till rivers, which run deep, drag you under. Neil Gaiman's Coraline, a children's story "for all ages," told with the clear, intense, transparent stillness of the best children's stories, runs deep. It starts where the best children's stories start, down there in child country where it all seems new, though it is not, for Coraline vibrates with associations and reconfigured memes like a wind chime (an image I used just last month to describe Carol Emshwiller's The Mount, and will use again: for the literatures of the fantastic of the 21st century have a huge genre past to remember and rise out of, and they ring like wind chimes in the gale of ago).
Already, it is beginning to happen. Coraline, a very short novel full of simple words and clear sentences, is beginning to drag me under. So I should say this, lest I forget: that it is Neil Gaiman's most fully assured work to date (very much less baggy than American Gods, which just won this year's Hugo for best novel); that it is a children's story which may become a classic, which is to say, beloved.
And we approach the mystery, the deep conundrum at the heart of all great children's books: that almost always they are Twice-Tolds, echoing the wind chimes of previous story; but that, simultaneously, the worlds they depict seem as new to us as the world seemed to Friedrich Nietzsche's cow:
"Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by," Nietzsche says." (I'm quoting from Michael Pollan's brilliant The Botany of Desire [2001], page 162, where he suggests that marijuana's effect on us mimics the brain's natural ability to forget, an operation that keeps us from being overwhelmed by sensory input; marijuana, Pollan suggests, allows us to experience the present tense of the world, or something like it, "for it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment.") "Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future—all of them depend ... on one's being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember," Nietzsche himself continues. Be like the cow, he concludes: that "plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future."
Or be like the child reading Coraline. Children, after all, like potheads, come very close, now and then, to living in the present, unfettered by memory, knowledge, skill, use, memes (Richard Dawkins' extremely loose but convenient term for "units of memorable cultural information," as Pollan puts it). Any theory of the nature of the children's book should perhaps begin with the supposition that—like marijuana, or intense fear, or exercise, or meditation—it is a device to allow the child to experience story unmediated, and the adult to experience story through a process of creative meme-forgetting.
So the best way to read Coraline is with eyes wide open, pasted to the page, like a child. But we are no longer children (the experience of rereading a book loved in childhood almost invariably fails to regain the rapture), and—fatally to that rapture—we read in context. We read Coraline as a work of art, and we make the suggestion that it is one of the stories the young may enter whole, but that the old can only gain whole-hearted entry to when in a state of ecstasy.
Belief in ecstacy is half the battle
As in the best children's stories, it is very difficult to tell just how old the protagonist is. Dave McKean's fine illustrations rarely feature her directly. Coraline (not Caroline, as she is forced to remind some adults time and again) is somewhere between (say) 9 and a young 12. She has just moved with her busy parents into a large house carved into flats (the setting seems to be southern England, where housing accommodations of this sort are common). She is rightly bored, as summer is almost over and her parents have no time to entertain her. Upstairs is Mr. Bobo, who is training unseen mouse musicians to perform in his mouse circus; downstairs live two elderly resting actresses.
The flat has 14 doors. One of them opens onto a brick wall. But when Coraline gets hold of the key, the door opens into a dark passage; she voluntarily enters this portal, and finds herself in an almost identical flat on the other side of the house, on the other side of reality. Here she finds her "other mother," a phrase adult readings will connect with a plethora of memes, from the image of the mechanical replacement mother in Lucy Clifford's "The New Mother" (1882), to the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" (Coraline's other mother feeds her all sorts of delectable food), to the stepmother in general.
Memes of this sort are most often found in tales of horror, but it is the peculiar magic of Coraline that, despite the horrific things that almost happen to its protagonist, the tale is not horror but fantasy (dark fantasy perhaps, but this is cookie-cutting). Coraline travels—more than once, and always voluntarily—through the portal into the parody world of the other mother (Gaiman uses the word parody at least twice in the tale), for she is on a Quest to find the souls of three child ghosts (out of Edward Gorey) whom the other mother captured long ago, and has hoarded over aeons of non-years in the non-place of the other house. She is helped in this quest by some toys out of Toy Story. If Coraline had been a tale of horror, we would have expected her to have been dragged (as though by a hook) through what was not a portal at all but a cloaca, a outgushing gape of the Bad Place Within, which befouls the protagonist on contact.
But Coraline is never hooked into horror. In a sense, she is never contacted by the Bad Place she has so bravely entered. With the aid of a black cat (which, for any adult, is what one might call a supersaturated meme), she finds the children's souls, saves her parents from stone bondage in a snowglobe on a mantel in the witch's formal parlor (a wind chime here from the Nome King's similar parlor under Oz), and so defeats the parody mother. She re-enters the world.
So Coraline is the child in the fairy story who is given a task or three to accomplish, and through her success defeats the wicked parody mother, and reclaims her family and her world. She is also the Heroine of a Thousand Faces. But we never forget the girl herself: For Gaiman has perfectly captured something that (for me, at least) has always characterized young girls: that under all the frills and fetishes, they are deadpan. They look at the world without blinking. They are Crones in bud.
The reader who is able to believe in Coraline, therefore, is already halfway to ecstasy. It is that reader who will shed (as Gaiman seems capable of shedding) the anxiety of the meme, and enter the tale. And gain some semblance of experiencing the world direct: which is where we came in, once upon a time.
