NOTE: There may be spoilers for the book discussed.


I know it's not a terrible original lens for discussing Neil Gaiman's CORALINE, but the story bore some similarity to Lewis Carroll's Alice stories. Both dealt with a young girl being dragged into a bizarre world, both dealt with a journey to return home, and both had a scary matriarch barring the way.

CORALINE, however, has a more modern cast with the young heroine facing everyday challenges as school shopping and work-at-home parents. Of course, she also has to deal with evil other parents that want to sew buttons on her eyes, a particularly creepy concept.

Coraline's guide through the more surreal perils is not a white rabbit, but a dryly sarcastic and self-absorbed black cat. And that's only one of the ways in which Gaiman's story is the better of the two options.

A more important reason is that Gaiman's writing is excellent. The style is simple, very much like the best writing happening in young adult stories today. It is concise, clear, and extremely evocative. It is also, for the most part, completely transparent, which is to say that it does not impede the actual story in the telling.

There can be no doubt that Gaiman is also brilliantly creative. He creates a situation that resonates as both exceptionally strange and yet hauntingly familiar. This story is the stuff of nightmares and an exploration of subconscious fears made real.

I very much enjoyed this book.

Now, however, I should discuss the things that didn't work quite as well for me.

First, I would like to return to the simplicity of the language. While it is true that this was largely a strength of the work, there were areas where the language became opaque simply because it was so uncomplicated. At times the plainer language just could not keep up with the complexity of the ideas Gaiman was exploring, and in those places the story seemed oversimplified.

Secondly, and this was perhaps my biggest issue with the narrative, I felt there were some pacing problems. The development of Coraline's real world and her subsequent entrapment in the dark world through the door was built up slowly, everything was developed in great detail creating a languorous tone that works well with the nature of the story. This slow, careful development continues through to Coraline's quest and escape. And had the story ended there no pacing problems would have existed, though the ending might have felt a bit predictable and sentimental.

Instead, Gaiman continues the tale, and rightly so. However, this last section while being similar in language moves much more quickly than the parts that came before. It felt, when I was reading it, slightly rushed and lacking in the beauty and depth that characterized the first two-thirds of the book. This is not to say that the writing was bad by any means. It was still well crafted and engaging. However, in comparison to what came before it was flat, no longer resonating as deeply with the surreal.

By the time I was finished I couldn't believe that was the end of the story. Yes, Coraline had vanquished her foe, and did so brilliantly, but I had felt like I was being hurtled towards something, and the ending I got didn't, to me, live up to that change in pacing.

Finally, while Gaiman brilliantly weaved together a number of what seemed initially to be unrelated details, there were a few that were left unconnected, or at least unexplored that I would have liked to know more about. Examples of this were Mr. Bobo and his mice, which were crucial to the story and yet somewhat nebulous, and the entity between the two worlds. I never did figure out what that creature's part in everything was and rather thought that it would have a bigger role in the last part of the book. Instead it was just forgotten, which seemed off to me if only because Gaiman spent so much time building its significance.

So, in the end I was left highly entertained, more than a little disturbed, and undeniably charmed by this story. I was also, unfortunately, left, thanks to the pacing issue and few dangling plot thread, with the impression that the story was not quite finished. It felt more like a lull in the storm than an actual ending when I read the last page.

I have no idea if this was intentional or not. I'm not even sure for all I listed those issues that created the impression as flaws that it wasn't actually the only ending that would have worked. For Coraline is an exceptional young girl, and while her adventure was over her story almost certainly wasn't. Perhaps any other emotional resolution would have just been sentimental.