Cecily's Reviews > Coraline

This a perfect, traditional fairy* tale, with a slightly surreal twenty-first century warp. The writing is as magical as the plot.

Its thirteen chapters are delightful, dark, and funny, with a heroine many can relate to, as child, parent, or both.

Coraline is intelligent, inquisitive, slightly contrary, hates being bored, and wishes her parents paid her more attention, and didn’t feed her “recipes”. Perhaps, she wishes she had different parents. And you should always be careful what you wish for, even if you don’t know you’ve wished for it.

So begins an adventure in which Coraline unlocks a door, goes down a secret passage, and finds herself in an alternate world that is eerily familiar, and scarily unfamiliar. She must conquer fears, discover the truth, and solve problems to find and rescue her parents, herself, and others.

"A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It's supposed to be a door." Fran Lebowitz.

There are echoes of Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Dickens, Greek myths, and others, but it's also thoroughly original. It is YYA, rather than YA. I only wish it had been published a decade ago, so I could have read when my son was YYA.

Learning Outcomes

This isn’t a remotely teachy or preachy book, but Coraline learns a lot about life, familial love, and especially herself. She finds bravery she didn’t know she had, but she faces temptation as well. “The other mother loved her… as a dragon loves gold.” The other mother offers her everything she thinks she wants. But there is a price, and Coraline has a Eureka moment, and declares:
“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything?”

The Importance of Names

Names are often endowed with supernatural power, but in this book, it’s almost the reverse.

In Coraline’s real world, there is a strange man who has an apartment in the same house; Coraline doesn’t know his name (it hadn’t even occurred to her that he had one), and he always gets hers wrong (Caroline).

The equivalent man in the alternative world always gets her name right, and yet that's also where the cat explains why names are unimportant: “We [cats] know who we are, so we don’t need names.” When Coraline asks what she'd do if she needed to call it, the cat replies, “Calling cats… tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”

The Importance of Fairy Tales

In the introduction, Gaiman says that the prime message he wanted to convey to his young daughters was that bravery is “when you’re scared but still do it anyway”.

Hence, he opens with a quote from GK Chesterton:
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

That reminded me of an equally pertinent one from Ursula Le Guin:
“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

Chris Riddell’s Illustrations Compared with Henry Selick's Film

My edition of the book is illustrated by Chris Riddell, who has also illustrated Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I have fond memories of his collaboration with Paul Stewart on The Edge Chronicles, read with my son a dozen years ago, and enjoy his cartoons in The Literary Review.

The slightly different imagery of the film is probably familiar to more people. I saw it several years ago, and it feels like a Tim Burton work, but it was actually adapted and directed by Henry Selick, who worked with Burton on The Nightmare Before Christmas, and also directed James and The Giant Peach (Miss Spink and Miss Forcible reminded me of aunts Spiker and Sponge).

Submit to being entrapped in this tangled web of creative talent.

Quotes

• “It wasn’t the kind of rain you could go out in, it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed. It was rain that meant business.”

• “'Go away,' he said cheerfully.”

• “An argument as old and comfortable as an armchair… that no one ever really wins or loses.”

• “The mist hung like blindness around the house.”

• “She had the feeling that the door was looking back at her, which she knew was silly, and knew on a deeper level was somehow true.”

• “There was something slightly vague about his face – like bread dough that has begun to rise.”

• “Her long white fingers fluttered gently, like a tired butterfly.”

• “Her hair was wriggling like lazy snakes on a warm day. Her black-button eyes seemed as if they had been freshly polished.”

• “If she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you can’t see.”

• “Her voice did not just come from her mouth. It came from the mist, and the fog, and the house, and the sky.”

• “Mirrors… are never to be trusted.”
But Gaiman is.
This book is magical.
I already said that, but it’s worth repeating.


* No actual fairies in this fairy tale, but that's true of most of the best fairy tales, imo.