The Graveyard Book

“Mrs. Owens bent down to the baby and extended her arms. ‘Come now,’ she said, warmly. ‘Come to Mama.’ To the man Jack, walking through the graveyard towards them on a path, his knife already in his hand, it seemed as if a swirl of mist had curled around the child, in the moonlight, and that the boy was no longer there: just damp mist and moonlight and swaying grass.”

Mrs. Owens accepts the living child from his recently deceased mother and whisks him away into their misty world just before the man Jack can kill him. The mist becomes a protective element around the baby, foreshadowing the security he is to find in the world that cannot be seen.

“‘But,’ expostulated Josiah Worthington. ‘But. A human child. A living child. I mean. I mean, I mean. This is a graveyard, not a nursery, blast it.’”

Baronet Josiah Worthington protests that it’s not appropriate for a graveyard full of ghosts to raise a live human child. His protests, while valid, are quickly lost and show the inevitability of Bod’s path in life. The unexpected family relationship that arises between the ghosts and the little boy will change all of them.

“Some skills can be attained by education, and some by practice, and some by time. Those skills will come if you study. Soon enough you will master Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. But some skills cannot be mastered by the living, and for those you must wait a little longer. Still, I do not doubt that you will acquire even those, in time.”

Silas explains to little Bod that he must be patient, and that, in due time, he’ll learn everything he needs to get on in the world and more, because he’ll have some ghostly abilities as well. It’s a preview, for the reader as well as Bod, of the plot points to come in his life.

“Scarlett was happy. She was a bright, lonely child, whose mother worked for a distant university teaching people she never met face-to-face, grading English papers sent to her over the computer, and sending messages of advice or encouragement back. Her father taught particle physics, but there were, Scarlett told Bod, too many people who wanted to teach particle physics and not enough people who wanted to learn it, so Scarlett’s family had to keep moving to different university towns, and in each town her father would hope for a permanent teaching position that never came.”

This passage makes clear how smart Scarlett is. Her parents are intelligent, and she already possesses a basic understanding of her parents’ financial difficulties. With her father’s profession, she’s already comfortable with the concept of physics as well. That her folks often must move in search of work explains Scarlett’s loneliness and her reception to Bod’s own living arrangements.

“It was a perfect spring day, and the air was alive with birdsong and bee hum. The daffodils bustled in the breeze and here and there on the side of the hill a few early tulips nodded. A blue powdering of forget-me-nots and fine, fat yellow primroses punctuated the green of the slope as the two children walked up the hill toward the Frobishers’ little mausoleum.”

The beautiful day on a hillside bursting with flowers suggests Scarlett and Bod’s happiness to be together exploring the cemetery. The loveliness contrasts ironically with the graveyard and its tombstones. the warmth of the day stands apart from the mild chill of the underground world and signifies the way the graveyard has come to mean a life for Bod.

“One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it—waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave, it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like a fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate. There was one in Bod’s graveyard. There is one in every graveyard.”

The novel’s vivid imagery describes a common thing seen in cemeteries but infuses it with mystery, magic, creeping fear, and, most of all, imagination to add to the tone of fantasy and mystery. That the name of the deceased has eroded away, the burial place transformed by time and decay, bespeaks the takeover of unearthly creatures. It’s a reminder that Bod, though raised thoughtfully and lovingly by ghosts, does reside in a place with foreboding aspects.

“‘[T]here are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.’ ‘They kill themselves, you mean? […] Does it work? Are they happier dead?’ ‘Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.’”

The book raises deep questions about life and death, such as whether those who die by suicide forfeit chances in the afterworld. Silas says it’s more that killing oneself doesn’t solve a severe emotional problem, but simply moves it forward in time. The lesson is that people can’t solve their troubles by running away from them.

“‘You’re a witch!’ they shouts, fat and fresh-scrubbed all pink in the morning, like so many pigwiggins scrubbed clean for market day. One by one they gets up beneath the sky and tells of milk gone sour and horses gone lame, and finally Mistress Jemima gets up, the fattest, pinkest, best-scrubbed of them all, and tells how as Solomon Porritt now cuts her dead and instead hangs around the washhouse like a wasp about a honeypot, and it’s all my magic, says she, that made him so and the poor young man must be bespelled.”

The dead teenage girl, Liza Hempstock, explains to Bod how she was accused of witchcraft by a man who courted her and was rejected. In fact, Liza really is a witch, but that doesn’t make her evil, despite the terrible treatment she received in life at the hands of the witch hunters. Her idiomatic old English is one example of the many antique styles spoken by the dead in the graveyard and serves as a reminder that regardless of station or dialect, all are made equal in death.

