The Graveyard Book

I've been struggling with this review for a week. After the awards Neil Gaiman has garnered for this novel, I was looking forward to another entry in the fine list of thoughtful, well-written books from him, and to be honest, on that score I was not disappointed. The story of Nobody Owens begins with the murder of his parents and continues with his being raised in a graveyard by ghosts from various historical periods, a vampire and a werewolf. Given the "Freedom of the Graveyard," Bod is able to interact physically with the ghosts, and he is also trained in stereotypical frightening techniques: fading from view, installing fear, and walking through other people's dreams. It is a fascinating idea, giving Gaiman free reign to do the legend-making he is so adept at.

And he does build some interesting folklore. There's the Jacks of All Trades, an ancient society made up of men named Jack, intent on…well, it's never really clear what their goals are. What we do know, however, is that they have a prophecy (don't all ancient societies?) that indicates to them that Bod will lead to the destruction of their order, and so he must die. Note however, that while this society is hinted at, it is only really developed towards the end of the novel, and this explanation of their activities is tossed off pretty quickly in the course of the biggest action sequence in the novel. Opposing the Jacks is an even more secret society of werewolves, vampires, mummies and other fabled creatures named The Honour Guard. Silas, one of the members of The Honour Guard, is a vampire who has been named Bod's guardian, since he is the only denizen of the graveyard that can be corporeal outside its boundaries. Silas's regular disappearances appear mysterious and dark until he reveals that he has spent the entire book fighting the Jacks in their locations around the world. But most of this conflict takes place offstage and the reader only learns of it towards the end of the novel. The whole conflict just screams out for more books and stories detailing their ages-long battle.

The weakness is that the novel makes no bones about being a children's book (even calling it "young adult" is a stretch), and so there is not a lot of depth to the proceedings. There lurks some undercurrents of bigger things as the story goes on, but they are never really dealt with significantly, since exploring those unhappy ideas would cause the novel to stray beyond the boundaries of its age group. For instance, while Bod's parents are murdered within the first few pages of the book, Gaiman slips humor into the narrative when it could be its most terrifying, diffusing the darkness with his description of Bod as a toddler making his way across town and into the graveyard. Most of the book is spent describing Bod growing up, narrating a few interesting adventures in his life at the graveyard: meeting a witch, making living friends, and trying to go to school as a "normal" kid. These adventures really act as chapter-long anecdotes, scribing the arc of a fairly standard coming-of-age story with a fantastical setting.

But each of the stories also contributes a key element to the crisis of the novel and its resolution: Bod seeking revenge for the murder of his parents. In some ways, those passages just highlight the fluffiness of the previous chapters, but the chase scenes, while somewhat suspenseful, seriously understate the seriousness of Bod's predicament. In rather short order, Bod succeeds with the nonchalance of Tom Swift a more recent child savant, Wesley Crusher. It is terrifically fun and satisfying as it happens, but diminishes somewhat in reflection. And then to maintain a sort of childish innocence, Bod's revenge does not actually end up in the death of any of his pursuers; granted they are all disposed of in potentially guilelessly horrible ways—the unknown is far worse than the known, even if it includes the possibility of escape.

The result of all this is a fun read, not requiring a lot of thought for adults unless they are in the company of a child seeking explanation. Gaiman does offer an interesting point of view for a child entering society with his metaphor of a child raised by the dead entering the world of the living. But he doesn't push those issues too far, just evoking the emotional highlights, enough to prepare children for the difficulties of social interaction in their lives to come and to offer adults wistful reminders of their entry into the larger community. The characters are lightly drawn and the narration and voices all evoke some whimsy, even when Bod is in the most danger. The Graveyard Book is a worthy addition to Gaiman's burgeoning reputation as a great storyteller, leaving this reader wanting more stories from this same world but written for a slightly older audience.

Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

I was waiting to write this entry until the second half of Neil Gaiman's epitaph for Batman had been delivered, but it's been delayed until mid-April. I won't remember these ideas that long, and I'll be lucky if I have remembered them from when the first part was released until now.

