Sunday Salon - It's all about Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things, Coraline, The Graveyard Book.

I've decided to do a post about one of my favourite authors, in honour of RIP3 challenge, AND that these three books fit this time of year, spooky and ghost-filled. I know that for many of you, my Gentle Readers, you also love Neil Gaiman. I thought I would try to show some of what I admire and love in his books, and his writing. Most of all, it's as if he pierces my heart, but instead of ripping it into shreds, he gently puts it back together with love and hope and faith.


Fragile Things

I read Fragile Things earlier this year. I didn't post on it because I got caught up in other things, but it never left the side of my computer where I pile the books I really want to review. I am in awe of this writer. Fairy tales, fantasy, gothic, and horror, all with a touch of melancholy about them. Even the poem about Bluebeard, The HIdden Chamber, isn't straightforward, instead mixed with doom - unlike the fluttering butterfly he (the writer) sets free, this is what will happen to his new love:
If you are wise you'll run into the night,
fluttering away into the cold
wearing perhaps the laciest of shifts.
The lane's hard flints
will cut your feet all bloody as you run,
so, if I wished, I could just follow you,
tasting the blood and oceans of your
tears. I'll wait instead,
here in my private place, and soon I'll put
a candle
in the window, love, to light your way back home.
The world flutters like insects. I think this
is how I shall remember you,
my head between the white swell of your breasts,
listening to the chambers of your heart.

The horror, the real horror, is that even if she escapes, she will come back again. He - the writer, Bluebeard - understands the secret to a woman's heart, that even if she senses danger, she has to know all the secrets: "You'll see/the heartbreak linger in my eyes, and dream/of making me forget what came before you walked/into the hallway of this house."
And he is right! It's a play on Harlequin novels, gothics, that sense that the right woman will heal a man. Wise, and heart-breaking, the collection of stories and poems in this book are all like this. Some succeed more than others - in past posts, here and here, and here , I've referred to my favourites: October in the Chair, A Study in Emerald, The Problem of Susan , and my favourite poems of all: Instructions and Locks.

If you are looking for short stories to read before Hallowe'en, I highly recommend this book. It is magical and fantastical, creepy, unsettling, spooky, funny, everything that is good in fantasy and horror writing today. It should be in every serious reader's library.


Coraline

I read Coraline over the past three days, mostly because I kept getting interrupted. I finally finished it late last night. It has to be one of the scariest books for children I've read, and I really wish it had been around when I was a kid. I would have loved it! I would have read it over and over! My children are just a little bit too young for it - I think the 'other family' would confuse them, and the horrible button eyes and the other mother creating the world, is for children about 7-8 years old. I can hardly wait to read it to them, though! Coraline is the spunkiest, bravest heroine ever. I mean it, I'm not sure I could have survived the other world. I was possibly holding my breath during the last 50 pages of the book. It was awful, in the awe-inspiring sense that real terror can take. And beautiful, because she makes it right in the end, and the sense of relief was palpable to me, at least! I was able to get to sleep last night. I think if Coraline hadn't gotten out and back into her world, I would have nightmares about her being trapped, for a very long time. That is how real Neil makes his characters, and how real the story is. Especially as I live in a semi-detached house, though thankfully there are no doors between our houses, in the wall!!

I think one reason Neil Gaiman is so popular a horror/fantasy writer is because the underpinnings of his writing is love, and faith, and hope. This is what saves his characters. It is a real treat in today's world of endless bad SAW movies (I haven't seen one and never will) and stupid slash and gash horror movies where fatalism means no one escapes, that there are writers who deal with the mysteries, the ghostly and ghastly, with the emotions and characteristics that make us our best as humans. No matter the danger, or the eeriness, it all comes down to the heart. Whether Bluebeard's uncanny understanding, or Coraline's bravery, most of Neil's characters are on human journeys of finding love, recapturing love (several of his short stories deal with both these topics), or surviving love. He explores the dangerous pathways of the world, in myths (American Gods), folktales, children's stories, the underground literally in Neverwhere, horror in Coraline, and in my next book to review, The Graveyard Book, and in all of them, he never loses sight of what makes people human, good or bad, and he lets his heroes and heroines be brave. And if any of you have had to face real nightmares in the world, as I have, you know that bravery and courage are needed as much today as ever. He's writing to you, to me, to his children, to the world, telling us the stories we need to hear to survive. To me, Coraline is one of the best heroines for girls to ever be written. It's a truly good horror story for kids that deserves every award it received. And the illustrations are truly creepy and delightful and my kids will pore over them. They are the stuff of nightmares. Most excellent!


