was that had bitten me. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an amalgam of a book; only half aged; one half adult, the other a child. Indeed, it defies every attempt to force it into an age. Neil Gaiman, the book's own author, is still not certain whether it is a book for adults or for children. 

The book's child protagonist, a boy of 7, certainly makes it seem a book for young people. At first glance, at least. But, as Gaiman himself put it, if it were to be a book for children he might have had to remove the scene in which the boy's father, in a fit of unexplained madness, tries to drown him in the bath.  

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is questionable, to say the least. It is the only dark book featuring a young protagonist I have ever felt necessary to withhold from too a young a reader. Sometimes it is inappropriate; and yet, I think it is best to read it as if you were still a child. Indeed, someone too adult might try too hard to understand it. This would be a mistake, for in doing so it is likely that they will not understand it at all.

I have written before about the adult horrors in books meant for children. They are, as I point out in my post titled The Adult Shadows in the The Sisters Grimm, made more horrific because they are placed in contrast to a child's world inside a child's book, and so, they become all the more terrible because they are not supposed to be understood in the least. 

They are rendered the stuff of horror not because the adult world is necessarily horrifying, but because there is something frightful in it when seen from the perspective of a child.

 

But this is, of course, not only true in fiction. Few of us like to think about it, but the adult world once seemed just as alien and arcane to us as the dark powers inside this book do to me now.

 

 

There are moment's throughout every child's life when they realize, with a thought that feels a lot like a shudder, how little control they have over their own world. I grew up in a safe home, and my parent's tried to shelter me from the outside world like any loving parents do, giving the hard truths to me slowly and in good time at the appropriate age. They kept a close eye on the movies I watched and sometimes on the books I read, telling me just enough so that I would know what types of things to stay far away from.

Still, sometimes it scared me to know how little I knew; that life crippling mistakes could be made completely by accident, by the ignorance of trusting a stranger too well, or in messing with something dark disguised as just risky enough to be exciting. 

There remains ever on the edge of the child's life the possibility that things could fall out of control, and they, being small and mostly helpless, could do nothing about it. The idea that a child could somehow ruin their own life by not being adult enough, not knowing enough, or simply not knowing any better, makes me gulp. 

There were earlier glimpses in my own childhood before the time my parent's took a book I was reading away, telling me there were devilish themes inside of it. 

 

I was taught to be paranoid of strangers from a young age. I still have bad dreams about being taken by an unknown person sometimes, and although these dreams are nightmarish, they still do not compare with the real shuddering fear I felt when I was young and unable to judge what was dangerous and what not; such as the time an old man pulled over to talk to me when I was playing in my driveway, and I, forgetting everything I had been taught about being wary of strangers in a moment, stepped closer only to hear my dad shout my name in an alarming tone. 

 

I felt foolish afterwards and insecure, and even though he turned out to be a kind man (my dad spoke to him after I had left) I knew afterwards that there were risks out there I had no idea about. It was scary thinking that the things I read and the people I talked to could turn on me or do me ill. Worse still was the thought that I could not see it coming and so would be helpless in preventing it from happening.

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, as I've said, half-adult. This is represented to me in the way the cover has folded over, as if someone (probably my little brother who borrowed it once and returned it in this condition) has only half looked at it, not daring to open the book all the way.

It is, after all, a book that is only ever half read; whether through the eyes of a child who does not recognize some of the adult things going on behind the windows, or an adult recalling what it felt like to be a child and have no control when their world changes, the book is designed not to be understood, or rather, to be only half understood. 

So, when the boy's father tries to drown him in the bath, we have no idea why. We know that he is not a violent man. Indeed, the story makes a point of telling us the boy's father has never once hit him. Still, any one that has ever had a short-tempered parent knows how scary it is to stand in their shadow, even if they do not touch you or hurt you, the angry look in their eye is enough to cause some level of fear. Thus, we do not need to understand why the father is harming the boy. Indeed, that is what makes it feel so scary and so very real. No child ever really knows why they are being harmed or why their parent and guardian has suddenly turned on them.

 

Having been a child once, everyone should know the fear of not being understood and of not understanding. With our limited language and perception, how can we explain when a teacher was cruel to us? When we do not really know what happened, much less how to explain; all we can really know is that something felt wrong about it. It is almost as if it is too adult for a child to talk about. They can not explain why an adult does what they do, neither can they always know exactly what was wrong about it. Children, while having a great sense for wrongness and injustice, are less than inept at explaining how they feel and why.

Furthermore, how can a child  know that, when an old man pulls over to talk to them that he might have ill intentions? How can a child even imagine what he might really be thinking? 

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane Ursula Monkton knows this, and she exploits this, turning the boy's parent's against him, making up lies about him, telling him that he will not be believed because he is a child and she is an adult. 

