Luna’s Prose Ramblings

For chapter one of this review, click here or else click on the The Graveyard Book tag in the tagcloud in the bottom right hand column.

If you have not already done so, watch Neil read chapter two here.

Chapter 2 The New Friend

Chapter two is a curious chapter. For one, it’s a very upbeat and witty chapter as compared to the first, which was less so. But it also has a lot of quirky features that one might not notice when the chapter is read at face value.

The chapter begins with exposition of the boy Bod as he has changed from the baby that we met in chapter one. Bod has grown enough for him to walk, talk, pester the graveyard’s inhabitants with questions and argue with girls who are meanies. He is a boy with grey eyes and accompanying tousled mouse-coloured hair.

At sunset, Bod often waits at the Old Chapel to ask Silas questions. Questions like ‘Why amn’t I allowed out of the graveyard ?’, ‘How do I do what he just did ?’ and ‘Who lives in here ?’. After having corrected Bod’s grammar, Silas patiently explains that it is not safe for Bod outside the graveyard and that while he is there he can see in the darkness, walk some of the ways that the living should not travel and that the eyes of the living will slip off him. That some skills – like fading, sliding and dreamwalking – are learnt and some just don’t come in life. And that Bod should learn to read so that he can discover the epitaphs and their dedicatees for himself.

Bod’s peace and quiet is disrupted with the arrival of The New Friend. Scarlett is a bright curious young girl of five who roams the graveyard whenever her parents will let her while waiting on a bench. Soon Scarlett decides that Bod must be five too and talks to imaginary friends, but after that first meeting, it was never Scarlett who saw Bod first. (I wonder if that is the acquired fading skill of Bod’s that Silas talked about.)

The pair of them go exploring and discover the oldest grave in the yard, the one mound that stems from Celtic times. There are several accounts of people going into the mound and coming out changed… or not coming out at all. While exploring, Bod indeed shows that he can see where Scarlett cannot and soon they test their courage when faced with the guardians of the mound, the Sleer. The Sleer keep the tomb of the master and his possessions. They are the guardians of the brooch, the goblet and the knife. How and where the Sleer will play their part, I don’t know, but I’ll wager that they’ll be back before long !

The great thing about this chapter is that Neil has managed to introduce us subtly to the new concepts of fading, sliding and dreamwaking and has shown two of them already in a very unobtrusive way. I’m looking forward to seeing the third.

Some other things to think about. In one of the expositions on time spent between Bod and Scarlett, Bod tells Scarlett about ‘how Sebastian Reeder had been to London Town and had seen the Queen, who had been a fat woman in a fur cap who had glared at everyone and spoke no English‘. When I read that I wondered which queen Neil had referred to and set out to see if I could find out. Funnily enough, it turned into somewhat of a personal quest for me and ended abruptly when I came across an interview in which Neil talks more fully about it. Unfortunately I lost the link after a computer crash and a new search has failed to turn up that particular interview, but I’ll continue to search.

Since Sebastian Reeder died in 1583, the queen in question is most likely one of the wives of Henry the VIII, but none of them fit the bill. Excluding the wives of English birth – of whom we can expect English language skills – leaves Katharine of Aragon and Anne of Kleves. Katharine doesn’t fit because she was a beloved queen by the English people, whom she reigned for almost 24 years. She has been known to speak and write perfect 16th century English. Anne of Kleves would be a good candidate if it were not for the fact that she was not fat.

This portrait had been commissioned by Henry the VIII of Hans Holbein the Younger before Henry’s and Anne’s betrothal, with specific instructions to represent her as accurately as possible and not to flatter. It is therefore unlikely that Anne would ever be the ‘fat queen‘ of Reeder’s description.

Because the passage does not specify that the queen was actually English, I had come to the conclusion that the most likely candidate was Mary, Queen of Scots. But then I read the interview in which Neil himself admits that he doesn’t quite know which queen Reeder describes and that he had always liked to think it was in fact Anne. This passage is a glorious reminder that even an author does not always know everything about the story they write !

