Buried Treasure

The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman

Nobody Owens, more-familiarly known as "Bod", finds life in the graveyard – and finds life good. The graveyard is his whole world; where he plays with friends, where he sleeps in his adopted family’s home, where he learns what he needs to survive. His friends and family are the buried dead of the graveyard whose spirits live on eternally.

Orphaned as a toddler by a mysterious man named Jack, Bod grows up among the spirits and other beings (most especially his guardian, Silas) who watch over Bod, teach him their ways and, as best they can, the ways of the world outside the iron fence. Too soon for all concerned, the ways of that outside world intrude in a dangerous way and Bod must learn his final lesson from the spirits: how to live.

Author Neil Gaiman (Coraline and Stardust, among others) wrote this Young Adult fiction as a take on Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”. Being more familiar with the Disney cartoon than the actual stories, I do not find too many exact, one-to-one, characterizations here -- and that is not a bad thing at all. Sure, “Jack” is Shere Khan the Tiger, Silas is most-likely Bagheera, while Bod is, of course, Mowgli – but in the end, it does not matter.

Here is what matters:

Silas said, "Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you."

Bod shrugged. "So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"Yes," Silas hesitated. "They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."

An exciting and clever book, nevertheless "The Graveyard Book" really won me over with its great heart and honesty. There is no sugarcoating the terror, and the trickster Bod often falls over his own faults. His foibles are not necessarily well-intentioned ones, either.

It is a book in which the experience of reading it winds up like life itself. At the end of our own time, many most likely do not want an end. We would want to keep going or sometimes would even want to start over. I felt a strong urge to start re-reading “The Graveyard Book” again at the end of the final page. If not for the fact it also makes me want to get out there and live even more. No time for someone else’s stories -- live your own.