The Graveyard Book

I read this today. I couldn't put it down!! I love this story! I thought it could be good, the premise is certainly interesting - little boy raised in a graveyard by ghosts - and this story is everything I hoped for, and more. It is enchanting. How I can say that about a book that involves murder, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, witches and ghosts, is almost a mystery, but it's not - it's Neil, so it's heart-breaking even as it's beautiful and haunting and funny. It's a ghost story for families. In case you are one of the 10 readers left on the planet who haven't read the book yet, I am not going to give the plot away here - I'm just going to give you how I felt reading this book, and why I think everyone can read it. First of all, it's not scary, even the opening, even my most faint-hearted, sensitive Gentle Reader can be assured that no matter how it starts out, you will not have nightmares. Yes, it's scary in places. Have you ever spent a night in a cemetary? Me either. Nor do I want to. Why? Because the dead walk at night. I don't care what anyone says, they do. I love the melancholy beauty of graveyards, I think about the people gone before and try to imagine their lives as I read the headstone inscriptions, but I would not spend a night in a graveyard. Well, The Graveyard Book is about a boy who lives in one. And how he does, and how the ghosts help him, and what wonders befall him - make this book truly worth reading. It is a magical tour through the world of a graveyard. Not necessarily the land of the dead, mind, just the world here of the dead. And yes, I cried at the ending. I hate change, even though I know it's necessary, I hate loss of people, change in relationships, and the loss here in this book is inevitable, and piercing.

Of all the amazing characters that people this book, the one I love is the Lady on the Gray Horse. Much is made of Neil's remarks at the back of the book to Rudyard Kipling and The Jungle Book, how there is inspiration from that book in this one. I've never read The Jungle Book, but I have read John Keat's poem The Belle Dame Sans Merci, and seen the Pre-Rahaelite painting of the same name, and that is who the Lady on the Gray Horse reminds me of. When Bod Owens (the main character) first meets the Lady, this is his impression and what they end their conversation with:
"There was a woman riding on the horse's bare back, wearing a long grey dress that hung and gleamed beneath December Moon like cobwebs in the dew.
....."Can I ride him?" asked Bod.
"One day," she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. "One day. Everybody does."
"Promise?"
"I promise."

Every time I read those lines, I get a lump in my throat. She is Lady Death, and isn't she a better figure to come carry us away, than the Grim Reaper Spectre with th scythe that we are more familiar with?

For a book about death and ghosts, it is filled with whimsical moments and ideas like this. So it's not a scary book. It's filled with love and humour, and ghosts and graveyards, and I think it is perfectly wonderful. As soon as my kids are old enough - I think sometime in the next year Holly-Anne at least will be able to listen to the story being read (albeit with 5,000 questions in between!) - I will be reading this to them. And the illustrations, of course - line drawings that leave the mind to fill in the gaps, setting the tone, and I've forgotten until I read Coraline and The Graveyard Book how much I enjoy drawings with my stories!

Recapturing childhood wonder, somehow that seems to be the essence I get from reading these two books. So I recommend them highly, as marvelous work that must be read. Come, take Neil's hand, and let him show you how to survive the night, and face the dawn, and live to tell the marvelous frightening tale.......

*sighs happily, contentedly*

I hope your ghostly reading is taking you to fantastic places today, too!