Lastly, some more interesting Silas bytes; When Bod says to Silas that he wants to be like him, Silas responds; ‘No, you do not.‘ Silas, like Bod, has the freedom of the graveyard, but for Silas it is a mere Right of Abode. Silas also reads Latin. Unfortunately, nothing here to confirm he is a vampire, but I’ll find it !

Random House is set to release fourteen unpublished shorts by Vonnegut as serial e-books starting end of August this year. As Dave Itzkoff poignantly describes; “In a twist that Kurt Vonnegut, the master satirist, would have appreciated, he continues his career despite the apparent impediments to his productivity.”

Imagine having thought you bought a book and finding it missing. Scatterbrained ? Lended ? Delusional ? Paranoid ?

Not if you bought the book in e-version off of Amazon. Apparently, e-book sales are reversible according to Amazon. Apparently, although you purchased your copy legally on Amazon and put it on your Kindle, Amazon reserves the right to go onto your Kindle and erase your purchased content, or so they think they do. Of course, only after crediting your sale charge back into your account ! Goodbye, book…

After a move that deleted a range of books from customer’s Kindles, including 1984 by Orwell – How Ironic ! – Amazon sent out a press statement that the company that added the books to the online store did not have the copyright to do so and were in fact uploading illegal content. However, does this give Amazon the right to go onto Kindles and delete ? Apparently not, if you read Amazon’s license agreement and terms of use.

I know that if I buy a Kindle and buy Amazon e-books instead of the traditional dead trees, I will not be able to lend my e-books to my friends and I accept that I can’t resell my purchased digital copies either when I am finished with them. But now I will not even know that I will have them for myself to read ? And I will have to make due with my money back ? Are you adding extra credit for devaluation too ?

It seems like David Pogue is right; “As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

Free Press, part of Simon & Schuster, has bought the rights to the memoir Last Words that George Carlin was working on before his death in 2008. Publication is set for November of this year.

After seeing this trailer of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey Jr., I started to wonder how true to the original book film adaptations generally are. And where are common strong and weak points in adaptations ?

These questions inspired me to become vigilant of film adaptations appearing in cinemas and makes me want to write a few reviews on the subject. In lieu of starting this new item idea immediately, however, Examiner’s Michelle Kerns has the answers to the above questions for Harry Potter books one through five in this astute article.

Enjoy !

The publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America marks the day that Hemingway is revealed to have been a spy for the KGB. But did he fail at it because Hemingway wanted unidirectional information or was he just not spy material ?

If you collected all the books that were ever recommended to be read, one would end up with more books than could ever be read in one life-time. So isn’t it nice then that The Second Pass makes an effort to sum up what not to read ? Saves us time !

Yes, it might raise some eyebrows, but there have always been people that insist that they read Playboy for the articles. And since Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada was excerpted in Playboy, it gave its literary editor, Amy Grace Loyd, foot in the door.

The original of Laura was long unread, since Vladimir Nabokov stated as a dying wish that his unfinished novella should not be published. After a change of heart, though, his son Dmitri contacted literary agent Wylie to find a suitable purchaser.

Loyd decided to emphasise the long-standing association of Playboy with Nabokov by way of the orchids that appeared in Ada. After Wylie received a notice of no interest from The New Yorker, a publication that also had a strong association with Nabokov in days gone by, he offered the option of first serial to Loyd; “I’m so glad all those orchids did not die in vain. I don’t imagine anybody’s taking good care of them over there.”

David Pogue, author, New York Times columnist and CBS news reporter, is on a mission to get to know his followers. Yes… doesn’t that sounds creepy ?

Twitter is often thought-of as a unidirectional communication channel. Mostly by people who are not on Twitter. When Pogue was speaking in a seminar and wanted to demonstrate the imminence of the Twitter community, he asked for the best 140-character pun. The reactions started to flow in. He repeated with other questions and realised that he was actually displaying communication with the masses.

