The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

Ghastly, Ghostly, Gruesome, Great!

Who loaned me this book? Robin? Tom-El? Whoever it was, I thank you. The Graveyard Book is the first thing I've read by juvenile fiction writer Neil Gaiman (whose name looks like caiman, a kind of crocodile), but it will not be the last. This book was justifiably given the Newbury medal for excellence in children's literature.

The pen and ink art is gorgeous
and evocative. The art program
adds an amazing amount of
atomsphere.

I found this book in a side pocket of my suitcase when I was unpacking at a Youthbuild gathering in Kentucky. Surrounded by trees on a mountainside near Hazard, I took every chance to be peacefully by myself and, as it turned out, reading. The Youthbuild gathering was terrific, but it was the quiet time that meant the most to me. Hundreds of birds singing, the hum of ceiling fans on a huge screened porch...in this alternative world, I was easily drawn into Gaiman's eerie otherness.

The Graveyard Book is set in--guess where--a graveyard. A toddler whose parents are murdered wanders away through a door left open by the killer and ends up in the graveyard late at night, when the ghosts are out going about their nightly business. The ghosts take the toddler under their protection and decide to raise him as one of their own. (Gaiman says that he modeled this book on Kipling's Jungle Book, in which a child is raised by jungle animals, but I thought most of Harry Potter.)

Gaiman presents the ghostly community straight on...doesn't need to justify it or explain it. He sort of made me wonder why I ever thought ghosts did NOT live perfectly interesting lives at night. Dry (as bones) humor saturates the text, especially when the ghosts are referred to by what is on their tombstones, as in, "He went down the hill at a run, a ten-year-old boy in a hurry, going so fast he almost tripped over Digby Poole (1795-1860, As I Am So Shall You Be), righting himself by effort of will."

The oldest tomb in Bod's cemetery is an ancient
barrow, which figures ominously in the plot.

The toddler, named Nobody Owens, grows up with spectral tutors and protectors. He learns to read by deciphering the tombstones. Some types of ghosts can leave the graveyard, and those bring him food. In fact, there are many kinds of ghosts and otherwise undead creatures looking out for Bod, as he is called, reminiscent of the Harry Potter stories. And some of them are on the lookout for the person/entity who killed Bod's family (Graveyard's Voldemort).

Graveyard stays pretty light, as Bod gets into and out of trouble. The chapters are funny in themselves, and actually charming, a word I don't use too often. Any fourth grader and up will enjoy them just as cool ghost stories.

However, quite subtly and unawares, Bod gathers knowledge that will help him protect himself when the murderer returns. It is subtle because I didn't realize it until the crisis occurred...it was not telegraphed. Bod collects specific knowledge of stories, languages of the dead, and sacred objects like amulets. The story does get a bit grim toward the end, as Bod and the ghosts cope with a group of attackers. The attackers are not treated gently or kindly.

The graveyard gates have kept Bod's enemies
out--but will it keep him in forever?

A major theme in this book is whether Bod will ever get to live outside the safety of the graveyard. Several times he seeks to stay forever, without really understanding what death is. In the end, he chooses to leave. This echoes wonderfully the developmental crises of adolescence (which some of us never get over)--the approach of independence and the avoidance thereof. Somehow, the child must feel both safe and strong to go forth, and must want to explore a wider world. Children thrown out without the sense of safety, strength, and curiosity will fail. The graveyard world is a security blanket; and Bod resists the measures taken to prepare him to leave, such as the education he receives.

I recommend this terrific book. The language is not difficult (except for names). It is imaginative and interesting, fast-paced, at times ecstatic, and utterly accepting of death, which oddly bequeaths the joy in the book.