Other reviews:
Bart's Bookshelf
Nymeth
Stuff as Dreams are Made On

Stainless Steel Droppings (Carl)
Eva (A Striped Armchair)

Weekly Geeks # 19 ...where I reveal my secret shame

Well, it's been a long time since I did a weekly Geeks. I think we are up to #19 - we are, it's here. First, this week, your WG theme is to list your top books published in 2008.

Well, to my secret shame and my Cool Literary Inner Bookworm's disgust, I have not read one book published in 2008 - but wait! There is hope on the horizon....for those of us who compile our reading lists based on last year's best books in different genres, we're always behind. I am willing to take a big risk with.....The Graveyard Book! Sure to be a bestseller, and very likely a most excellent and interesting book to read...I'm saved! It just went on sale today!!!! My CLIB is going away to write angry poetry about me, but I don't care, The Graveyard Book is out! so if I buy it and hurry up and read it, I can still do this week's Weekly Geek! and read a book that I have been waiting for since reading the short story, "October in the Chair", in Fragile Things, which was a story that gave me little chills. That house, and what happened to the boy when he went in? Oh, please let me find the book quickly tomorrow!!

So now you know my secret shame, that I rarely read a book published that year unless it's by a mystery or fantasy series author I am following. I read the good ones published one year, the next year...yes, that means I let others do the work of reading through the piles of books published and sorting out what they think is good! I do have to say, as I said in my last post, that book bloggers are great for getting the word out about good books, no matter when they are published, too. So I am very curious to see which of us book lovers do read the current book lists, and which of us mosey around, picking a book from a decade here, a book from a century there. I'm definitely in the latter group!

Beowulf - Penguin Classics (Michael Alexander transl)

( I am unable to post a picture of my version, which has an enlarged version of part of a bowl from the Sutton Hoo collection in the British Museum. Mine was published in 1973, transl by Michael Alexander, Penguin Classics, 1973, paperback).

I had studied Old English in university, and very much enjoyed it. There was something about the use of alliteration that appealed to me: 'Him da Scyld gewat to gescaephwile,/ felahror feran on Frean waere.' (lines 26-27). If you say it out loud, as the bard would have recited it in the smoky halls long ago, you can get a sense of the rhythm, the recurring sounds that are almost hypnotic. It was a way to recall for the bard from memory the lay, and I think it also stirred in the blood of every listener ancient echoes of remembering. I did not keep my text of Old English dictionary and texts that I used, which I now of course regret since one of things I loved was translating the original old English directly, and then transforming it into modern usage. I could see the beginnings of our language, and my ancestry, in the Old English.

The lines above translate in my edition by Michael Alexander to: 'At the hour shaped for him Scyld departed, the hero crossed into the keeping of his Lord.'

This is an epic poem, and it is beautiful. I should have remembered how much I loved Old English, but over the years I had forgotten. And I love this version of Beowulf; I have Seamus Heaney's version, which I am going to read next month, so that I give a little time to sit in my mind this version before going with the award-winning version. From the bit I have peeked at though, I think I can say I prefer this version - Alexander's because it is as close to a direct translation of the Old English, which I have said above that I love. There is a directness to this translation, an immediacy that Old English contains in itself: 'It is a sorrow in spirit for me to say to any man/ - a grief in my heart - what the hatred of Grendel/ has brought me to in Heorot, what humiliation,/ what harrowing pain. My hall-companions,/ my war-band, are dwindled; Weird has swept them/ into the power of Grendel.'(473-478) I love the word 'Weird' for fate. I love the alliteration, I love how the words are used so that we have to say each of them - this isn't easy poetry that you can say hurriedly, you have to say each word, so you feel the poetry with your mouth as well as hear it.