His Twitter followers turned out to be the wisest and funniest group of people, according to Pogue. And according to PEW and Quantcast this might be true since the demographic of Twitter is different from that of for instance Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

The seminar display turned into a social media experiment. David Pogue thought up a list of 40 questions, statement or other prompts that he posed to his 500,000 followers and compiled the best reactions in his book The World According to Twitter, out in August of this year.

What can you expect ? Some of the funniest photo captions and parental advice that you cannot help but feel ring true. And if you think it’s all good fun, imagine what Pogue went through to contact his followers who’s comments he wanted to publish. The ones that had changed their username, the ones that had quit twitter and the ones that were on honeymoon…

This is the story of a little boy, his family stripped away through no fault of his own. A little boy who will, growing up, probably not remember his mother’s lullabies, or the voice she sang them in. This is the story of a boy growing up in a graveyard.

Neil Gaiman fashioned his latest novel to the model of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling; both stories have boys growing up in extraordinary adoptive families and both tell the story by way of consecutive chapter histories. And my guess is that this is also where you will probably find the comparison to end.

I picked up this book for review since I know Mr. Gaiman’s work well, having every adult’s novel and some of the children’s books he’s ever written on my shelf. And much a compliment to him, I have actually read everything by him that I own. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Gaiman in Bristol at the release of Coraline, which incidentally has been released in feature film version this February, where he wrote in my copy of Good Omens to burn it.

A while ago I was pleased to hear that his newest release would be a novel suited for children as well as adults. It takes skill not to just claim that, but to actually craft that. And I am certain that when I am done reading this book, I will be happy, content and in want of nothing but to give the book its rightful place on my shelf.

If you have not already done so, watch Neil read chapter one here.

Chapter 1 How Nobody Came to the Graveyard

The Graveyard Book starts off with a first chapter that does everything it is supposed to, but does it with flair. Nobody, or Bod for short, Owens is the new name fashioned for a little boy who finds himself orphaned at the hand of the man Jack. This name is fashioned for him by Mrs. Owens, a long-dead woman living in the graveyard up the hill from where Bod used to live and the refuge that he finds when unwittingly wondering in need of a new home.

This first chapter is effective in the way that it manages to raise more questions than it answers. It sets the stage for the conflict, introduces us to not only the main character, but a whole array of them, and for the adults and attentive reader leaves enough to be tantalised by.

The man Jack for one is an extraordinary man, who seems to have extrahuman senses. Electric light is of no importance to him and he can extricate smells to a level unheard of;

“He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, night-time nappy. He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery – a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck – that the child had been carrying.”

The man Jack also turns out to have planned his ploy for months, even years and decides for the time being to not inform the ‘convocation’, whomever they might be, of his failure to complete the task set for him.

One thing that strikes me as odd. Before the man Jack could tend to his task, the baby is said to have ‘…been woken by the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with a crash.’ Certainly that was not Jack’s doing ? That would seem out of character.

And then there are the inhabitants of the graveyard. We meet Caius Pompeius, who is described as one of the most senior citizens of the graveyard and had asked to be laid to rest in this graveyard rather than to have his body sent back to Rome. Also in the mix is the last character I would like to pay some attention to; Silas.

Silas is an impressive man, with the ability to influence others, either by mind alteration or flattery. He describes himself as a caretaker ’in a manner of speaking’ and is described as ‘the stranger that Jack had taken for a caretaker’. Silas has been given the freedom of the graveyard when he was not alive, but, unlike the other inhabitants, he can leave by choice and does so to obtain food for Bod and to go see Bod’s family’s bodies.

Another hint as to what type of man Silas is; when Silas feeds Bod a banana and is asked what it tastes like, he says; ’I’ve absolutely no idea’, because Silas consumes only one food and it is not bananas. Also, Silas dryly without sentiment says that ‘[i]t must be good to have somewhere that you belong. Somewhere that’s home’ and is said to exist ‘…on the borderland between their world [of the dead] and the world they had left.’

My guess… Silas is a vampire.