The ObserverNeil GaimanReviewNeil Gaiman is at his best when he abandons his trademark fantasy for stark realism

Read an extract from The Ocean at the End of the Lane

This is Gaiman's first adult novel since Anansi Boys in 2005 and his millions of fans will be mad for it. It tells the story of a man who returns to Sussex for a funeral and then finds himself driving "randomly" to the scenes of his childhood. He is drawn to the Hempstock farmhouse wherein, he remembers, there lived three generations of powerful and mysterious Hempstock women. The youngest of these, Lettie, used to call their duck pond her "Ocean" – later revealed (in a beautiful passage) to be a metaphor for what might best be described as the cosmic life force. And it is by this Ocean that the narrator sits down and recalls the magical and traumatic events that befell his seven-year-old self.

Those events get scary when the hero wakes with a coin choking his throat. He and Lettie take the problem to the older two Hempstock women who warn them to be careful when they set out to "bind" the malevolence.

Out in the fields, they encounter the monster: "some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind… a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time". In the ensuing struggle, the narrator lets go of Lettie's hand as she chants the binding spell (though these Hempstocks don't call them spells: "Gran doesn't hold with none of that. She says it's common.") and the monster places a worm into the arch of the narrator's foot.

Later, the boy removes the worm but doesn't quite get it all out. The malevolence stays and assumes the human form of the tall blonde Ursula Monkton, the narrator's evil live-in nanny, who wears a ragged grey and pink dress that also flaps. Now there's real trouble. And the only thing that Ursula Monkton is scared of, the only thing that will get rid of this kind of a monster, are the formidable "hunger" birds…

You'd be right in surmising that I find all these flapping tent-monsters and worms in your feet and beautiful governesses slightly gauche. Which wouldn't matter (and doesn't, in terms of those millions of fans) except that I also find Gaiman much more interesting as a writer than this somewhat laboured "mythic" story permits.

Let me explain. Here he is on page 71, writing his manifesto in the voice of his narrator: "I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were. Adult stories never made sense, and they were slow to start. They made me feel that they were like secrets, masonic, mythic secrets to adulthood."

The book is orchestrated with a good deal of this pat defensive counterpoint – "Adults follow paths. Children explore." But in my view by far the most impressively realised and impactful scene is the one in which the narrator's father breaks down the door of the bathroom to dump the terrified boy in a freezing bath and hold him under the water.

Observe how the horrifying hyper-realism of this is so vividly clinched: "I looked at him [the father], at the intent expression on his face… He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie. He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it on the window ledge." Observe how precisely Gaiman has evoked the cruelty of the father. The stalled time effect as the narrator notices the exact details and that "intent expression". And that superb, deliberate removal of the watch – so chillingly suggestive of the calm and calculation of a torturer about to go to work. Plus, in a few seconds, it will be that maroon paisley tie that the child will take in his hands, "gripping it for life… pulling [himself] up out of that frigid water", holding on so tightly that the father can't push him down and drown him, before "clamping" his teeth into it, just below the knot. We see this scene, we believe it, we experience it, but most of all we feel it. And it's terrifying. Because it's real. No ghosts, no monsters, no pretending this, no phoney that.

In other words, Gaiman's intelligence and his skill as a writer – to this reviewer at least – are best mobilised in the adult writing he purports to eschew; his account of real human drama, relationships, sensibility, emotions, thought. And so I'd love for him one day to stop with all these ragged tent-presences and just open his veins and write something powerful about human beings – fathers and sons, for example – without all the "gee-shucks-aren't-the-grown-ups-dumb" prophylactics. But I realise that I may be entirely alone in this hope.

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