All the way through the poem runs the Viking way of life, interspersed with the new Christian religion - we are seeing the usurption of the old Gods by the new one in this part (told by the bard in the hall):
'.......until One began
to encompass evil, an enemy from hell.
Grendel they called this cruel spirit,
the fell and fen his fastness was,
the march his haunt. This unhappy being
had long lived in the land of monsters
since the Creator cast them out
as kindred of Cain. For that killing of Abel
the eternal Lord took vengeance.
There was no joy of that feud: far from mankind
God drove him out for his deed of shame!
From Cain came down all kinds of misbegotten
-ogres and elves and evil shades -
as also the Giants, who joined in long
wars with God.' (lines 101 - 115)

This is the first time I have encountered a recounting of what happened to Cain, and it is fascinating to see how the bard recounts how evil things are from Cain, so part of God's landscape, but not to be tolerated. This is only a side part of the poem, for the most part it is Norse, with the warrior's way of life paramount:
'For in youth an atheling should so use his virtue,
give with a free hand while in his father's house,
that in old age, when enemies gather,
established friends shall stand by him
and serve him gladly. It is by glorious action
that a man comes by honour in any people.' (lines 20-25)

This is the Viking code, and it is repeated throughout the poem, and at the end has a special resonance because '
The band of picked companions did not come
to stand beside about him, as battle-usage asks,
offspring of athelings; they escaped to the wood,
saved their lives.
Sorrow filled/the breast of one man. The bonds of kinship
nothing may remove for a man who thinks rightly.' (lines 2596-2603)

I was enthralled by this poem, and was transported back in time to halls of warriors drinking and laughing, shouting boasts and knowing their days are numbered by Weird so living knowing they are going to die one day.

I love the dragon at the end. Beowulf is such a hero that he kills Grendel with his bare hands (which turns out to be the only thing that can kill Grendel), then Grendel's mother, and then, at the end, a dragon. I admit here that while I knew Tolkien lectured and studied on Norse myths, I did not know that almost his entire idea of Smaug was taken from Beowulf. I was stunned when I read it:
....Men did not know
of the way underground to it; but one man did enter,
went right inside, reached the treasure,
the heathen hoard, and his hand fell
on a golden goblet. The guardian, however,
if he had been caught sleepig by the cunning of the thief,
did not conceal this loss. It was not long til the near-
dwelling people discovered that the dragon was angry. (lines 2214-2220)

I suppose that it is an honour to Beowulf that Tolkien almost directly copied how Bilbo creeps down the tunnel and discovers Smaug asleep on the hoard of treasures, and how, after Bilbo escapes him, Smaug torments the people of Dale until one man slays him - in the same manner that Beowulf's dragon is killed by Wiglaf, the one man who stands beside Beowulf in his last hour of need:

'His hand burned as he helped his kinsman,
but the brave soldier in his splendid armour
ignored the head and hit the attacker
somewhat below it, so that the sword went in,
flashing-hilted; and the fire began
to slacken in consequence.
The king {Beowulf}
once more took command of his wits......
and the Geats' Helm struck through the serpent's body.

So daring drove out life: they had downed their foe
by common action, the atheling pair,
and had made an end of him. So in the hour of need
a warrior must live. ' (lines 2696-2709)

The last line, for me, is the key to the whole work, and my favourite line. It is, I think what has become the motto for most fantasy work, and any epic poem ever written: who comes in the hour of need to save the people? As much as I personally am against war, I admire heroism, I admire facing death bravely, so in my deepest heart I admire some of the Viking culture. (Plundering and raping and killing women and children, no.)

And even if Tolkien did borrow the dragon and dragon-lore from Beowulf (and didn't mention it), that dragon-lore has passed directly into our literature. We all know how to kill a dragon - though I will admit that Tolkien embellished by saying there was a tiny part on Smaug's chest that was not covered with scales, where his heart could be hit by an arrow flown true (I think it's safe to say I know The Hobbit by heart now!!) I still love Smaug, too, as well as this nameless dragon from Beowulf. Monsters from the dark, brave heroes facing death to save their people, loyalty - and cowardice -, treasure, courage, there is not much to not like in Beowulf. I know why it's a classic now. I'm just sorry it took me so long to read it.

