Book Review: The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman

2008

Awards: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ –  –

SPOILER ALERT

The Graveyard Book opens with a creepy man named Jack entering a home and murdering almost every member of the family that lives there: the mother, father, and daughter. But the baby boy escapes, toddling all the way up to the graveyard at the top of the hill, where the ghosts there protect him and adopt him as one of their own.

The ghosts name the boy Nobody, or Bod for short. Bod grows up in the graveyard, educated by ghost teachers and taken care of by ghost doctors and playing with ghost kids.

Unbeknownst to Bod, however, the man who killed his corporeal family is still around and means to finish the job as soon as he can find the boy. It turns out that creepy Jack is a member of an evil society called the Jacks of All Trades, who are allied against Bod’s graveyard friends and who knew, via a prophesy, that Bod spelled potential trouble for the Jacks from the day he was born.

Given previous books I have read by Neil Gaiman, I admit I wasn’t looking forward to reading this one. But I couldn’t help liking it in spite of myself.

It is a children’s story, so you have to read it with that in mind. It echoes other bittersweet lost-boy-raised-by-wolves stories, like The Jungle Book (on purpose) and even Puff the Magic Dragon  (probably accidentally). It is sympathetically told and has likeable characters. It is also extremely dark and occasionally gruesome, which I get out a kick out of, since it is, after all, a kid’s book.

Bod is a quiet, perceptive, lonely boy whose only friends and mentors are ghosts and other creatures of the night. I liked him a lot and I was glad to read the story of his coming of age, as he inevitably learns, like Mowgli, that his place is among the (living) humans and that he can't stay in the (ironic) safety of the graveyard forever.

Bod’s primary guardian, Silas, is a kindly vampire. He is taciturn and gruff and, of course, vampiratical, but his love for the boy comes across loud and clear. Silas is sweet. And so, for that matter, is Bod’s part-time tutor, Miss Lupescu the werewolf.

There is a neat chapter in the book where all the ghosts come down from the graveyard and dance with the living people in the town square. It is a lovely, eerie scene. And afterwards, the living don’t remember it and the dead won’t talk about it. It was an odd little interlude, but it worked, and I am sure it carried a profound message about how we are all dancing with death even if we don’t want to discuss it or think about it.

                         

All that said, though, there were definitely moments where some of Gaiman’s more irritating habits came through. In particular:

1.      In one chapter, Bod gets kidnapped by a bunch of ghouls. The incident itself was fine but I was annoyed that all of the ghouls had to be famous people—Victor Hugo, an Emperor of China, the "33^rd President of the United States" (who for some reason couldn’t just be called Harry Truman), etc. The famous-people-as-ghouls felt too forced to be funny. It reminded me of the pretentiously hokey scene in The Demolished Man where all the high-class judges and ministers are out in the jungle searching for the main character, tromping through undergrowth and calling each other “Senator” and “Your Honor.” Philip Jose Farmer does a better and more subtle job of spreading famous people out among ordinary people in a more realistic mix, like you might actually find in any random group of dead people. It means that when a famous person appears, it has more of an impact, whether for shock or humor.

2.      Similarly, the Jacks of All Trades, whose first names were all Jack, all had to have clever last names like Frost, Tar, Dandy, and Nimble. It was too self-conscious. I found myself wondering when Gaimain was going to run out of names and whether he wasn't perhaps already reaching the bottom of the barrel.

3.      And, again, similarly, many of the grave markers have phrases on them that are just too clever by half. These markers often get read aloud when they come up in the story, like when Bod goes running by one. The first few are effectively wry and funny, but they get more and more tiresome until it feels like you are being hit over the head with all the wit. For example:

"Bod's left ankle was swollen and purple. Doctor Trefusis (1870-1936, May He Wake to Glory) inspected it and pronounced it merely sprained."

"...Thomas Pennyworth (here he lyes in the certainty of the moft glorious refurrection) was already waiting, and was not in the best of moods."

"...the boy popped up...from behind a tombstone (Joji G. Shoji, d. 1921, I was a stranger and you took me in)."

"And so it went, until it was time for Grammar and Composition with Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish (Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykewise?)."

And actually there were two Spinsters of this Parish--old Letitia and also Majella Godspeed. Perhaps he'd forgotten he'd already used that line.