Contemporary Urban Fantasy

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an interesting look at the mythos of growing up, and in some ways it reminds me of the Percy Jackson series, except without the more obvious references to old myths. Gaiman really wanted to look at childhood and the world through the eyes of a child, and used his memories and experiences with his kids to do so. The myths he pulls into this story help inform the reader that this is a child’s story because children are always imaginative and curious about the world. They create their own myths in order to describe the world around them, and to make sense of their experiences. This is what Gaiman is having his narrator do so that he can understand the adult world, such as to make sense of his parents actions, the Hempstock family, and the death of the opal miner. This whole story could just be about a child’s reaction and view of the opal miner’s suicide, wherein he turns the miner’s worries about money into having a coin choke him in the middle of the night because money is a scary and powerful staple in the adult world. However, the ‘reality’ of the story does not matter, because the narrator is experiencing all of these events as he tells them, so the fantastic elements of the story are reality regardless. I really enjoyed Gaiman’s use of existing myth in order to further the narrator’s own myth of his life and childhood. The coin that is lodged  in the narrator’s throat after the miner dies could represent the fare that a soul would have to have in order to cross the river Styx in Greek mythology. This can symbolise the ‘death’ of the narrator’s innocence, and suggest that he is about to enter his own version of the underworld. This journey itself reminds me of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, wherein Orpheus must go to the underworld in order to retrieve his lover, Eurydice. On the way back up from the underworld Eurydice looks back, and is forever lost to Orpheus. In Gaiman’s story, the narrator is not meant to let go of Lettie’s hand when they go to try to stop the spirit that was brought into the world by the opal miner’s death. He accidentally does, this allowing the spirit, Ursula, to create a bridge between her world, the one of fantasy and monsters, and his. Over the course of the story the narrator does become lost because he forgets all of these events when he leaves the duck pond. He is lost to that world of fantasy and to his own myth. Gaiman has reinvented how a contemporary audience should look at myth in this story. Myth is not simply the old stories of God’s that you grow up with, it’s your own story as you experience and tell it. The old myths can help you do so, even, by giving you a basis to work from.