However, before I close, I want to talk about how we recreate myths, how over centuries we rework these myths; because, to my surprise, last night I finished Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, and the last story, The Monarch of the Glen, is about - Beowulf again:

"There was a cold wind, a sea-wind, and it seemed to Shadow that there were huge shadows in the sky, vast figures that he had seen on a ship made of the fingernails of dead men, and that they were staring down at him, that this fight was what was keeping them frozen on their ship, unable to land, unable to leave.
This fight was old, Shadow thought, older than even Mr Alice knew, and he was thinking that even as the creature's talons raked his chest. It was the fight of man against monster, and it was old as time; it was Theseus battling the Minotaur, it was Beowulf and Grendel, it was the fight of every hero who had ever stood between the firelight and the darkness and wiped the blood of something inhuman from his sword."

I am not going to talk more about Fragile Things here, I am saving that for a separate post. As most everyone who reads Neil Gaiman knows, last year he co-wrote Beowulf, a new movie version of the epic poem. I still have to see it, as I was saving it until I'd read the original poem. Now I am going to see it, and then read Seamus Heaney's rewritten version, and will do a post later. For now, I love how Gaiman ties together old myths and creates new ones; Monarch of the Glen is of course a novella of American Gods, which I think might eventually become considered a fantasy masterpiece. (I read it before I began blogging, so when I reread it, I will post about it then!) Now I know more, because I've read Beowulf; now I know more about fantasy's roots, which I did not expect, and I've remembered that, once upon a time and always, we have told each other stories about the dark, and about the heroes who fight the things roaming in the dark.

We will always need heroes, and American Gods shows Gaiman taking the old myths and stories and changing them again, to take in the new myths of the New World. It has taken 400 years for Norse myths to start being combined with North American myths, and that is part of why I think Gaiman, and Charles de Lint (who blends Celtic fairies from the old world better than almost anyone else with the North American myths), and are among the forefront of creating hybrids of new and old myths. We need the old - we brought them with us - and we need to know the myths of where we live, so we recognize the gods here, even if they wear different faces - Spider Woman, Trickster - and now, we are bringing them together in new ways. So they live, as Shadow does in Monarch when he doesn't kill Grendel; the old myths are let free. In Beowulf's time Grendel had to die; in our time now, Grendel has to live so the old gods live. Something is changing, and I wonder what Joseph Campbell would say now, about the Hero's Journey? Where are we now? For we need myths, we need stories, we need legends, and our world desperately needs heroes. That's why I think Beowulf is still relevant now - he's slaying the monsters of the dark, and we each are on a journey to slay our own monsters now. I'd rather have Beowulf (or Shadow)......I think I am going to have to reread American Gods sooner than I thought, because Shadow is bigger than normal, as Beowulf was, and it occurs to me that Shadow might actually be Beowulf in modern form......and why does it feel right that Shadow frees the characters of Norse myths, that he doesn't kill Grendel? It does, and I know the teller of Beowulf wouldn't approve, so what has changed between 700 AD (when the poem was finished) and now?

Short Story Monday - Fragile Things

I only had time to read a bit of Fragile Things tonight - short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" and his fairy-tale poem "Instructions".
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" is a neat twist on the 'girls are from another planet' idea, a line that one of the characters Vic actually uses in the story, pun intended by the author! It makes me wish Gaiman had written more of this story - it is like a mix of 'Day of the Triffids' and a Dr Who episode. And it has poetry and music from the '80's in it! It is a coming-of-age - slightly - story, and again, like the ones read last week, haunting. I'm not sure I would want to go to that party myself - but I like the idea that the girls carry the universe in their eyes. You will have to read it to find out more, Gentle Reader. (wicked grin)
"Instructions" is the kind of poem I would write if I were trying to write down how to survive a fairy tale. Worth reading, printing out, carrying with you in case you encounter any fairy tale creatures or settings in your daily travels.
I am definitely enjoying the stories and Neil Gaiman's writing in Fragile Things. Some, like "The Problem of Susan", keep returning to me at odd times, pieces of it swimming up in the surface of my mind this past week. I'll keep you posted on how I do with the two from this week. I think I will read "Instructions" again before bed, and see if it brings me any interesting dreams.
Happy Short Story reading!