Neil Gaiman does an imaginative variation on Kipling's Jungle Book. Instead of Mowgli living in a jungle and befriending the wildlife, we have Nobody Owens, a child who finds himself orphaned and living in a large cemetery being raised by ghosts (and a vampire).
Considering that this is a children's book, the opening chapter is very dark indeed with The Man Jack proving to be a really quite scary villain as he creeps through the house and viciously murders Bod's entire family.
Luckily for Bod, he's chosen that day to toddle unseen from the house and up the road to the deserted (by humans) graveyard. After a confrontation and a plea on his behalf, the decision is taken by the ghosts to grant young Bod the freedom of the graveyard and raise him to adulthood.
Like the Jungle Book, this book takes the form of a series of interlinked short stories. The longest story joins them together and uses plot elements from all the preceding tales to give a more than satisfying conclusion to one of the overarching plots. I found the final chapter to be really quite moving.
As usual for Neil Gaiman, the prose is excellent. He achieves a fairy tale feeling which is deceptively charming, given the darkness of the subject matter. Bod is a brilliant creation and watching him grow and mature is a lovely experience. The supporting cast are all uniformly engaging, some mysterious, some funny, some scary. The illustrations are rather good as well.
I was going to power through this book but found myself slowing down to savour it instead. As children's books go this has plenty to engage the more mature reader too.
Buy it for your kids if you must, but don't feel ashamed of reading it for yourself too. You won't regret it.
No comments:
Post a Comment