“Abanazer Bolger had thick spectacles and a permanent expression of mild distaste, as if he had just realized that the milk in his tea had been on the turn, and he could not get the sour taste of it out of his mouth. The expression served him well when people tried to sell him things.”

Someone who buys and sells used items needs a bargaining advantage, and Bolger has one built into his face. The description of Bolger eloquently captures the man’s long experience, cynicism about humans, and a calculating ability to cheat people out of their valuables.

“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind / Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind, / Now slip, now slide, now move unseen, / Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”

Liza the witch intones this invocation while pressing her palm against Bod’s forehead. Her magic works and Bod disappears. The rhyme’s repeated use of “be” generates a compelling visualization that takes over Bod’s essence; the last three words do the same while investing in him the ability to move through things. For the reader, the real magic is in the words, their vivid imagery enlivening the text.

“Bod put the clothes on. The shoelaces gave him a little trouble and Silas had to teach him how to tie them. It seemed remarkably complicated to Bod, and he had to tie and re-tie his laces several times before he had done it to Silas’s satisfaction.”

Silas knows Bod will soon be venturing outside the graveyard and he gives him street clothes that will make him anonymous and therefore safer. Bod’s struggle to learn how to tie shoes anticipates his upcoming struggles in dealing with the many details of human life down in the city. Silas serves as Bod’s father figure in his reinforcement of the shoe tying, taking on the parental role in ensuring Bod’s success in a primary self-care task that parents often teach their young children.

“I know many things, Bod, for I have been walking this earth at night for a very long time, but I do not know what it is like to dance the Macabray. You must be alive or you must be dead to dance it—and I am neither.”

Silas explains to Bod that not all beings can dance to the strange magic of the Macabray. Humans and ghosts can do so, but not him, providing further evidence that Silas is something different, a being who exists beyond the world of humans alive or dead. Silas connects with Bod an outsider status that’s hard to shake, further developing their relationship’s foundation on one of mutual understanding.

“Bod woke early the next day, when the sun was a silver coin high in the grey winter sky. It was too easy to sleep through the hours of daylight, to spend all his winter in one long night and never see the sun, and so each night before he slept he would promise himself that he would wake in daylight, and leave the Owenses’ cozy tomb.”

Though he’s well cared for in the graveyard, Bod must conform to his community’s nocturnal lifestyle. As a live human, he needs a certain amount of sun and works his needs around the community in which he lives. Instinctively, he collects moments of sunlight to nourish himself, which the ghosts cannot.

“They stomped to the music, and stepped and spun and kicked, and the lady danced with them, stepping and spinning and kicking with enthusiasm. Even the white horse swayed its head and stepped and shifted to the music. The dance sped up, and the dancers with it. Bod was breathless, but he could not imagine the dance ever stopping: the Macabray, the dance of the living and the dead, the dance with Death. Bod was smiling, and everyone was smiling.”

When the ivy blooms in winter, everyone—living and dead—dances the Macabray together. The ghost goddess, the Lady on the Grey, presides, and music comes from nowhere and everywhere, and all seem to know the steps. It’s a ritual beyond reason, deep in the souls of all people, a transcendent joy that communicates that there’s much more to life and death than people imagine.

“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.’”

Silas doesn’t want Bod in danger, but he knows the boy is growing and must someday face those perils—especially the threat from the assassin. Bod’s reply, that his friends are dead and he doesn’t mind dying, speaks to his close-knit family of kindly ghosts. Silas continues to remind Bod, and the reader, that though he finds comfort in his life in the shadows, life as a human being is the ultimate force of change and power, and is not found in death.

“‘I’ve learned a lot in this graveyard,’ said Bod. ‘I can Fade and I can Haunt. I can open a ghoul-gate and I know the constellations. But there’s a world out there, with the sea in it, and islands, and shipwrecks and pigs. I mean, it’s filled with things I don’t know. And the teachers here have taught me lots of things, but I need more. If I’m going to survive out there, one day.’”

Bod goes beyond what Silas wants of him: He desires, not merely to learn more, but to do it properly, with teachers who know things the graveyard’s denizens do not. Silas doesn’t want to expose the boy to such a risk, but he knows Bod won’t remain cooped up in the graveyard forever—not, at least, while he’s alive. This debate highlights the way in which Bod straddles life and death, as he struggles to fully live and risk his welfare away from the death and security of the graveyard.

“‘Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister.’ ‘Yes. Someone did.’ ‘A man?’ ‘A man.’ ‘Which means,’ said Bod, ‘you’re asking the wrong question.’ Silas raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’ ‘Well,’ said Bod. ‘If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t ‘who will keep me safe from him?’ ‘No?’ ‘No. It’s ‘who will keep him safe from me?’”

