It’s Coraline, Not Caroline

How could I enjoy The Graveyard by Neil Gaiman as much as I did and not pick up a copy of his Coraline?  In case you haven’t seen the movie previews (or the movie at this point), Coraline is a nightmarish fairy tale about a curious young girl living in an old house somewhere in the English countryside. 

After getting to know the neighbors, interrupting her busy parents, and spending a couple weeks exploring the house and grounds, Coraline unlocks the door to the next flat and follows the passageway to another house exactly like her own…almost.  She finds all the same furniture, some toys and books that move like they’re alive, and her other mother and father who claim to love her very much.   With the bravery and confidence we can only hope our own children possess but would never have to test, Coraline spends the rest of the story trying to find her real parents and get back to her real home.

Gaiman claims in an author’s note at the back of the book that he began writing this story for his 5 year old daughter and finished it when she was 15 and his younger daughter turned 6.  He wanted something refreshingly creepy with a girl as a heroine.  I think he got it.

He says, “It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gives adults nightmares.  It’s the strangest book I’ve written, it took the longest time to write, and it’s the book I’m proudest of.”

It is a pretty scary story.  Though I never doubted Coraline would triumph in the end, Gaiman never let me relax along the way.  He played on every single childhood fear imagined by every single child.  Even from the start there were the simple fears – neighbors mispronouncing her name (Caroline) and ignoring her quiet corrections.  Besides being terrible cooks, Coraline’s parents have no time to talk or play with her, always having too much work to do.  It would rain for days at a time. 

Then the escalation: a locked door in the fancy room that Coraline’s mother unlocks to a brick wall one moment, but creaks open on it’s own in the middle of the night.  There are the dark shadows of scurrying rodents, the heavy mist surrounding the house, and the prediction of “terrible danger” by the old ladies next door.  When Coraline finally opens the door to find the bricks replaced by a long, dark passage  and follows it to reveal her “other” house and her “other” mother and father, the reader is fairly panicked.

Coraline, however, is an explorer and merely finds this interesting.  In this other house, the food is delicious, everyone has time to talk and play, the animals can speak, and the neighbors remember her name.  As perfect as all of this sounds (with one weird exception I won’t mention), Coraline knows this isn’t her home, says goodbye to her other parents, and returns through the passageway to find her real parents gone.  Gone.

The only thing she can do is head back to the other house and find them.   Along the way, Coraline defines what it means to be brave, “..doing something when (you’re) really scared” , reassures herself: ” I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.”,  and stands up to the other parents: “You don’t frighten me,” said Coraline, although they did frighten her very much.”  Her greatest strength shows when she says to her “other mother,” no matter what spectacular promises were made:  ”I have no plans to love you.  No matter what.  You can’t make me love you.”

Later, Coraline confronts another childhood fear.  One of the neighbors reminds her:

Nothing’s changed.  You’ll go home.  You’ll be bored.  You’ll be ignored.  No one will listen to you, really listen to you.  You’re too clever for them to understand.  They don’t even get your name right.

The neighbor begs her to stay and describes a world with everything a child could ever dream of.  Coraline states what most parents hope their kids understand but know they will never admit:

I don’t want whatever I want.  Nobody does.  Not really.  What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?  Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything.  What thena

By the end of this story, Coraline has faced her darkest fears and falls asleep with the windows open and a song in her dream.  I still think it’s a bad idea to let your typical second or third grader read this story alone, but maybe the way the story unfolds warrants a reading together.  Maybe all of these fears out in the open and up for discussion could end up being more reassuring to children than upsetting.

Let me know what you think.