The Graveyard Book Summary: Neil Gaiman's Boy Raised by Ghosts
What it is about
The Graveyard Book was published in 2008, simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States. It opens with a murder. A man known only as the man Jack kills three members of a family in their home. The youngest child, a boy of about eighteen months, crawls out of the house, up a hill, and into a graveyard. The ghosts there find him. His mother, now a ghost herself, asks them to keep him safe.
They agree. The baby is given a name, Nobody Owens, a play on the idea that nobody owns him. He is usually called Bod. He is also granted the Freedom of the Graveyard, which lets him pass through solid objects inside its walls, including the gates. From there the novel moves forward in chapters that work almost like linked stories, each one catching Bod at a different age as he grows up among the dead.
The structure is deliberately episodic. Bod learns to read from headstones. He makes a friend among the living. He gets into trouble with things that live underground and in other dimensions. All the while, the man Jack is still out there, still looking, and the reader knows it long before Bod does.
The main characters
Bod is the centre of the book, and Gaiman lets him age properly across it, from toddler to roughly fifteen. His curiosity keeps getting him into danger, which is the engine of most chapters.
Mr and Mrs Owens are the ghosts who adopt him. Mrs Owens finds him first and argues for keeping him. They give him the ordinary parenting the book needs as ballast against everything strange.
Silas is the guardian, a figure who exists on the border between life and death and can therefore leave the graveyard to fetch food, books and information. He is the one who persuades the man Jack that the child is not there. He is also, quietly, the most interesting presence in the novel, withholding more than he explains.
Miss Lupescu arrives to mind Bod when Silas has to go away. She is strict, her cooking is unusual, and six-year-old Bod cannot stand her. She turns out to be a werewolf, and she saves his life when the Ghouls, corpse-eating creatures from an alternative dimension, trick him through a Ghoulgate. Their relationship changes completely after that.
Scarlett Perkins is the living girl whose parents bring her to play in the graveyard. With her, Bod discovers the Sleer, an ancient creature coiled in a prehistoric barrow, waiting thousands of years for its Master to return and reclaim the treasures it guards: a knife, a goblet and a brooch. Scarlett's family moves to Glasgow, but she comes back years later, and her return sets the final act moving.
The themes
Family is the obvious one, and the book takes an unsentimental view of it. Bod's real parents die in the first few pages. The family he gets instead is made by agreement and argument, assembled from people who are already dead and one who is neither. It works. The novel is clear that a family is what raises you, not what produced you.
Death runs through every page without ever being morbid. The graveyard is the safest place in the story. The living world is where the danger is. Gaiman uses the dead as teachers, neighbours and gossips, which has the effect of making mortality ordinary rather than terrifying.
Underneath that sits a straightforward coming-of-age shape. Every protection Bod is given is temporary. The Freedom of the Graveyard, the guardian, the walls themselves, all of it exists so that one day he will not need it. The book is honest about the cost of growing up: what you gain and what you have to stop being able to do.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the ending fresh.
Scarlett befriends a historian called Mr Jay Frost, who lives in the house where Bod's family was killed. When Bod visits, Frost reveals that he is the man Jack. Jack Frost is his full name. Bod is hunted through the graveyard by Frost and four other members of a society called the Jacks of All Trades. He defeats them one by one. Frost takes Scarlett hostage in the Sleer's chamber, and Bod tricks him into claiming to be the Sleer's Master. The Sleer takes him into the wall, protecting him from the world, permanently.
Silas returns. He and Miss Lupescu belong to the Honour Guard, who protect the borders between things. The society is destroyed, but Miss Lupescu is killed. Scarlett is appalled by what Bod has done, and Silas removes her memory of the night and sends her back to Glasgow. In the last chapter Bod, now about fifteen, is losing the Freedom of the Graveyard and can barely see the ghosts. Silas gives him money and a passport. He says goodbye and walks out.
Why it still matters
The awards tell part of the story. The Graveyard Book won the British Carnegie Medal and the American Newbery Medal, the first time both went to the same work. It also took the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. Chris Riddell, who illustrated the British children's edition, made the Kate Greenaway Medal shortlist, the first time in that award's thirty-year history that one book appeared on both the author and illustrator lists. Time magazine named it one of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.
It suits readers who like their children's fiction with real stakes and real loss, and adults who want a short novel that treats death plainly. Several film adaptations have been attempted. The most recent was abandoned after sexual assault allegations were made against Gaiman.
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