In a recent Permanent Damage, Steven Grant talks about "mad ideas" being a driving force behind DC's recently completed Final Crisis (http://comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=20019). I've read a lot of the comics that Grant uses as his examples of "mad ideas" and really enjoyed most of them; I appreciate Promethea though it really drove me nuts as it seemed to careen wildly off its original course. I'm a huge fan of American Flagg, Planetary, and Authority (well not the current Authority—what has Wildstorm done with their apocalyptic setting? I guess that's fodder for another entry down the road). And Morrison's recent run of Batman seems to come out of the school of mad ideas as well.

As a coda to Morrison's bizarre and infuriating run, Neil Gaiman offers up the two-part "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" perhaps an homage to Alan Moore's brilliant "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" from (can it really be) nearly two decades ago. Right off the top, Andy Kubert's art indicates something is not quite…normal…with Gaiman's story. Using shades of sepia and architecture from the early to mid-20^th century in his panels, and an aura ethereality, Kubert suggests that the story being told is a memory, but it's not quite like any story of Batman we have seen before. And the characters attending the wake for Batman are teasingly familiar—they look right and they have the right names—but they don't quite act right. Alfred greets the foes of Batman as longtime compatriots? I particularly enjoyed the inside joke of the waif offering to watch The Joker's car for him then fearing for his life if he steals the wheels, a winking nod to the origin story of Jason Todd, who does in fact die at the hands of The Joker in normal continuity (never mind punching the walls of reality…).

But the weirdness really starts when the wake's attendees are invited to tell stories about Batman. The first belongs to Catwoman, who talks of the love that she and Batman shared, beginning with her early days as a criminal (complete with the first Catwoman costume) to her latest appearances, when she gave up crime and became a hero for his sake. But it never appears to be enough for Batman, and when he refuses to give up his own crime-fighting for her, she kills him out of spite. The wake takes this in stride, but the reader is taken aback by this revelation; it does not jibe with the still-painful recollection of Morrison's story of the death of Batman, just completed. And two shadows, their figures indistinct discuss Catwoman's story, apparently unheard by the attendees. One of them speaks for the reader, refuting the story, while the other tells the first to be patient.

Alfred then rises to tell an even more offbeat and unexpected story—that he is the mastermind behind the criminals that infest Gotham City, and that in actuality they are really just actors he has hired to appease his dull-witted boss, Bruce Wayne, who cannot see how ineffective his attempts at crime-fighting really are. To Alfred, Wayne is a lovable dullard in a stupid costume, and to protect him from harm, Alfred's actor friends keep Wayne safe away from the real criminals in Gotham City, against whom he would not stand a chance. Again, the first shadow protests and the second shadow demurs.

Gaiman's character's flashbacks do two really interesting things—first they accurately and concisely sum up years' worth of backstory about these characters in twisted and yet accurate ways. Catwoman really does love Batman. Alfred really does work to protect Bruce Wayne. But these stories also treat those characters as if they were real people. Of course a woman spurned for decades would grow so frustrated she would consider murdering her lover. Of course any sane man watching his ward put on a goofy costume and fighting criminals at night would go to extremes to protect him.

The result is an artifact that is in some ways opposite to what Grant Morrison did throughout his "R.I.P" arc. Morrison's story-telling is based on resurrecting obscure bits of Batman trivia and driving the plot with them. Without using editorial notes, he relies on the reader knowing details to move his story along. The mystery is in trying to figure out the plot points and then tie them together to figure out what's going on in the story. The story itself was fairly predictable in its broad strokes if chaotic in its minutiae. Gaiman, on the other hand, bases his mystery on why the characters are doing what they do. By genericizing the stories told at the wake, Gaiman makes his story universally approachable. By not relying on esoterica, Gaiman's story is also more satisfying, even in its incomplete state.

I ranted about "R.I.P." earlier in this blog, and perhaps the point of Morrison's story is the utter insanity of a man running around in a bat-suit. His mad idea is to deconstruct the history by over-reliance on the details, the often conflicting and never really considered in context of a person's life details, and finish off by killing off the character whose life is such a chaotic, paradoxical, unholy mess. Gaiman, on the other hand lifts up those conflicts, pointing out that such idiotic moments are exactly why readers love the characters as we do. By distilling the essence of the stories and characters down, the story allows the reader to appreciate the decades of story-telling without getting bogged down in the minutiae. And then, in what may be an ironic triumph, the one person complaining about the details, the first shadowy figure, is probably Batman himself, finding himself in the place of "reading" his own life story and disturbed because it is not the story he remembers.

