For our discussion on Tuesday, June 20, 2017, the Banned Book Club selected The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. At the April meeting I had made some suggestions for the next next book. The others weren't very enthused about any of them and one of the newer participants suggested The Graveyard Book. I decided to trust their judgment and I'm glad I did because I enjoyed the book very much. I already knew that Gaiman was a good writer from reading Neverwhere several years earlier. I enjoyed The Graveyard Book even more. It's a children's novel that won both the Newbery Medal for best children's novel and the Hugo award for best science fiction/fantasy novel the year after it was published. It is written for children to understand and supplemented with striking though dark illustrations. But it also has enough complexity and enough unexplained phenomena to keep me intrigued. Perhaps children are better at accepting the unexplained than adults.
The book is about a living boy, Bod, who spends his childhood in an old English graveyard. He can see ghosts of the dead there who raise him and teach him. A good vampire, Silas, helps with other tasks such as getting Bod his food. Sometimes he has to leave and has someone fill in for him. In the graveyard, there are "all told, some ten thousand souls …, but most of them slept deep, or took no interest in the night-to-night affairs of the place, and there were less than three hundred of them up there, in the amphitheater, in the moonlight." (p. 21) Silas tells Bod about people who commit suicide and Bod asks, "Does it work? Are they happier dead?" Silas answers, "Sometimes. Mostly no. It's like people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but it doesn't work that way. Where ever you go, you take yourself with you." (p. 104) But in the graveyard, "no one ever changed. The little children Bod played with when he was small were still little children." (p. 221) Some of the dead are quite eccentric such as Nehemiah Trot who says, "I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be buried with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius … could my poems be removed from my cold dead hands." (p. 234)
The book is a fantasy and contains many supernatural elements, though they seem to fit naturally into the story. Every hundred years occurs the Macabray when the dead dance with the living. Bod says to Silas, "You saw us! You watched us! The living and the dead. We were dancing. Why won't anyone talk about it?" Silas answers, "Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember." (p. 165) After Bod exhibits some fighting skills to protect Scarlett, she is more shocked than thankful: "You aren't a person. People don't behave like you. You're as bad as he is. You're a monster." (p. 286) Silas later assures Bod that "People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer." (p. 289)
There were several relatable references. One character visits the graveyard, places a piece of paper on a tombstone and rubs a crayon "back and forth across the stone with the stone with easy, practiced movements." (p. 221) We learned about the similar practice of brass rubbing when we visited St. Martin-in-the-Fields church in London, UK in June 2004. I think the practice of tombstone rubbing was also mentioned in The Namesake that we read for the May 2017 Banned Book Club discussion. Later a character suggests, "What do you say we swap information over a cuppa?" (p. 244) In the Acknowledgement section, Gaiman mentions, "Moby … The famous Lorraine Garland, the Wonderful Kat Mihos, and the amazing Kelli Bickman all struggled with my handwriting." (p. 312) Just like Gaiman I prefer to write things out longhand. At the end of the book is the text of Gaiman's acceptance speech for the Newbery medal. He describes how "I had loved A Wrinke in Time as a boy, even if they had messed up the first sentence in the Puffin edition …" We discussed that banned book in July 2017.
Gaiman's Newbery acceptance speech contains some interesting and profound observations. He mentions the hilarious attacks by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report. I saw the clip from this show and agree it was hilarious. I especially liked when Colbert identified Gaiman's accent as not American and says that the Newbery Medal is an American award. In the acceptance speech, Gaiman says that librarians "tell me they are worried that people will misinterpret my story and use it as an excuse to use their libraries as free day care for their children." But my favorite point is that it seems as if "some people believed there was a divide between the books you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides … And I don't believe it … I … am on the side of books you love."
I read most of the book from the print edition but when I didn't have it handy I read a little from the epub edition. I actually found a difference between the two. Bud describes what he learned from Miss Lupescu who filled in for Silas. He points up into the night sky. In the print book he says, "That's the Big Bear and her son, the Little Bear. That's Draco the Dragon snaking between them." (p. 97) In the epub edition he says, "That's Orion the Hunter up there, with his belt of three stars. That's Taurus the bull." (p. 97) I'm not sure why they differ. Maybe one is the English edition and the other is the American edition. I did find one word I did not know. Silas had originally been on a team of four monsters but "they had lost Haroun in a cave, when the Infrit, as naturally overconfident as all of its race …" (p. 231) According to thefreedictionary.com, an infrit is a gigantic and monstrous demon in the Muslim tradition.
In February 2015, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) was confidentially involved in a defense of the graphic novel edition of The Graveyard Book which was challenged in an undisclosed middle school for violent imagery. CBLDF's defense was successful. The review committee voted to keep the book on library shelves. I didn't read the graphic novel version. The original version had some dark but still quite impressive illustrations usually at the beginning of the chapters. They complemented the story but did not reveal too much. The first one shows a hand with a knife. Stephen Colbert complained to Neil Gaiman during the interview that the first sentence of his "so-called children's book" states that a hand held a knife.
We had a good discussion on June 20. I think around 12-14 people attended with four new people. One of them liked how the book made it more comfortable to talk about death, especially with kids. Many also enjoyed the clip from The Colbert Report and we all felt the book should not be banned from middle school.
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