This Month's Books - April 2006

Coraline by Neil Gaiman
I had heard some good things about this book, and it had one of my favorite Chesterton quotes on the front page: "Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." But Coraline was a disappointment. The dragons of this book live in a nightmare-world that is dangerously close to ours, close enough for Coraline to stumble through--and for one of them to come back with her. In the end they are not really beaten, but only shoved away.

Coraline is much darker than Lewis Carroll's books, which I have heard it compared to. Coraline goes through a door that isn't there and enters a world that is like a piece of modern art, or one of the pictures Lewis described in That Hideous Strength. It looks a lot like our world at first, but there are some strange differences--just annoying or disturbing differences until you see how they are carefully twisted to mock the real world. Coraline's attempts to find her parents, who have been taken captive there, read like a vivid nightmare. Worse, when Coraline finally gets back to our own world part of the nightmare follows her without leaving a distinction between the real world and the dream world.

The best part of the book was a description of Nothingness. I think Gaiman actually did a better job than Lewis (in MN or LB) in describing what nothing might be like. His Nothing is like a grey fog, a blankness, that goes on and on no matter how far you keep walking. (I wish I had typed up that section while I had the book.)


The Golden Key by George MacDonald
A good book and deep. It is a fairy-tale about a little girl named Tangle who runs away and finds her Grandmother's house. She stays there until Mossy comes, the boy with the golden key, and Grandmother sends them off together on their journey with her blessing. They travel through the world together, and go through a valley of visible shadows cast by invisible things (which was my favorite part of the story). I would tell more, but you really should just read it.


The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye
A tale about a princess who is decidedly not as beautiful as the day, but marries and lives happily ever after just the same. Fun, if on the edge of twaddle. (Reread.)