 

We do not know what Ursula Monkton really is, but she appears in the form of a grown-up, and the book makes this something truly horrible, telling us that "she was power incarnate.. She was the storm... she was the adult world with all its powers and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty." 

By the end of the story, the boy, now himself grown, has forgotten about the horrible events of his childhood. He does not remember Ursula Monkton. He no longer knows that his father once tried to drown him. 

This is necessary. It is necessary because, if we, like him, remembered for a second what it was like not to understand a world of change and unseen danger and out of control strangers, well, then we'd realize for ourselves what Lettie Hemstock, the eternal eleven year old of this story, said so well 

"The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." 

 

If we remembered what it was like to be so and to know oneself to be so we'd realize with horror that not much has changed now that we are older. The truth is, we are all just children who aren't young anymore, and so we are half. Half-child, half-adult, only ever half understanding, only ever half-understood; and, being so, there is still and ever the lingering possibility that our world could cut loose from our control.

 

In which case this hybrid of a book, itself something compound and cross-stitched, can only be for us half-beings. 

Slaughtering the Scene

 Beware: the following contains the dark humours of a writer and should only be taken somewhat seriously.

 

The really tricky part about killing off a character is that, once you've killed them the wrong way, it's hard to bring them back and do it right. 

It's not like you can ask someone how to fix it, because that would spoil their demise and make it altogether less effective the second time around. 

 

 

Killing off a character is between you and that character. No one else should be involved, for I think the writer does their best killing when they think they are doing something wicked and unexpected.

But how do you kill a character right the second time around when you don't think you did it right the first time? They already feel so flimsy now that you've killed them. It's hard to write about them again now that they're already dead. Besides, haven't they already suffered enough through their first poorly done slaying? 

These are the types of questions only a writer has to worry about. These are the types of things that, when asked what we are thinking, we likely wouldn't share, instead choosing to vouch for a nice simple answer such as "not much", another way of saying"nothing all that alarming".

One would think the writer would laugh maliciously to themselves as they do the deed. I don't think I did.

In fact, this character has been dead for over a year now, and strangely I found the first time a breeze. I killed them off quickly last spring, then proceeded to move on without much thought as to what I'd just done. The aftermath is always the most unexpected. That is when you get to see what their death entails. 

 

 

I spent all of last night editing that death scene, trying to make it something a reader would find satisfying. By the end of it all I was almost as great a mess as the scene I was trying to fix. I felt a bit like a surgeon leaving incisions and stitches in all sorts of ugly places, transplanting paragraphs just to find them faulty and cut them out again. 

As it turns out, slaughtering scenes takes a lot less skill that killing characters, and satisfying readers is difficult when you feel like a clumsy killer. 

 

The truth is, I've had spontaneous deaths turn out better than this one. 

But those characters were practically asking for a good death scene, and admittedly, this one didn't deserve any of this. 

Sometimes the only way to get it right is to write all the wrong ways first. Somewhere in that bloody mess the writer comes across a good phrase or a detail that makes it all work in a very simple and straightforward way. 

 

What can I say. Writing is not always an art; sometimes it's a slaying. And all I can do when a night spent editing poorly is through is wash my hands of it and go to bed.

"Mistborn" Wears Away in My Mind

I recently finished rereading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy. As I mentioned in my post The Dark Lord of Depression in which I talk about the first novel of the installment, I read the trilogy for the first time in the ninth grade. A lot of time has passed since then. A lot more books have been read in that time, including the first three books of Sanderson's epic The Stormlight Archive. Time and life has gone by between my first reading of Mistborn, and to say that I have read The Stormlight Archive alone is to say that I have traveled many pages since. 

But books are not like our own memories. They can be relived any time, returned to by the flip of some pages. And though we return to them slightly changed, they can remind us of who were when we first read them.

 

 

 

Beneath time and other great works, the series, while remembered, wore away till much of it was only remembered vaguely, other parts forgotten entirely. Rereading it now felt a bit like reliving an old dream. I could sense the feelings beneath the story that I remembered from those days: the shock, the tragedy, the parts that blew my mind. I remember tuning out the school halls around me, trading it in for one of ash falls and mist. I remember seeing another girl a year older than me sitting in the hallway at lunch reading one of the books. It was strange to think that, though we did not know each other, we were living in the same made up world; that the same events I was witnessing she was witnessing before me. 

Already, I can feel time taking its toll again, as memory breaks all things apart like ash. 

 

The cover of The Hero of Ages which always looked a bit like an old photograph looks all the more like one now as fine white tears, like the blue lightning which the artist painted in, have marked the cover, separating Vin from Elend along its spine and scarring Vin's face on the front cover. 

No matter how recently it's been touched, the cover always looks like it's covered in a thin layer of dust.

 

I know that this is not the last time I will reread this series. Indeed, someday this book, which already now is marked by wear and reading, will be like a letter unfolded too many times, read many times over, because I do not wish to forget it.