Gaiman N, Coraline, Urban Fantasy, (Bloomsbury: 2002)
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price £5.94
Corliane is a bored adolescent stuck in a strange new home with parents that don’t listen to her and a cat the occasionally talks. But that isn’t the strangest thing about the house. The strangest thing is the hidden door in the drawing room; the door that leads to the other mother, the mother with the button eyes, the one that wants to keep and love and care for Coraline forever, if she’ll only let her take out her eyes.
Ah, Gaiman. How do you review a book by Niel Gaiman? I’ve loved his work since I used to queue to buy latest edition of Sandman and have delighted in his success since. There is nobody who has an imagination quite like his (the closest was, perhaps, Pratchett – which made Good Omens particularly poignant.) Part of that imagination is because he steals liberally from any mythology he can find, and as any good author should I applaud him for this apt and appropriate theft. Part of it is because seems to have an inner child so large it may as well be an outer child. His stories are a delight.
Yet there’s something off. Sometimes the prose stutters. Sometimes the structure leaves you feeling trapped in endless epilogue. The final act of Coraline feels anti-climatic after the sheer terror of act 4 (and this is a frightening book, for adults at least; I read it out loud to my wife but strongly suspect my children would be fine) If this were any other writer the odd writing style would be off-putting.
But this is Gaiman. The sheer scope of imagination, the endless oodles of ideas, make this just a bloody good read. I enjoyed every page of this book, and I can’t wait until my kids are old enough to read it to them. I mean, talking cats, ghost children, travel through mirrors, people made out of rats, walking hands, button eyes… For ordinary human writers that’s a book each. Read Coraline. Then go read Neverwhere. Oh, and have you read Sandman? Put aside your comic bias and read Sandman.
