“The Ocean at the End of the Lane” is a fantasy novel dealing with a strange adventure of a young boy meeting a slightly older girl, her mother and grandmother, who live in a farm just down the road from him. The farm contains a pond which the girl, Lettie Hempstock, insists is an ocean. The boy doesn’t really believe or understand this as it is clearly a pond. However, things are not as they seem. When dark forces enter the boy’s life, only Lettie and her family can save him.

The narrator is an adult at the start, an adult who has just spoken at a funeral. We don’t know the narrator’s name, or who died. He gets in his car and drives aimlessly, though finally realising he’d been heading towards where they’d lived when he was a child, a house that no longer exists. Where he ends up is the ‘end of the lane’ a farm and a pond, and he begins to remember the events of his childhood.

Many people say that people don’t remember their childhood. Science says that you are unlikely to remember the first few years of life only, due to the brain still forming. Memories can be blocked out due to trauma, and the events of this story would certainly count as traumatic for a seven year old boy. The (unnamed) narrator starts with a birthday party where no one turns up, establishing he is a solitary child, bullied at school, and doesn’t make friends easily. He has a kitten who gets run over, and none of the adults in his life seem to care about his sadness.

I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They would have been baffled by my upset …

This tells you a lot about the parenting skills of the parents. They both lack empathy, as well as favouring their daughter, who takes after them. The boy is isolated already, well before the events of the story really take off, and he is used to taking care of things on his own. This family is very broken in a way that is very mundane, and the boy, the loner and dreamer, becomes the scapegoat.

His feelings of worthlessness are used and preyed upon by the ‘hunger birds’, dark forces that want to devour him. After their attempts to trick him to come out from his circle of protection fail, they fall back on preying on these fears. They are terrible feelings for a small child, and not as unusual as we might wish.

Your family hates you. You have no friends … nobody cares … we will make all the pain go away forever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come.

 During the story he grows and learns courage.

Old Mrs Hempstock said, “Can you be brave?”

I did not know. I did not think so.

Then later,

I looked up at the dark shape behind and above the torch beam and I said “Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?”

And finally,

…I ran, as fast as I could, knowing that to hesitate, even to slow down, would be to change my mind, which would be the wrong thing, which would be to save my life.

In this moment he takes responsibility for the mistake he inadvertently made and tries to fix it. It’s a very grown-up moment.

Lettie Hempstock, Ginnie Hempstock, and old Mrs Hempstock, are magical beings that the author has used in other stories. They are the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, the triple Goddess.

“It’s funny. For a moment I thought there were two of you. Isn’t that odd?”

“it’s just me,” said the old woman. “it’s only ever just me.”

“I know,” I said. “Of course it is

This tradition has a moon association, and the different phases of the moon the boy can see out of the different windows represent this.  

“Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful and it reminds her of when she was a girl,” said Lettie, “And you don’t trip on the stairs.”

They take his memories of the events, but this is to help him exist in the real world. He does not need to remember the events of this time.  The narrator, now a man, has to ask the question if Lettie’s sacrifice for him was worth it, and the women say Lettie summoned him to see if it was. It is a metaphor for a question every person must ask – was the love and protection offered to us in our childhoods worth our life as adults? It’s not a question we can really answer.

She said, “I think Lettie just wants to know if it was worth it.”

“If what was worth it?”

“You,” said the old woman, tartly.

Despite their differences, in age and in who they are, Lettie and the boy become friends. Lettie seems genuinely impressed with the boy.

“But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn’t listen to them. Well done. That’s quality, that is,” and she sounded proud.

What function does the ocean have in this story? We don’t know much about it until Lettie uses it to help the boy. His experience immersed in the Ocean is one of complete knowledge – he knows all things from the beginning of the Universe to its end and on to the next universe. The ocean is eternity, or heaven, or nirvana, whatever you want it to be.

I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark sea water that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket …

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane” is a story about helplessness, the helplessness of a small child in the face of a large and overwhelming force (a metaphor for a child’s helplessness when confronted with the world). Letting go appears to be what one needs to do in order to grow up, but when you are still small and do not understand what that entails you can face dangers you were not anticipating. He remembers in order to make sense of what has gone before. He forgets in order to go on living. The Ocean is the beginning and the end of the story. Lettie shows him at the start, and says they brought it with them from ‘the old country’, though what country that is she does not say. She uses it to help him, and ultimately she is given to the Ocean in order to heal. It’s a beautiful little book, and ultimately very much worth reading.