The first lessons happen on the stones themselves. The boy is still very small, and nobody in the cemetery has ever owned an alphabet book, so his guardian brings two, plus a copy of The Cat in the Hat and a packet of wax crayons, and then walks him between the graves, pressing the child’s fingers into the carved capitals of the newest inscriptions. There is a quest attached: find all twenty-six letters somewhere on the hill. He does, finishing on a stone set into the chapel wall, and afterwards he spends whole days copying names and dates in crayon, bringing back Latin epitaphs for translation at dusk. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman contains a murder, a monster under the hill and a society of killers, but this is its real subject in miniature: a child learning to read the world from people who have already left it.
Lessons From the Long Dead
The boy is Nobody Owens, Bod to everyone, and the cemetery has raised him since the night he toddled in. Gaiman’s great comic invention is the faculty. Mr Pennyworth, author of a Compleat Educational System for Younger Gentlemen, drills him in the bodily humours and despairs of his ability to vanish, complaining that he would be noticed even beside a purple lion. Miss Letitia Borrows, a spinster of the parish who did no harm to any man, teaches grammar and composition and can be steered off-topic with a single question. A Roman who arrived a century after the legions remembers the roads fondly. The dead are proud, petty, forgetful and kind, and each of them knows something about one particular century that no textbook would bother with. A family of seven generations polishes its coffins before a festival nobody will name; a long-dead apprentice, sent on a fool’s errand for striped paint, still nurses his fury and his copy of Robinson Crusoe. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman lets every one of them be faintly absurd without ever turning them into a joke.
What gives the novel its feeling is that the education is never quite enough. The boy can greet anyone politely in nine hundred years of changing manners and still never have seen the sea. Halfway through The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman he wants a real school, with living children breathing in the same room, and the request lands as both the most natural wish in the world and a genuine danger. Gaiman keeps returning to that tension. The dead can teach a boy almost everything except how to be alive, and the people who love him most are the ones least able to follow him out of the gates.
A Headstone Nobody Paid For
The finest chapter is the one about the witch. Beyond the railings, in unconsecrated ground where the hanged and the self-murdered were put, lies a girl drowned on a ducking stool and then burned, buried without even a marker. She is sharp-tongued, proud and not remotely sorry for the curse she laid on the village, and she tells her story to Bod as casually as a recipe. The boy decides she deserves a stone with her name on it, and that kind, impractical errand sends him out into the town for the first time, alone, with a single ancient brooch to sell.
This is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman at full strength, and the episode is a model of how to frighten children responsibly. The pawnbroker who locks him in a back room is a grubby, greedy, entirely human menace, and the scene escalates through greed and sloe gin into something close to farce before it turns dangerous. The rescue depends on the boy’s own ingenuity and the witch’s grudging help, and the ending, in a cleared patch of nettles at dawn, is one of the loveliest small gestures in modern children’s fiction. Readers who wonder what the old potter’s field beside a churchyard was for will find the answer here, told without a trace of sermon.
What The Graveyard Book Asks of a Friend
Not every chapter is this good. The school episode, in which Bod tangles with two classmates who extort pocket money from younger pupils, is the thinnest in the book. The bullies are cartoons, the boy’s supernatural revenge is satisfying in the way of a fable rather than a story, and the consequences are tidied away so quickly that the section feels like a detour on the way back to the cemetery.
The larger problem is Scarlett, the bright, lonely five-year-old who befriends Bod early on and whose parents are convinced he is imaginary. Their first adventure together, deep inside the hill, is wonderful. When she returns as an angry fifteen-year-old, uprooted again by her parents’ separation, the novel sketches a whole story for her and then needs her mainly to move its own climax along. Her final scenes ask her to react rather than choose, and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman never quite repays the attention it invited readers to give her. A brief, era-appropriate punishment from Bod’s ghostly father may also give modern parents pause, though the book plainly signals it as the custom of another century.
None of this undoes the achievement. The scares come in measured doses, the violence mostly happens just out of sight, and the overall register is wonder rather than dread; violence, menace, grief and the plain presence of death are all part of the bargain. Read aloud, the book suits children from about nine, and it rewards adults who come to it alone just as fully.
Where Neil Gaiman Found the Story
Neil Gaiman, born in Hampshire in 1960, was already an established novelist by 2008: Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett, appeared in 1990, Neverwhere in 1996, and Coraline had shown in 2002 that he could frighten younger readers without patronising them. He would go on to write The Ocean at the End of the Lane in 2013, another book about a child and the old powers just past the hedge. HarperCollins brought out The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman in America at the end of September 2008, with Bloomsbury’s British edition following a month later.
The witch’s chapter came first. It appeared as a standalone story in an anthology of fantasy tales and won the 2008 Locus Award for Best Novelette before the novel around it appeared. The finished book went on to collect the two most prestigious children’s medals on either side of the Atlantic, and Time later placed it on its list of the hundred best young adult books ever written. Gaiman also recorded the audiobook himself, with the banjo player Béla Fleck supplying a version of Saint-Saëns’s macabre waltz after reading on the author’s blog that he wanted one, and that recording was named Audiobook of the Year. A full-cast version followed in 2014, narrated by Derek Jacobi.
Final Thoughts
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is a Halloween book that turns out to be about the whole of childhood, from first letters to the day home becomes too small. Readers who want another young hero who can see the dead should try Tunnel of Bones by Victoria E. Schwab, which takes its ghost-hunting heroine beneath Paris. The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe by Karen Foxlee shares its abandoned child and its found family, and Small Spaces by Katherine Arden is a good next step for the child who wants to be properly scared.
He learned to read from gravestones. The book leaves the impression that there are worse ways to learn.