This book starts off as an adult fiction. The narrator with no name after attended a funeral has an hour to kill. So instinctively, he drives down his memory lane and into a farm house with a duck pond next to his old home. The girl whom he has met during his childhood Lettie Hempstock has not made a return (it is complicated). He has met her mother Mrs. Hempstock instead. That is the prologue. In the epilogue, he chats with Lettie’s grandmother Old Mrs. Hempstock before I presume returning to his families. Who was the funeral for? What happens to the story of Callie Anders, the girl whom he first kissed, the one who was red-cheeked, fair-haired? Where exactly is Lettie? There are tons of open questions that are never answered. The most obscured of it all is the duck pond that Lettie has insisted it to be an ocean (hence the title of the book). What is in that ‘ocean’?
Majority of the book is devoted to narrator’s childhood, when he was seven; on how he first met the Hempstock family. There was something supernatural about Lettie the small girl, her mother, and her grandmother. This part of the book reads like a young adult fiction. Kind of like a horror story that ended bad. There is heroic sacrifice. And there is childhood innocence. While The Ocean at the End of the Lane is beautifully written, engaging from beginning to end, I wish there was a resolution on the disappearance of Lettie. Or perhaps, the idea is not to have a resolution. Whatever happened in the narrator’s childhood stays in the past. Let not reality kills off our imagination. Was it even real? And not some boy’s imagination? The extract below may shed some light. I could only guess.
Curiously I turned in my seat and looked back: a single half-moon hung over the farmhouse, peaceful and pale and perfect.
I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.