Author Neil Gaiman at his home in Cambridge, Mass.
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Although he was born in Hampshire, England, and owns a home in Wisconsin, at the moment Gaiman is renting an enormous old house with his wife, the musician Amanda Palmer, a short walk from Harvard Yard. It used to belong to an extremely senior presidential adviser, and it still has a little private phone booth in it where President Kennedy or the Gorbachevs could talk on a secure line. "At some point you will probably wind up peeing in the toilet by the door," Gaiman says, "and you can say, 'I peed in the same toilet that pretty much every American President except Nixon peed in.'"
Magic Is Like Salt
Gaiman Describes the ocean at the End of the Lane as "an accidental novel" because it began as a short piece written as a gift for his wife, based on a grim anecdote that his late father told him: once, when Gaiman was a child, a man with gambling debts stole the family car and committed suicide in it. But the short story got long. "It all just sort of turned up," Gaiman says. "Normally when people tell me they like things of mine, I get properly proud. I go, 'Well, yes, I was the one who crafted that, cunningly and brilliantly, and of course I deserve your applause!' With this one, it's kind of like, 'Ah, thank you, thank you, I don't know quite how I did it.'"
Ocean is that relative rarity, a book for adults written from a child's point of view. (Other examples would be The Painted Bird and To Kill a Mockingbird.) The child is a 7-year-old boy in rural England whose family takes in lodgers, one of whom, an opal miner, does in fact kill himself in the family car. But from there Gaiman improves on memory. The lodger's suicide has consequences: it attracts the attention of an evil spirit who begins making mischief in the area.
Fortunately for the boy, he makes the acquaintance of one Lettie Hempstock, an 11-year-old girl from down the lane. Lettie lives with her mother and grandmother, and it soon becomes apparent that despite appearances, Lettie is neither 11 nor, in any conventional sense, human. The Hempstocks have extraordinary powers, and the duck pond behind their house is--in some mysterious, magical way--also an ocean. When the evil spirit invades the boy's family in the form of a sexy but wicked nanny, a kind of anti--Mary Poppins, he and Lettie must join forces to send it back where it belongs.
It would be easy to categorize Gaiman's work as fantasy--I wouldn't feel uncomfortable doing so--but he resists the label. "I love writing stuff where I get to set the rules," he says when pressed. "Which is I guess a bit like fantasy, in that I love being God when I write. Could I have written Ocean at the End of the Lane with absolutely no magic? Sure, I could. But the magic in Ocean for me is like adding a little salt. It brings out the tastes. It makes things that happen, happen more so."