I grew up in a small town on the north shore of
Massachusetts, and so I was lucky. Not only was Salem nearby—with its
witches and cobwebbed history—but we had some old graveyards right in our
town. Jenny and I got it in our heads that we wanted nothing more than to
camp overnight in a graveyard. Preferably the oldest graveyard in town.
Ideally on Halloween. Upon hearing this request, my mother didn’t
immediately forbid this venture. Instead, she waited a little while—a
while during which we made plans involving tents and chocolate bars and grave
rubbings and such. Then she gathered us to share the unfortunate news
that it was illegal to camp in graveyards. We were forced to abandon our
plans, moving into new supernatural investigations.
I first heard about Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book from my nephew, a
precocious reader and one of my favorite people with whom to talk about
books. When I asked him what it was about, he told me that it starts with
the murder of a family in which one member—a toddler—escapes and is rescued by
the ghosts of the graveyard. I was hooked. I knew that at some
point I would have to read this book, and now that I have I’ve finally gotten
my chance to spend the night in an old graveyard.
And not just one night: the toddler who escapes
death grows up in graveyard, learning the dangers of ghouls and the tricks for
becoming invisible along with his ABCs. Bod—short for Nobody—has parents
and mentors and friends and guardians just like any other boy. Except
that all of these folks just happen to be dead. This small detail doesn’t
stop them from being funny and sweet and odd and difficult in turn.
In The
Graveyard Book, Gaiman makes us believe every detail of Bod’s world.
Gaiman makes the impossible seem merely invisible, and in doing so, blurs the
line between fantasy and reality. One of my favorite passages occurs not
long after Bod has made his first “live” friend, a little girl named Scarlett:
On the way home Scarlett told her mother about the
boy called Nobody who lived in the graveyard and had played with her, and that
night Scarlett’s mother mentioned it to Scarlett’s father, who said that he
believed that imaginary friends were a common phenomenon at the age, and
nothing at all to be concerned about, and that they were fortunate to have a
nature reserve so near. (42)
Of course, five-year-old Scarlett is not making Bod
up, just as Bod is not making up his graveyard friends and caretakers, though
Scarlett—not having the Freedom of the Graveyard—cannot see them. And
upon hearing that Scarlett’s father, a teacher of particle physics, has
dedicated his life to “things that’s smaller than atoms,” Bod decides that such
a man is “probably interested in imaginary things” (44). Who can argue
with that kind of logic?
Each chapter of The
Graveyard Book holds a little adventure, while the central tension—the man
who would murder Bod is still after him, yet a boy can’t live in a graveyard
forever—remains throughout. The
Graveyard Book is a novel that can be enjoyed and appreciated at any age,
by anyone who enjoys a sometimes dark, sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical,
sometimes tender book. And certainly by anyone who believes that the
impossible might just be the invisible in disguise.
[Gaiman, Neil. The
Graveyard Book. New York: Harper, 2008.]