Graveyards

Since I've been researching family ancestry in the past few months, I feel an amazing affinity for graveyards. They are the holders of record, the names, the dates, the "daughter of," the "loving mother and wife," the "Grand Army of the Republic, 1864." If you can get to the stones before they weather away, they will give up great information, carefully hoarded information. Chuck Wallace and I met in a local graveyard the other day, to let our dogs roam (with poop bags ready, of course). This graveyard is so old that the graves are undecorated, tilted, worn. Still, Chuck took me to his favorite stone--one in which a misspelled word is carefully repaired by the carver. What a crisis it must have been in a time of grief to discover this egregious and disrespectful error! Who was responsible for getting it fixed? Was the stone carver ever after shunned?

Liz I is a primary marker of history for me. Was
an ancestor alive before, during, or after her
reign? Was the ancestor a contemporary of
William Shakespeare?

In genealogy, finding the grave marker is a major discovery. It makes the ancestor physically real, even as it marks his or her passage into physical non-reality. I have followed the lives and deaths of so many ancestors. The simple data says so much--the historical context of the birth and death years: what was happening at that time? Was she born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I? Did he die before or after Columbus arrived in the Americas? Many of my forebears were English Puritans, arriving in America between 1620 and 1650, a time of religious upheaval and persecution in England. Many others migrated to Ohio from the east between 1780 and 1820, probably claiming land grants as payment for service in the American Revolution.

A map of a cemetery

Birth records are evocative. How many children did the women have? How many of the children lived less that five years? Did a woman have children every year? How old was she when she married? How old was her husband? What kind of life was that?

Fortunately (except for those of you bored stiff by this genealogy stuff), graveyards are quite well-documented. People have marked locations and copied off information. We DO know where the bodies are buried! And me? I don't know. Now that cremation is getting more popular, it is likely that my final resting place will be unmarked. I will end up like one of Gaiman's characters, unsanctified, forgotten. The only beauty will be that I will not be around to find out!

Space Cadet, by Robert A. Heinlein

Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher could never
escape his goody-two-shoes reputation on
Star Trek: NexGen

No, there is no irony in the title of this book--Heinlein wrote his book Space Cadet long before "space cadet" became synonymous with "airhead." And, really, I wonder if this book wasn't the inspiration for the most noteworthy of space cadets--acting Ensign Wesley--Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: Next Generation. The main character Matt Dodson shares only a certain earnestness and respect for authority with Wesley. Unlike Wesley, he is not that great at science and math (but is a natural as a pilot), hangs out with people mainly his own age, and he travels without his mother.

Space Cadet, written in the late 1940s, is the tale of teenager Matt's training for the Space Patrol--a peace-keeping force created to prevent the use of nuclear weapons on Earth and its neighboring planetary bodies. The story follows him from newbie to independent young officer. With his friend Tex, Matt goes through many agonizing tests in a boot-camp setting, during which many applicants are winnowed out. These tests include a ride through the too-many-G-forces/too-little-G-forces gizmo (Matt withstands 7 Gs and passes the test); personality challenges (there's a faked tragedy for the applicants to respond to); academic tests; and even ethical tests.

The 1948 cover--see below
for other covers with
other goals

Matt and Tex pass the tests and move on to a training ship and further study. Eventually, they move out into space as junior officers attached to a working ship. Eventually, they move into increasingly dramatic settings and adventures--especially when they crash land on Venus. On Venus, you see the impact that the training has had on these young men--the resources they have to draw on, the principles they follow. (And, of course, there is a counter-example, a cadet who washed out of the program early and scorns its values.)

But, the charm of this book is not particularly in its plotting. It's in the details. It's in the pace. Once again (see my blog entry on Rocketship Galileo), Heinlein pulls me right into the world of the book. Although nothing dramatic happened for pages on end, Heinlein created enough hooks on Matt for the reader to feel attached, to slide into Matt's spacesuit with him (that sounds kinky), to face the challenges, wonder at the new systems and knowledge, hope for success, fear failure. 

