The Graveyard Book

Author: Neil Gaiman
Published: HarperCollins, 2008
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy.

"THERE WAS A HAND IN the darkness, and it held a knife."

"The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately."

"The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet."

Neil Gaiman is best known for his adult fantasy and graphic novels, but he is more and more entering the world of children's and young adult fantasy. His recent books Coraline, M is for Magic, and Interworld have helped bring the darker side of literature to youngsters everywhere. The Graveyard Book is no exception.

It starts with a psychopath killing a family in their beds. It's not graphic, but it is disturbing. Happily, the youngest member of the family has recently learned how to escape from his crib, and he happily toddles out the open door and into the street, blissfully unaware that a ghoul is on his heels. As chance would have it, the family lives just down the road from a graveyard, and fortune smiles as the traumatized souls of the murdered family make a brief appearance just as child passes the graveyard gates. The graveyard ghosts are so moved by the family's grief that they take an unprecedented step -- they agree to adopt the toddler and protect him from the killer that is even now stalking him...

So, the boy stays, to be raised by ghosts and other denizens of the night. The book is written in a style not seen much these days, presented as a series of semi-related adventures, one per chapter. This, for me, calls to mind Winnie the Pooh and The Jungle Book, and all the more so as the earlier stories follow the boy, now named Nobody 'Bod' Owens, as a young child of four and five. His adoptive parents (the Owens') and his self-appointed guardian, Silas (a stolid, mysterious man, and the only resident of the graveyard who can travel amongst humans) do their best to keep Bod out of trouble, but he still manages to get involved with Ghouls, vengeful ancient spirits, and human visitors to the graveyard, all of which he handles through a combination of luck and supernatural skills taught to him by the ghosts.

Personally, this is my second favorite Neil Gaiman book so far, shadowed only by the magnificent Stardust. However, it is best taken as a series of short stories. The backstory to the killer is a bit hokey for my taste (but I can't tell you more, as that would spoil everything), and if you look at it as a novel it will appear to have a moderate-severe case of ODTAA. Speaking of short stories, one chapter of this book, The Witch's Headstone, previously appeared as a stand-alone story in M is for Magic.

It is worth noting that this is an 'illustrated novel'; this does not mean that it is a graphic novel. It contains a number of illustrations scattered throughout the pages in the traditional way; they are in no way integral to the story, although they do add something to the book. The illustrations were done by Dave McKean, the same illustrator who did the cover for Coraline, and who illustrated Gaiman's Signal to Noise and Mr. Punch. The illustrations are simple, somewhat misshapen, and frankly often not very good, but they do add to the dark tone of the book. The copious and dramatic illustrations in the first ten pages of the book completely justify McKean's involvement in the project.

You can hear Neil Gaiman read the book aloud here.

The Graveyard Book is a 2008 children’s novel by popular fantasist Neil Gaiman. It’s constructed as a set of linked stories — Gaiman loosely modeled the structure after Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book  — that tell the childhood adventures of Nobody Owens, a young boy who grows up in an English graveyard. Nobody first arrives at the graveyard (and is taken under the protection of the ghosts and vampire that reside there) as a toddler the night that a killer named Jack slaughters the rest of his family, including his preteen sister.

Opening a children’s book with a family’s murder is a risky move, indeed! The issue of how best to handle violence and threat in literature for younger readers is one that has interested me for some time, so I read Gaiman’s bold opening with surprise and fascination:

The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done. (Gaiman 7)

Gaiman deliberately uses a passive style to blunt the impact of the horror inherent in the scene. The emphasis on Jack’s hands makes it seem as though the man himself has done nearly nothing — the rest was his hands’ doing. And what have those hands helped him do? Complete a “task”, not a murder. In terms of sensory detail, the paragraph focuses on color: the white handkerchief, the black coat, the bright bedroom. But there’s no mention of a vivid spray of arterial blood on the walls or the gleam of staring, dying eyes.

A young reader — one who might be prone to nightmares and whose parents might in turn be prone to write angry emails to their local children’s librarian — is quite likely to be distracted by Gaiman’s techniques. But for an experienced reader, it’s perfectly clear that Jack has stabbed or slashed the sleeping family and they now lie dead in their home. To me, the passage evoked scenes from Michael Mann’s serial killer film Manhunter, but it’s not clear if that was a deliberate move on Gaiman’s part. I wondered if Gaiman would hold back from fully immersing the reader in instances of peril, but he does not, at least not completely:

There was a light at the end of the room, and in the light a man came walking, walking through the rock, and Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream.

The man looked well-preserved, but still like something that had been dead a long while.
His skin was painted (Bod thought) or tattooed (Scarlett thought) with purple designs and patterns. Around his neck hung a necklace of sharp, long teeth.

“I am the master of this place!” said the figure, in words so ancient and guttural that they were scarcely words at all. (Gaiman 52)

Gaiman could have described the guardian more vividly and gruesomely, but he describes just enough and conveys the character’s emotions just enough to maintain tension. However, the guardian is quickly revealed to be no real threat to the children:

“I will feast on your liver!” screamed the Indigo Man.

“No, you won’t,” said Scarlett, with a huge sigh. “Bod’s right.”

