Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

Picking up The Graveyard Book after the exhilarating but exhausting Chaos Walking trilogy (see a few posts below) was both a relief and a slight disappointment. Relief as it was a nicer, more straightforward, easier read (notwithstanding the brutal murder of the protagonist's entire family in the first chapter), disappointment as whatever came next after the rollercoaster of Chaos Walking was going to feel somewhat lightweight in comparison. Only slightly disappointing, mind, as Neil Gaiman is obviously in the top class of authors of imaginative fantasy and knows what he is doing no matter the material.

Coraline is, to my mind, the superior novel by Gaiman for the younger market, a near-perfect blend of surreal fantasy and horror with a wide-ranging appeal that goes beyond its target demographic. However, it was The Graveyard Book that hoovered up all the prestigious awards in the children's/young adult sector for Gaiman, and made him the first author to even win both the Carnegie and its American equivalent, the Newbery Medal, for the same novel.

Gaiman has confirmed his major inspiration for The Graveyard Book was Kipling's The Jungle Book; only the slight twist of the abandoned orphan, Bod, being raised by ghosts differs from the basics of Kipling's plot. Through eight short, snappy stories, Bod meets a range of characters, both ghost and human, that vary from the nice to the sinister to the downright weird, gets into a number of amusing and scary scrapes in both the real and supernatural worlds, and learns a few lessons about people and places and growing up along the way.

One of Neil Gaiman's standout skills as an author is his ability to write for a wide range of audiences in a variety of genres and always maintain his own authorial voice while pitching his story and tone for his intended readership each time differently and seemingly easily - although it's a hell of a difficult trick to pull off. The Graveyard Book is no exception to this - it reads just right for 9-year-olds and up, just descriptive and wordy enough to be a challenge for this age range without bombarding them with anything overly complex or confusing. Gaiman is also a talented enough author to include incidents, jokes and sly little nods that can be enjoyed by an adult audience too; one of the chief things I enjoyed about this book was the fun Gaiman has with Bod's ability to slip in between the real and supernatural worlds - used to both clever and funny effect when Bod attends a local school and uses his skills to blend into the background, barely noticed by students and teachers alike (and haven't we all worked or gone to school with someone that seems to have faded into the ether just like this?)

The Graveyard Book's effortless style, witty invention and Neil Gaiman's well-established reputation as an excellent author all combined to make this an easy choice to sweep the awards circuit at the time. However, perhaps as a consequence of the book consisting of eight short unconnected tales rather than one wholly consistent plot, I was left wanting just a little more. The main villains of the book, introduced in the penultimate chapter, offer a dark and detailed glimpse at a fantasy world that Gaiman leaves mainly unexplored as we stay confined to Bod and his adventures in and around the graveyard. Flicking through the book again shortly before writing this review, the standout element of the project struck me as being Chris Riddell's illustrations; witty, well-observed, and perfectly suited to the material, I was left wishing there had been more commissioned to accompany the book rather than just the one at the beginning of each chapter.

The Graveyard Book is smart, well written and hits many of the right notes, but there's also unexplored depths here that Gaiman might have opened up to a fuller and more interesting extent in a longer or more intricately plotted work.