Slide rule--yet another wet dream
of science in the 1950s and 1960s--looks
like a tool for WASPs only

Heinlein is adept at drawing enough details into the picture to make it real without overdrawing or over-explaining. He gives enough for your imagination to complete the environment but does not worry if what I picture is not exactly what he meant. I was amazed, because I was hooked into this obsolete boy's adventure  novel right away. I struggled with moving through weightlessness and with magnetic boots and with trying hard not to need to use the airsick bags. I fretted over "astrogation" and the mathematics it required (and the slide rule!). I worried over my fitness for such an elite corps. (see the video at <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/MiRlJSttQuc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> for a tutorial on weightlessness, which makes it look embarrassingly easy.)

Young Matt is a great character--fun, but not dangerous; flawed, but not a loser. I was most interested in what happened to him during his Earth-leave, when he visited his home in Des Moines for the first time after entering the Patrol. What he found was a total disconnect. He found that his family could not understand anything he talked about and that it was all too complicated to explain. It was not discussed in the book, but I saw it as a critical moment for Matt--when his life in the Patrol became more real to him than his life on Earth.

This beautiful photo of Venus uses
color to indicate the concentration of
various chemicals in the atmosphere

The Venus part of the book was charming in its antiquated vision of Venus. For now, scientists do not believe that any life can exist on Venus--not only is the atmosphere thick with poisons, but the air pressure is so great that it exerts a dramatic crushing force. The surface is barren. If life might be there, we would have a hard time detecting it--our apparatus would need to be so thick to avoid being crushed that any delicate maneuvering would be difficult.




For more information, go to  http://library.thinkquest.org/18652/venus.html.

Matt and Tex, however, find a tropical dangerland with swamps and creepy critters and alien intelligence. This is their lab for putting into practice all of their training--their training in values and self-control as much as in any particular subject. They find that as a group they have more intelligence that any of them individually.

So, another thumbs-up for Heinlein. I don't think I've been to Venus with Matt, but I do feel like I went to some other world that was mistakenly called that. I have a feeling of movement, of time, of growing up. That's cool. And, that's good, because I have three or four more Heinlein books to read from my Easy Reader children's literature list.

Me and Space: Evolved Lemur

This is the tech-guy cover
from the 1980s or so, I'd
guess

I was a child in the 1960s (I turned 10 the year the moon landing took place in 1969), so maybe it's not a surprise that I have so much interest in space and space travel and the interaction of humans with unearthly conditions (such as weightlessness) and with others unlike themselves (such as Republicans). How do we solve the problems? Are there human characteristics that truly define us as a species? One of the most defining characteristics of humans is the sense of wonder, the tendency to gawk and to explore that which puzzles and amazes us. What lies beyond the horizon? What lies beyond the end point of the solar wind? But does this define just some of us? Is hide-boundedness another trait of humans--the desire for stasis and certainty?

See, these are issues that my submergence in the genre of science fiction have awoken in me. Because I did (and still do) submerge. My inner self resonates with the themes and imagery of sci-fi. It is abiding, and I know that because it has abided. There are episodes of Star Trek I have seen dozens of times, but I am still somehow intrigued. One of these is an episode of NexGen in which the crew started to devolve because the inactive content of their DNA was triggered by a virus. Troi was turning into a fish. Riker became a Neanderthal. Even scarier, Worf turned into a Neanderthal Klingon. But most touching was Captain Picard devolving into a lemur, acutely aware of sounds and sights, ever fearful. Could his humanness reach through the genetic programming to rescue the ship?

This is the soft-focus warm and fuzzy cover, probably
from the 1990s. Makes science fiction safe for kids--
although this is a distinctly adolescent book--not
for children.

I have seen Godzilla in the original. I have seen Hitler's hand creeping across the gangway of a submarine. I have made first contact with species so radically different that communication was nearly impossible (Republicans again!). I've been on so many different planets and spaceships that I cannot count them. What has this done to me? First, I know that it leads me to see humans as a species like any other on Earth, subject to the same survival pressures as any other. We are not divine. We are not the chosen ones. We are not on top. Second, it has increased my likelihood to see events from many points of view, to see that there are as many priorities as there are people. It has led me to attempt to lead with peace, not hostility.

