Book Review: Coraline by Neil Gaiman, Illustrated by Dave McKean - Page 2

The best children's books (which aren't really children's books but publishers have to call them something and adults don't like being thought of as people who will read stories about little girls, so they call stories like this a children's book) have a simple premise that leads to complications. They also end up teaching you something, but don't worry — you won't even notice it happening, so it won't taste bad or anything.

If the conventions of traditional stories are followed things are so much the better. I'm not normally a conventional type, but these are different in that they make the stories resound with the history of the type. How many other young women down the years have been unable to resist the locked door that sometimes goes nowhere and other times into another world?

This tradition has been sending a shiver of excitement and fear down spines for generations of readers, and when invoked creates an atmosphere immediately. Like all good archetypes it provokes the desired reaction among readers and allows the author to get to the meat of the story right away.

Coraline's family has moved into an old house that has been divided up into flats. Two of the other flats are occupied by strange people, the man in the top floor claims he is training mice to be an orchestra, while the elderly women who live in the flat beside Coraline and her parents had acted professionally when younger.

This being a modern story, some of the conventions have been updated to suit the needs of the time. Coraline's mother and father work at home doing something with computers all day long and don't have any time to spend with her. So she spends all her time alone, which isn't so bad because she likes to go exploring, and there is lots to explore in a big old mysterious house.

There are the gardens, which don't sound like any gardens I've ever known but always seem to accompany big old houses in England. It has an old well that's boarded over so nobody falls down, a tennis court in horrible repair, and a small forest. She has a great time exploring the garden until one day the weather turns bad and it rains buckets for hours.

Neither of her parents is able to play with her, her toys are just no fun any more, and she is bored. Even worse, her father made supper from a recipe that night and she just couldn't eat it. Things were not going as she would like them and her life is singularly lacking in entertainment value. Which is when, as if the idea just magically appeared, she thought of the mysterious door in the drawing room that opened on a brick wall.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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