Coraline (2002)

I’ve seen a few of Neil Gaiman’s TV efforts now – Neverwhere and his Who episodes – and I’ve listened to the radio adaptation of Neverwhere, but this is the first book of his that I’ve read.  As with his TV work, I like Coraline’s slightly off-kilter, somewhat dark, very British fantasy.

Coraline Jones has just moved with her parents into a large old house divided into flats.  She spends her early days exploring, getting to know the eccentric neighbors, and wondering about the door in her living room, the one with the bricked-up passageway that once led to the empty flat next to hers.  One day, though, home alone, Coraline opens the door to find the wall gone.  At the end of the passageway is a twisted through-the-looking-glass world containing Coraline’s Other House and populated by her button-eyed Other Parents.  Gradually realizing that her Other Mother has malevolent intentions, Coraline sets out to defeat the villainess.

This is a really neat book.  It’s definitely pitched for kids but still greatly accessible for adults.  I like Gaiman’s calm, observational prose in the face of all the crazy, scary things that happen to Coraline.  Our heroine is similarly unflappable, though not uncaring.  There are huge stakes in this story and Coraline knows it, but she approaches her challenges with a cool, rational head and bravery that’s more decisive than innate.

I think this quiet, collected attitude, on the part of both author and protagonist, makes the creepiness of the Other World even creepier.  Coraline goes through the door to find a world that’s just a little bit “off,” but the sense of skin-crawling foreboding builds slowly, teasingly, until you can hardly imagine how she’s able to keep her head.  The Other Mother is particularly horrific, no surprise. 

Overall, it’s a fine entry to the “And We Read This to Kids?!?” collection, with lots of menace and scary images.  Those British, I tell you – after all, kids love Doctor Who in Britain, and even before they get to the “exciting” stuff in Harry Potter, he’s being raised by unscrupulous relatives who make him live in a closet.  Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t talk.  The U.S. gave us Lemony Snicket, who killed the Baudelaire children’s parents and destroyed their home in a fire in the first chapter of the first Series of Unfortunate Events book before shipping them off to living with an abusive criminal so covetous of their inheritance that he schemes to marry a 14-year-old.

One of my favorite parts of the book, however, is a secondary character:  the cat who can similarly pass between worlds and sort of ambivalently helps Coraline in her fight against the Other Mother.  (Just “the cat,” by the way.  As it explains to Coraline – in the Other World, it can talk – “Now, you people have names.  That’s because you don’t know who you are.  We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”)  In a way, it’s sort of a more even-keeled version of the Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere:  clever, enigmatic, more than a little imperious, and usually nowhere in sight when Coraline wants it around, but still generally on her side.

Warnings

Some major scariness for kids and disturbing elements.