The Graveyard Book (A Late and Truncated Assessment)

“It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,” said Silas, “take a graveyard” (22).

In The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s spooky take on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Nobody Owens is a live human boy living amongst the dead in a graveyard. His family is brutally murdered when Bod is just a baby, so the cemetery residents adopt him when The Lady on the Grey, the peaceful and wise personification of death, tells them, “The dead should have charity” (29).

The novel spans Bod’s childhood and the beginning of his adolescence. His interactions, adventures, experiences, and instructions evolve with him. The members of the graveyard work together to raise him. He learns to talk, learns to ask questions. “The adults would do their best to answer his questions, but their answers were often confusing, or contradictory, and then Bod would walk down to the old chapel and talk to Silas… His guardian could always be counted upon to explain matters clearly and lucidly and as simply as Bod needed in order to understand” (35).

Bod is Mowgli. Silas is Bagheera, the fierce and wise but soft-voiced guardian over the human child. Both Gaiman’s and Kipling’s guardian characters straddle the disparate arenas each narrative is concerned with; life and death in The Graveyard Book and wildness and civilization in The Jungle Book. Mr. and Mrs. Owens are the father and mother wolf. The host of ghostly residents in Bod’s graveyard home, who hail from a variety of eras and are of a variety of dispositions, are the myriad of jungle creatures. They act as parents and teachers, guardians and relatives of every parental sort. They represent the multiplicity of morality. This is best represented in a frank and surprisingly beautiful discussion of suicide, wherein Bod, curious about the unmarked graves outside of the cemetery gates, asks the adult ghosts about the people who were buried there. They respond with fear, disdain, and dismissal. He then finds out for himself by befriending the ghost of a witch named Liza, and helping her get her own headstone.

No matter the opinions of the properly buried ghosts, and even the sound advice from his most trusted guardian, Bod had to engage with the “other” in order to make his own assessment about an ignored and ostracized person’s worth, and in doing so, establishes his own sense of morality.

Where the morality of The Jungle Book is complicated because animals are animals and not people, The Graveyard Book insists that morality is complicated because those teaching morality are generally not as present within the world they are evaluating as the people who are looking for moral direction.

The child protagonist’s humanness is paramount in each story. (The ghouls are analogous to the monkeys in The Jungle Book, taking on the titles of prestigious persons so they might feel as important and powerful as humans. The man Jack is Shere Khan, both vicious murderers threatened by the young protagonist’s very nature.) The dead are different from the living, according to The Graveyard Book, in terms of their potential: “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."

But youth is humanness unadulterated, and pure potential. In Disney’s 1967 film The Jungle Book the jungle is fun and feral and wild and dangerous and Mowgli must leave it in order to join civilization and become a productive contributor to the realm of man where he belongs. The graveyard is home for Bod. Though it is an environment associated with darkness and death, for Bod it is what is comfortable, what is familiar, what is safe. For the most part, though there are threats within this space, it is the things from outside the graveyard that are dangerous, and over half of the narrative involves Bod’s guardians telling him, “As long as you stay here, you are safe” (35). But by the last third of the novel The Graveyard Book tells youth they must leave home, make mistakes, find themselves, and learn what the world has to teach them. The morality of the home and of the family is a crucial safe place to begin in. Bod must leave the known and enter the unknown to fulfill his potential.