Then she said, “I think maybe it’s a scarecrow.” (Gaiman 54)

That becomes a common pattern throughout the book: the more vividly a threat is portrayed, the more quickly it’s revealed to be no true threat to Bod or Scarlett at all:

He fell off the step, away from the rock wall, out into space, off the cliff-side, where he dropped — a nightmarish tumble down distances that Bod could not even imagine ....

And as he fell, he was certain he heard a voice coming from the general direction of the grey beast. And it said, in Miss Lupescu’s voice, “Oh, Bod!” (Gaiman 92)

The most vividly-portrayed peril and violence happens at the climax of the book:

Their faces were dead, as if someone had constructed dolls from parts of the corpses of humans and of animals. The faces were covered in purple patterns, tattooes in swirls of indigo, turning the dead faces into strange, expressive monstrous things. (Gaiman 283)

In his terror he was once more then nice man who had driven her home. He was floating in the air, five, then ten feet above the ground, slashing wilding at the air with two knives, trying to stab something she could not see ... (Gaiman 284-285)

Gaiman employs a couple of classic narrative techniques from horror novels in the climactic scenes. The first is that if you have an impressive monster, you never fully reveal it until you’re close to the ending of the narrative. Before that, the children (and the reader) only catch glimpses of the Sleer, creating a mystery and enhancing plot tension. Second, you save the worst fate for the worst characters. Jack richly earned a bad end in the first scenes of the book, and did nothing to redeem himself in the intervening pages.

“The Graveyard Book manages the remarkable feat of playing delightful jazz riffs on Kipling’s classic Jungle Books.

One might call this book a small jewel, but in fact it’s much bigger within than it looks from the outside.”

— Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn

I'm pretty sure I read The Graveyard Book before it won the Newbery. I loved the opening line ("There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.") and I enjoyed the first few chapters. I hadn't paid any attention to the praise from Peter S. Beagle on the back cover, and I wasn't thinking about the fact that the opening scene in Kipling's The Jungle Books is Mowgli toddling up the hill to the wolf den with Shere Khan the tiger close behind, demanding that the wolves return his quarry. I made it as far as Chapter 3, The Hounds of God, before it hit me. 

The air was cold and they were decending a wall. Tombstones and statues jutted out of the side of the wall, as if a huge graveyard had been upended, and, like three wizened chimpanzees in tattered black suits that did up the back, the Duke of Westminster, the Bishop of Bath, and the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh were swinging from statue to stone, dangling Bod between them as they went, tossing him from one to another, never missing him, always catching him with ease, without even looking. (Gaiman, 79)

Bod had been kidnapped by ghouls, strong, stupid, self-aggrandizing creatures, and was being carried away to an abandonded city that they had not built, but had claimed for their own, just as Mowgli was kidnapped by the Bandar-log and taken to the Cold Lairs, an abandoned city that had been built by humans. 

Two of the strongest monkeys caught Mowgli under the arms and swung off with him through the tree-tops, twenty feet at a bound. Had they been alone they could have gone twice as fast, but the boy's weight held them back. Sick and giddy as Mowgli was he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though the glimpses of earth far down below frightened him, and the terrible check and jerk at the end of the swing over nothing but empty air brought his heart between his teeth. (Kipling, 28)

Neil Gaiman had taken The Jungle Books as inspiration and written his own unique story, while managing to replicate the feeling of Kipling's stories. 

With that in mind, I went back to the beginning. Small boy-child toddles up the hill and manages to evade his attacker, check. Surrogate parents decide to take him in and raise him, check. Parents present the child to the community formally, in the usual meeting place, and are granted permission to bring him up and teach him the ways of the group, once a respected outsider vouches for the child. Check, check, check. 

Gaiman riffs on The King's Ankus (buried treasure guarded by a creature with a warped, outdated view of the world outside the chamber and a weapon that always returns to the trove), Red Dog (Bod sticks up for a student at school and lures the bullies to a place where he can teach them a lesson) and Letting in the Jungle (Bod uses his connections to the residents of the graveyard and his knowledge of every inch of his home to trap and evade intruders). The Kipling quote above is from Kaa's Hunting, which starts with Baloo trying to teach a reluctant Mowgli the Master Words of the Jungle, in all of the different tongues used by the jungle folk, so he can claim protection. Gaiman's version has Miss Lupescu, Bod's tutor, teaching him how to call for help in any language in the world. In both stories, the boy is soon kidnapped and puts his new knowledge to work. The stories are different, the details unique, and yet the structure and feel of the narrative are wonderfully familiar.

My favorites are The Spring Running (Kipling) and Danse Macabre (Gaiman). In both, something unusual is going on, and the residents of the community don't have time for the boy-child, who feels put out and abandoned. Both stories describe a magical time--the coming of spring in one case, a midwinter celebration in the other. Small snippets of quotes won't do the tales justice; you'll just have to go read them for yourself. Start with Kipling, so that when you get to Gaiman you can enjoy all the playful, spot-on allusions. 

If you want to buy a copy of The Jungle Books, make sure it's plural--I picked up a few copies at the local used bookstore that were just the first half of the collection. Not all the stories are Mowgli stories--Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is in the first book--but both books have Mowgli stories.