There is also an ironic twist when comparing Gaiman's ideas to that of Moore. "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" sets up the framework of telling Superman's story in a way that has the façade of being the story Superman always wanted to hear—a comic version of It's a Wonderful Life—assuming for a moment that Superman is unhappy and makes his wish, only to discover (as George Bailey always does) that his current life is not so bad after all. In Gaiman's story, Batman is forced to see how his life could've played out not if he could change it, but if those around him could've changed it to suit their own issues.

Of course, none of this may have any bearing on enjoying either story arc, but it does explain to me why Gaiman's story appeals more, based as it is in his implicit background as a meta-storyteller (does he think about doing these kinds of things explicitly? I know he's a smart man but that would make him scary smart). I'm really looking forward to the second half of the story and suspect that when it is collected, it will b something to recommend to non-comics fans as another example of the literariness that is potential in comics.

Interworld

Sometimes, you just happen to stumble on things that brighten your day. I have no idea how I found out about this novel by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, but it was easily orderable. And I'm tremendously glad I did.

The story focuses on young Joey Harker, a boy in his mid-teens, dealing with all the issues that come with that age for boys, including matters of self-esteem and, of course, girls. It's no help that Joey has a penchant for getting completely and totally lost. And one day, for a school project, he finds himself in the middle of his home town with directions to get back to school, accompanied with the object of his school-boy crush; in other words, he faces the confluence of all his teen-age angsts. And his day doesn't get any better when he tries to scout his way back to school and finds himself passing through a fog bank and then into a city that looks a great deal like the one he knows, except that there are subtle differences…such as another Jo Harker living in his house, who happens to be a girl. And then he finds himself under attack, first by robots and then by an evil sorceress.

And so begins an action-filled novel that posits a multiverse with individual universes spread across a continuum. Pure science resides on one end and pure science on the other, and they are fighting for mastery of the multiverse. Fortunately Joey finds allies in a group determined to let neither side win, a group that saves him and then takes him in as a trainee in the fight.

With such a fascinating backdrop, the story doesn't have to do much to succeed, but Gaiman and Reaves do much more. This story is very much in the vein of Heinlein's juvenile novels, where the young protagonist must learn to first be self-reliant and then an integral part of a community. Interworld is written in first-person, capturing the same kind of voice that Heinlein used so successfully in books like Podkayne of Mars, a character at once curious and concerned but at the same time self-doubting and confused. (I recognize this is yet another reference to Heinlein in recent blogging. I promise that I am not seeking out these kinds of relationships or trying to force them. It's food for thought, however, and it may not be much of a stretch to say that his influence permeates deeply.) And it is this juvenile sense of wonder that grounds our exploration of this multiverse along with Joey.

Interworld turns out to be a page-turner. Most of what happens should be fairly predictable to experienced readers of fiction, but that doesn't keep the story from moving briskly as Joey falls from one complication to the next, from one revelation to another. It is also tightly plotted, with nicely placed hints provided early on and used to solve problems further down the road. Of course at some point, Joey finds himself in the clutches of the evildoers, and his escape is ingenious, based on twists on the rules of the multiverse that have been provided to the reader earlier on. There is a wide range of characters from across the universes that accompany Joey—a wolf-girl, a cyborg, and even a winged woman. Their interaction is usually fairly simplistic, but still entertaining and sometimes surprising.

According to the notes in the back, this book was originally imagined as a TV series. I imagine it would have been a highly entertaining animated series, with hooks for both young and adult viewers alike. And this describes the book as well. It strikes me as being a tremendous way to introduce young readers to speculative fiction—an engaging, adventure-filled romp through some of the tropes of the genre. But it is also appealing to older readers as well, reminding us why we fell I love with the genre in the first place and providing smiles and slight shudders along the way.