Coraline

It’s with some degree of guilty pleasure that I liked this book. It’s a children’s book, much creepier than my usual fare, and it’s been around since 2002. It’s even been made into a movie. For some reason, when I saw it on the library shelf last week, I decided to check it out at last.

Coraline’s real life is rather mundane. Her parents are preoccupied in the way modern parents are — they work from their home, staring at computer screens. One day Coraline unlocks the door between her apartment and the empty one next door, and finds that instead of the usual brick wall there exists an alternate world.

It resembles her ordinary world in some ways, but it’s more interesting, and more centered around her interests and desires. The toybox is full of cool things, the food is tasty, and there are even models of her own parents there who seem much more focused on her. Her “other mother” and “other father” look like her real parents, except that their skin is white like bone, the other mother’s fingernails and teeth are a bit too long and pointy, and their eyes are shiny black buttons. They want Coraline to stay with them forever.

This is the classic children’s book in that it puts the child into a set of problems that she has to solve by herself, forcing her to clarify her values and save a few other people (including her parents) along the way. Coraline gets some help from the only other real-world visitor to the other world — a black cat who lurks silently in the real world, but talks in the other world. And she’s helped by the knowledge going into the experience that her parents really do love her. She’s quite resourceful in her own right and catches on to the rules of Other World quite well.

Several things, I liked. Gaiman has been compared to C.S. Lewis because this story (like Stardust, my only other Gaiman read) puts its protagonist into another world. But it’s much more macabre than any of the Narnia books. The Other Mother puts the White Witch to shame as a creepy sorceress. But the same successful collision between the everyday and the fantastic occurs when Coraline goes through the door.

I also liked the way the Other World seems fairly defined at the center, but gets less so in its outer reaches. When Coraline ventures into the woods of the Other World, the trees go from looking fairly real and detailed to, eventually, no more than a child’s drawing of trees, with a straight brown trunk and a blur of green at the top. Similarly, the Other Mother and Other Father look less and less like Coraline’s real parents to her. The Other Mother, it turns out, is the creator of the Other World, and Coraline recognizes that she has no power to actually create anything new. She can only copy and corrupt what already exists. Whether she knows it or not, this is a quality she shares with the devil of Christian theology.

The pull of the other world, and the Other Mother, to grasp and consume Coraline gives the adventure a quite perilous edge at times, and though the story is paced quickly and written simply enough for children (aged 9-12, the description says), and though the outcome isn’t ever really in doubt, I found Coraline plenty absorbing and entertaining.