It is the middle of the night, and a girl in a blue dressing gown is standing at a door with a candle, a key and an apple in each pocket. Before she turns the key she tells the cat beside her a story. Years ago her father took her walking on a patch of waste ground, trod on a wasps’ nest, shouted at her to run, and stood still while the swarm found him instead. He was stung thirty-nine times; they counted in the bath. That was not the brave part, he told her afterwards. The brave part was going back that same afternoon for the glasses he had dropped, knowing the wasps were still there. Coraline by Neil Gaiman puts its entire philosophy into that anecdote, and then sends a girl who is small for her age back down a dark corridor to prove it.
A Mother Who Snacks on Beetles
The thing at the other end is a second mother, and the novella is careful to make her attractive before it makes her monstrous. She cooks properly. She is always delighted. And she has time. Then, one morning, she offers Coraline a paper bag of what looks like sweets, and it is full of large shiny beetles trying to climb out. She pulls the legs off one, drops them neatly in an ashtray, and eats it. The scene is played almost as manners comedy, which is exactly why it lands.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman understands that the frightening thing about this mother is the quality of her love, not its absence. She wants Coraline the way a collector wants a rare coin, and everything she offers comes with what she asks in return. Her creations show the cost. The second father, cheerful at first, is visibly fading by the middle of the book, his face going soft and featureless like dough left to rise, and he is punished for saying too much. A reader old enough to notice will see that he is the most pitiable figure in the story: a thing made to fill a role and thrown away when the role is done.
At the edges, the made world gives itself away. Walk far enough into the woods behind the house and the trees grow vaguer, until they are only a brownish stalk and a greenish smudge, the idea of trees from someone who never cared to finish them. It is one of the best images in modern children’s fiction, a horror of incompleteness that no film budget could improve.
The Cat Will Not Be Named
The book’s comic heart is a black cat who wanders between the two houses and can talk only on the far side. He is sarcastic, vain and entirely uninterested in being anyone’s pet. People need names, he explains, because they do not know who they are; cats know, so they manage without. He torments a rat for sport and lectures Coraline on the mercy of it. He is also, when it matters, the bravest thing in the house after her.
His contempt for names is a running joke with a target. Nearly every adult in Coraline by Neil Gaiman calls the heroine Caroline, and she corrects them each time with diminishing patience. In the second house the copies of her two elderly neighbours, retired actresses in real life, have become young again and perform for ever to an audience of Scottie dogs, one of whom wants only the chocolates and explains that the show never ends. A blindfolded knife-throwing act with Coraline as the volunteer is the most frightening comedy routine in the book.
Where the novella gives ground, it gives it gently. The cat tends to arrive precisely when the plot needs him, which a sharp-eyed reader may notice by the third time. A few period details, the shelf of videos and the phone book, date the setting to its moment. And the story runs one chapter past what feels like its natural close; the extra stretch is tense and earns its keep, though it changes the rhythm. None of it weakens the central achievement.
What Coraline by Neil Gaiman Refuses to Want
Well before the end, the book does something quieter and more truthful. When her parents first vanish, Coraline simply carries on. She eats tinned spaghetti for breakfast and a block of cooking chocolate for lunch, empties her money box at the supermarket for limeade and a chocolate cake, and types a story on her father’s computer about a girl who dances until her feet turn into sausages. Then she wakes in the night, finds her parents’ bed still made at twelve minutes past three, and cries. Coraline by Neil Gaiman never makes more of the moment than that, and it is the most affecting page in the book.
Late in the book, a false version of the old man upstairs offers Coraline a world rebuilt each morning, with every meal a delight and every wish granted. Her refusal is the moral centre of the novella: getting whatever you want, instantly and for nothing, would make none of it mean anything. It is an unusually grown-up idea to give a child, and Gaiman trusts his readers to take it.
That trust extends to fear. Abandonment, confinement, bodily threat, the long-ago loss of other children and an animal’s death all appear, handled without gore but without blinking. It suits children who like being scared on purpose, roughly ten and up alone, younger with an adult nearby, and adults who reread Coraline by Neil Gaiman tend to find it more unsettling, not less.
How Neil Gaiman Found the Story
Neil Gaiman, born in Hampshire in 1960, came to novels from comics, and his reputation in prose rests on books such as Stardust and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was voted Book of the Year at the British National Book Awards. Coraline by Neil Gaiman was his first novel for children, and it took twelve years: he began it in 1990 and it appeared in 2002, going on to win both of science fiction’s best-known prizes for shorter novels. The edition circulating now carries anniversary illustrations by Chris Riddell, and it opens with a line from G. K. Chesterton about fairy tales proving that dragons can be beaten.
Gaiman has said he believed he had invented the name, a twist on Caroline that he liked for its echo of coral, only to learn later that it already existed, with its earliest known use in a French comic opera of 1849. He has also pointed to two older stories behind the book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Lucy Clifford’s Victorian tale The New Mother, in which two naughty sisters are warned that a new mother with glass eyes will take their real one’s place. On stage, the 2009 Off-Broadway musical by Stephin Merritt cast an adult actress, Jayne Houdyshell, as the girl.
Where It Leaves You
Readers who want more of a child’s own logic set against a house full of danger should go next to We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, an adult novel with a narrator every bit as stubborn. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James offers the grown-up version of children and ghosts sharing an old house, and The Witches by Roald Dahl remains the obvious companion for anyone who enjoyed being told, kindly, that some adults are not what they seem.
The wasps are long gone by the end. The lesson about the glasses stays.