Bod can Fade and Haunt and he has powers beyond those of mortals. He also doesn’t care if he dies: He knows the afterworld is filled with potential friends. He’s also smart and resourceful. His reasoning with Silas illustrates his growth in maturity during his time in the graveyard and his understanding of what he will face if he ever truly leaves.

“In the graveyard, no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still little children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was now four or five years younger than Bod was, and they had less to talk about each time they saw each other; Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him; he would walk with Bod in the evenings, and tell stories of unfortunate things that had happened to his friends.”

As Bod grows up, his ghostly acquaintances stay the same forever. Despite the warmth of the graveyard’s denizens, it’s Bod who’s changing, and the shifts in his relationships at the graveyard make him feel lonely. The passage starkly contrasts life and death through Bod’s growing years in the graveyard and how it is literally played out as he continues to live, while those who are already dead remain stagnant.

“‘How could you make her forget me?’ Silas said, ‘People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.’ Bod said, ‘I liked her.’ ‘I’m sorry.’”

Bod saves both his own life and Scarlett’s, but the things she’s seen make her distrust Bod to the point where she thinks he’s as much a monster as the Jack who tried to kill her. The skills Bod has acquired from the graveyard, and the beings who’ve taught him, create in him a history that he can’t reveal, even to a close friend, lest they may back away in horror and flee. His attempts to connect to the living world outside the graveyard are ruined as the very world in which he inhabits conflicts with the human world he tries to enter.

“He would begin by saying, ‘Nothing interesting has ever happened to me,’ then would add, gloomily, ‘and I have told you all my tales,’ and then his eyes would flash, and he would remark, ‘Except…did I ever tell you about…?’ And whatever the next words were: ‘The time I had to escape from Moscow?’ or ‘The time I lost an Alaskan gold mine, worth a fortune?’ or ‘The cattle stampede on the pampas?,’ Bod would always shake his head and look expectant and soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.”

The ghost of Alonso Jones regales Bod with stories of his exploits back when he was alive during the late 1800s. His tales have kernels of truth and a great deal of embellishment, but they’re entertaining all the same. Alonso serves as a mascot, for the story: Alonso tells not so much the tales themselves as the spirit behind them, the urge to climb onto the opportunities of life and ride them for all they’re worth. Bod thus learns from Alonso the attitude he’ll need when he explores wonder and excitement of the wider world.

“‘I still feel the same as I always did,’ Bod said, but Mother Slaughter interrupted, ‘And I still feels like I done when I was a tiny slip of a thing, making daisy chains in the old pasture. You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’”

Now 15, Bod is beginning to lose his ability to see the ghosts of the graveyard. Mother Slaughter offers the ironic wisdom that, though people and things change, they also somehow remain the same. As Bod approaches manhood, Mother Slaughter’s wisdom reminds him that he has always been human first, and that has never changed. However, his status in the graveyard is always changing, as he's always growing, unlike the static ghosts who have already died.

“Liza’s voice, close to his ear, said, ‘Truly, life is wasted on the living, Nobody Owens. For one of us is too foolish to live, and it is not I. Say you will miss me.’ ‘Where are you going?’ asked Bod. Then, ‘Of course I will miss you, wherever you go…’ ‘Too stupid,’ whispered Liza Hempstock’s voice, and he could feel the touch of her hand on his hand. ‘Too stupid to live.’ The touch of her lips against his cheek, against the corner of his lips.”

Love is just as problematic between the living and the dead as it is among the living. The ghost-witch Liza has been in love with Bod for some time, and he’s been oblivious. As Eliza uses her last chance to tell him her feelings, Bod’s evident growth is demonstrated as he moves further away from his abilities to see the supernatural world for what it really is.

“‘Islands and porpoises and glaciers and mountains. Places where people dress and eat in the strangest ways.’ Bod hesitated. Then, ‘Those places. They’re still there. I mean, there’s a whole world out there. Can I see it? Can I go there?’ Silas nodded. ‘There is a whole world out there, yes.’”

Silas, who has guarded Bod since he was a toddler, now invites him to retrieve his birthright by venturing out into the world and discovering all it has to offer. Silas’s purpose has been to protect the child of prophecy so that he may fulfill the promise and destroy the evil Jacks of All Trades; as Bod’s guardian, he also comes to love the boy and wish him well in the world. This moment represents a child leaving home, but also Bod’s cleaving with his deeper connection to the supernatural as he grows and the graveyard can no longer sustain him.