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.