The Graveyard Book begins with a knife in the dark and the wholesale murder of a family; only the youngest member of the family, a toddler, escapes. Unaware that the murderer, a man called Jack, is pursuing him, the toddler finds his way to the local graveyard where the ghosts make the decision to look after him and name him Nobody Owens, or ‘Bod’ for short.In his postscript to the book, Neil Gaiman points out that the debt he owes to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’. Once I read this, the influence became obvious, but instead of animals raising a human child it is, in a macabre twist, the dead. Just as Mowgli learns important lessons about life and growing up from the jungle animals so Bod is taught, in a rather haphazard way, by the graveyard inhabitants.
Some of the chapters are set a number of years apart, and almost form separate stories within the main narrative. Again, reading the author’s postscript, one almost gets the feeling that this was how it was written and my memory of the Jungle Book is that it had a similar feel. However, Gaiman sets the scene in the opening chapters and draws the narrative together in the closing chapters so that overall the individual pericopae form a satisfying cohesive whole.
With each chapter Bod encounters something, or someone new, and slowly he grows to adulthood. In marked contrast, the characters in the graveyard remain the same: ghostly children he played with as a child remain ghostly children. Then, just as Mowgli leaves the jungle to take his place with his own kind, so Bod must leave the graveyard to rejoin the living.
I found some of the individual chapters more enjoyable than others, but I think this was down to my personal preferences rather than any fault in the writing. The book is filled with both pathos and humour and, overall, I found it highly enjoyable story. It isn’t a long novel and, if I have one criticism, it is that it didn’t take me long to read and there is part of me that wished it had been longer. Nevertheless, I think this is a very minor criticism and I would still recommend this book.
If you would like to read The Graveyard Book, you can purchase a copy at Amazon
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you can download a copy here
