The Road Not Taken: Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’
‘Coraline’ is one of Neil Gaiman’s best-loved works. It’s a cracking read, tense and atmospheric, with nicely constructed suspense sequences and clever doubling between the two worlds. Gaiman imbues the material with warmth and humour and the action brims with ideas from the whimsical to the disturbing – I confess I was puzzled by the dog theatre, but the cat as a supercilious creature that passes between two realms was delightful and also, it has to be said, a heavy-lifter when it comes to exposition.
In the following I discuss elements of the plot. This may spoil your enjoyment of the book if you have not already read it (or seen the film).
The Road Not Taken
When I re-read the book recently, I found myself wondering about an alternative path for the narrative, as if I were a passenger in a car who expected the driver to turn left not right. I sat up and looked over my shoulder and thought about what might have been, the road not taken.
When Coraline first visits the world on the other side of the door, the ‘other mother’ is quick to offer her more love and attention than her benign but neglectful parents have given. There will be games and better food and magical toys. For a lonely youngster, this ought to be sorely tempting—think of the house made of gingerbread in ‘Hansel and Gretel’—but Coraline barely considers it. Why not?
Well, for a start, because Gaiman does not leave us in any doubt about the other mother’s malevolence. She is disfigured, her eyes replaced with buttons, an image vivid, shocking, and memorable. But you have to wonder why a monster (or the author) capable of spinning such an elaborate trap, of producing a credible facsimile of the real world, would so overlook this fundamental detail. The eyes are the pre-eminent organs of emotional communication, the windows to the soul, and blanked out surely the possibility of love is obstructed.
Given the other mother’s disfigurement, Coraline wasn’t likely to take the bait. Yet part of me still wanted the story to take this route and my mind began to consider this parallel narrative, this other version.
Let’s call it ‘Temptation, or the Shaming of the Hero’
What if Coraline thought life really might be better on the other side of the door and, for a night, say, decided to embrace these ‘other parents’? What if she liked the idea so much she ignored the other mother’s strange kinetic hair and teeth slightly too long and contemplated submitting to the same disfigurement as her new parents. ‘Noooo! Don’t do it!’ we would howl and squeal, trying to warn her. And only then, having taken it to the brink, the edge of destruction, would she baulk. After this she returns to the real world and discovers her parents are not at home. The plot thickens. Have they abandoned her or has something happened to them?
Here the two paths would rejoin, but now, in the alternative version, Coraline would be a compromised hero. No longer Gaiman’s sensible, grounded young girl – the most self-possessed of the human characters in the book, but flawed, emotionally complicit in her parent’s disappearance, carrying the shame of having betrayed her parents. And the story would have to deal with this weight.
Gaiman’s choice is lighter and less complex (which can often be a virtue not a fault). He has talked of how he wrote the first third of the story and then circumstances caused him to put it aside, but when he returned years later, he had come to understand its purpose. He knew what he wanted it to say. Be brave, he tells us. Dragons can be killed. My alternative version may intensify the challenge, but it does lack this simple, exemplary purpose.
Gaiman gives Coraline an anecdote—based on an autobiographical encounter with a hive of wasps—to explain why she must return to the shadow world, despite her fears, despite the risks, to confront the other mother and rescue her parents. It is an insight of preternatural maturity and one that casts Coraline as a heroic figure. The rest of the action confirms her courage and her ingenuity.
