The Illusionist

Neil Gaiman Remembers being punished. “I could run down a list of my teachers for you when I was 9 or 10 by the physical punishments they liked inflicting on us,” he says. He has a whimsical, wistful, mannered way of speaking that along with his light English accent serves up each sentence like an expertly bowled cricket ball. You immediately get why he’s among the few authors who are allowed to do their own audiobooks. “From the spotty young man, Mr. Cook, who made us–and we were wearing short trousers–stand on a desk while hitting the backs of our knees with a ruler, to the ones who would grab you just there”–he pinches the hair right in front of his ear–“and turn it, to the really kind of perverted ones who would go down for your nipple and squeeze. And the ones who would simply throw things … What the f— was up with that? Did adults know? Did they care?”

Gaiman is a writer, so it’s part of his job to remember things, even (or maybe especially) the unpleasant ones. He’s good at it: over the course of a 30-year career, he’s written a string of fantastical comic books and novels–including The Sandman, Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline and The Graveyard Book–each of which is a landmark in its genre. His work combines an enormous verbal intelligence with visceral images of sorrow and horror, tempered by his consolatory charm and humor, and it has made him a cult icon verging on just a plain old icon at this point. “I’m now more famous,” he says, “than I’m comfortable being.”

It doesn’t hurt that unlike most writers, Gaiman actually looks like a writer. He’s handsome in an interesting way, with a big nose and dark, wavy hair that’s always slightly disheveled to the point where you start to wonder whether it was ever properly sheveled in the first place. Gaiman wears only black: the day we talk, he has on a black T-shirt, black slacks, black socks and black boots. Later when we go outside, it gets chilly, so he puts on a black coat.

Gaiman is prolific, but even by his standards he’s having a big year. By the end of 2013 he will have published an anthology, two children’s books and a book based on a graduation speech he gave last year called Make Good Art. He has written a dozen short stories–one for each month of the year–based on ideas readers submitted via Twitter as part of a promotion for BlackBerry. In March the BBC produced a radio play of Neverwhere starring, among others, James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch (who may be the second most Gaiman-esque person on the planet). Gaiman wrote an episode of Doctor Who that aired in May. A new Sandman comic will come out this year, the first since 1996, and Gaiman is hard at work prepping a sequel to American Gods even as he develops the original into a series for HBO. Yesterday he finished a 10,000-word short story just because he felt like it.

And none of that is why we’re sitting in his house in Cambridge, Mass., talking about corporal punishment. We’re here because on June 18, Gaiman is publishing a novel called The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which he describes as “the most serious, dark, weird and personal thing I’ve ever written.”

Although he was born in Hampshire, England, and owns a home in Wisconsin, at the moment Gaiman is renting an enormous old house with his wife, the musician Amanda Palmer, a short walk from Harvard Yard. It used to belong to an extremely senior presidential adviser, and it still has a little private phone booth in it where President Kennedy or the Gorbachevs could talk on a secure line. “At some point you will probably wind up peeing in the toilet by the door,” Gaiman says, “and you can say, ‘I peed in the same toilet that pretty much every American President except Nixon peed in.'”

Magic Is Like Salt

Gaiman Describes the ocean at the End of the Lane as “an accidental novel” because it began as a short piece written as a gift for his wife, based on a grim anecdote that his late father told him: once, when Gaiman was a child, a man with gambling debts stole the family car and committed suicide in it. But the short story got long. “It all just sort of turned up,” Gaiman says. “Normally when people tell me they like things of mine, I get properly proud. I go, ‘Well, yes, I was the one who crafted that, cunningly and brilliantly, and of course I deserve your applause!’ With this one, it’s kind of like, ‘Ah, thank you, thank you, I don’t know quite how I did it.'”

Ocean is that relative rarity, a book for adults written from a child’s point of view. (Other examples would be The Painted Bird and To Kill a Mockingbird.) The child is a 7-year-old boy in rural England whose family takes in lodgers, one of whom, an opal miner, does in fact kill himself in the family car. But from there Gaiman improves on memory. The lodger’s suicide has consequences: it attracts the attention of an evil spirit who begins making mischief in the area.

Fortunately for the boy, he makes the acquaintance of one Lettie Hempstock, an 11-year-old girl from down the lane. Lettie lives with her mother and grandmother, and it soon becomes apparent that despite appearances, Lettie is neither 11 nor, in any conventional sense, human. The Hempstocks have extraordinary powers, and the duck pond behind their house is–in some mysterious, magical way–also an ocean. When the evil spirit invades the boy’s family in the form of a sexy but wicked nanny, a kind of anti–Mary Poppins, he and Lettie must join forces to send it back where it belongs.

It would be easy to categorize Gaiman’s work as fantasy–I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable doing so–but he resists the label. “I love writing stuff where I get to set the rules,” he says when pressed. “Which is I guess a bit like fantasy, in that I love being God when I write. Could I have written Ocean at the End of the Lane with absolutely no magic? Sure, I could. But the magic in Ocean for me is like adding a little salt. It brings out the tastes. It makes things that happen, happen more so.”

One of Gaiman’s particular strengths is his ability to write about magic in a way that feels properly magical. Not that magic is uncommon in fiction, but it’s rare that a writer makes you feel the truly uncanny force of it, the sense that some deep and strange power is at work just behind the thin scrim of ordinary reality. Gaiman makes you feel it. Early in their investigations, Lettie leads the boy (who remains nameless) through the woods in search of the spirit, feeling her way with a stick. Gaiman registers the gradual transition from this world to somewhere else in subtle touches that, when taken together, set one’s lizard brain keening:

“Are we there?” I asked.

“Not there,” she said. “No. It knows we’re coming. It feels us. And it does not want us to come to it.”

The hazel wand was whipping around now like a magnet being pushed at a repelling pole. Lettie grinned.

A gust of wind threw leaves and dirt up into our faces. In the distance I could hear something rumble, like a train. It was getting harder to see, and the sky that I could make out above the canopy of leaves was dark, as if huge storm clouds had moved above our heads, or as if it had gone from morning directly to twilight.

When the tip of the dowsing wand bursts into flame, we know we’re there. I ask Gaiman how he approaches writing passages like this, and he stresses the importance of not overdescribing–of treating unreal things the same way one would treat the real ones. “You don’t make a fuss about it,” he says. “The kid is just reporting what he sees, in that lovely, flat way that kids do.”

Ocean is a short novel, not even 200 pages long, but like the Hempstocks’ duck pond (or, for that matter, like Doctor Who’s TARDIS), it’s a lot bigger inside than it looks from the outside. It’s a bildungsroman but in reverse gear: it’s a novel about the truths–some wonderful, some terrible–that children know and adults do not, how we face them and master them and then, as we grow older, how we slowly but inexorably forget them. We take up residence in the mundane, unmagical world of adulthood. We lose our grip on the extremes of horror and ecstasy that children experience, and maybe mercifully, they slip away from us.

Or from most of us, anyway. “I remember reading books as a child and promising myself I wouldn’t forget,” Gaiman says. “Because you’d read books, and they’d obviously been written by someone who’d completely forgot. And I’d go, How can you forget?”