There. That's my space manifesto. I am most touched by the Voyager space probes, which have now reached the endpoint of the solar wind, the outer edge of our solar system. And yet they travel on. They continue to gather information and will even after they can no longer communicate it to us. The Voyager probes mirror the journey we are all on--we are curious and communicating beings and we will keep looking...for what? For whatever comes.

So, weird, dweeb, nerd, geek? I'll accept the title of "evolved lemur," thank you very much.

Mockingjay & the Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

If you have not read Mockingjay, please cut the two-page epilogue from the book and burn it before reading. This Happy Ending Device trivializes all three of the books that have gone before and insults the intelligence of the reader. I can't believe Collins fell victim to the same Happy Ending pressures that felled J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. And they all lived happily ever after...after unspeakable trauma, the epilogues of both series are crushingly bad. I have removed these pages from my copy of Mockingjay.

YouTube has many videos of Suzanne Collins, including this one of her reading the first chapter of Mockingjay:  http://youtu.be/1MY6yEt6aZs

I finished Mockingjay a few days ago and I feel confused--as confused as our hero Katniss feels most of the time. The amount of death and violence in this book makes Hunger Games and Catching Fire seem mild. Yet, I kept reading and felt compelled to do so. I am disturbed that I liked such violent books so much. And I am disturbed with the duality of Katniss's role. She flips like a coin in the air from ingenue beauty queen sweetheart to hard-bodied killing machine soldier.

Where is Katniss herself in this pink/black dichotomy? That's the question that kept me going. How would Katniss survive this role whiplash? I have felt this so many times (especially in adolescence)--that the choices presenting themselves don't fit me at all and yet I am forced to choose one. As I discussed in my blog on Catching Fire, it is the fact that these books are psychology evocative that makes them so good. I have many times felt the hate and blackness and helplessness and coercion. The images that I have searched for to represent these feelings have been violent and black. (I wrote a poem titled "Birth of the Baby of Death"!)

A scruffy tiger cat helps humanize this book.
I could write a complete essay on the cat's
role in the story.

Mockingjay finishes out Collins's trilogy. Katniss is still on her feet, physically safe, but filled with guilt, horror, and anger. She is turned into a public relations device for the districts' uprising against the Capitol, a pawn who once again is manipulated into unthinkable relationships with unspeakable horror. And the reader shares the impact of all of this with Katniss. She struggles to maintain her humanity in the face of her own participation in every level of coercion and violence. I won't go into detail about the plot...it's a war story.

I loved Katniss. I wanted to help her. I wanted to see her survive somehow, some way, somewhere. My engagement with her was one of the key factors in keeping me reading through to the end. Her fate became entwined with mine--if she could find a way to keep going, I guess I can. When I imagine what I would have thought of these books if I had read them 35 years ago, I see my teenage self clinging to these books, keeping them by my bed, valuing their reflection of my inner turmoil.

And truly, if you want to step way, way back and get all metaphysical, these books can be viewed as a hero journey for the adolescent. Adolescence can be seen as a lengthy battle for identity, autonomy, value, perspective, and wisdom. Adolescence is a fight like Katniss fights.

And, of course, these battles never really end as I grow into middle age, but I have more tools and strategies now, and nothing inside me is as serious as it was then. The important things are outside me now. And Katniss finds out what we all sort of find out (or should)--that sometimes evil is not punished, sometimes wrongs are unrighted, and many questions go unanswered. Loving anyway is what comes out of the struggle. Loving yourself anyway, loving another person, loving life anyway. Emerge from the flames and ashes still able to love.

The Hunger Games trilogy is impressive and strong. Even with all the violence and torment, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend these books. They have some strong truth in them.

Much useful information at this site, including summaries, character lists, study guides, and other resources on this trilogy:  http://www.gradesaver.com/author/suzanne-collins/