The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Lettie Hempstock has been 11 years old for a long time. She lives on Hempstock Farm at the end of the lane where the narrator lived as a boy. Her “red-brown hair was worn relatively short, for a girl, and her nose was snub. She was freckled” (24). Lettie befriends the narrator as his only friend, but accidentally gets him infected with an otherworldly reality. She saves him when hunger birds tear out his heart. Lettie’s efforts on the narrator’s behalf exhaust her powers, and she returns to the pond’s ocean to recuperate. She is an aspect of Old Mrs. Hempstock, her supposed grandmother. Lettie, and the tripartite deity to which she belongs, find that even immortal beings like themselves must learn from their mistakes and clean up their messes.

The eldest member of the Hempstock clan, Old Mrs. Hempstock is an “old woman, much older than my parents, with long gray hair, like cobwebs, and a thin face” (25). Kindly but a bit gruff, the old woman is the most powerful of the three Hempstocks and is in fact the source of the other two, who exist as aspects of her. Though the novel never says so, this trio echoes the ancient concept of a Triple Goddess who appears as three different women, each of whom is an aspect of a single deity. At full power, Old Mrs. Hempstock intimidates the hunger birds, dangerously powerful beings from beyond the universe. She does so to protect Lettie when the girl saves the narrator. As the main co-protagonist alongside the narrator, Old Mrs. Hempstock, using her three aspects—herself, Lettie, and Ginnie—corrects Lettie’s mistake, returns the narrator to a reasonably healthy state, and monitors him for decades thereafter. She’s reminded that even the gods themselves make mistakes and have a duty to fix them.

Lettie’s supposed mother, Ginnie Hempstock, is rather stout, with a “ruddy round face” (134). She’s affectionate and nurturing toward the young narrator, who’s comforted by her caring ways and thinks of her as a sort of mother figure. Ginnie isn’t a separate being but an aspect of Old Mrs. Hempstock, from whom all the Hempstock women are sourced. Like Lettie and Old Mrs. Hempstock, she helps protect the boy from forces beyond the human world.

Ursula Monkton moves in with the narrator’s family to watch over the children while their parents are away at work. She’s described as “very pretty. She had shortish honey-blonde hair, huge gray-blue eyes, and pale lipstick. She seemed tall, even for an adult” (73). The narrator quickly realizes she’s the creature Lettie tried to subdue, who escaped to the human world through a worm in his foot. The creature, “Skarthach of the Keep” (165), is ancient, perhaps older than the Earth, but her current purpose is to bring money to the locals—per the request of a deceased opal miner who died in debt. It’s her way of ingratiating herself to humans so she can feast on the misery she causes them.

Skarthach recognizes the narrator, who helped Lettie try to bind her, and she means to suppress him. Though extremely clever and competent in her role as Ursula, she’s ignorant of Lettie’s powers and ignores them until Lettie corners her with the threat of death by the hunger birds. Ursula/Skarthach is the story’s chief antagonist until she’s killed by the birds. Her purpose in the tale is to show that the face of evil can appear beautiful and innocent while hiding a monster.

The hunger birds are shadowy creatures that exist outside the human world but enter it to clean out extraneous creatures that don’t belong in the realm. Ursula belongs in a different reality, so the birds find and devour her. They refuse to leave until they’ve cleaned up every last bit of Ursula, including the piece of her stuck in the narrator’s heart—which they tear out. The hunger birds replace Ursula as the main antagonists until they’re defeated by Old Mrs. Hempstock.

The narrator’s father works in an unspecified business that involves many of the buildings nearby, and his son always runs to him when he returns home. Despite his own history with abuse, the father occasionally gets angry with his son, and his face “would grow red, and he would shout” (90-91), paralyzing the boy with fear. Ursula seduces the man and makes him so devoted that, when the boy refuses to cooperate with her, the father tries to kill his son by drowning him. The father is framed as an average man with average virtues and flaws, but his disappointment teaches the boy that he’s alone even in the company of the parents he loves.

The opal miner is “a tall, rangy man with tanned skin and a checked shirt” (12). He rents a room in the narrator’s childhood home, but when he arrives, his taxi runs over the boy’s kitten. He gambles away all his money and that of his investors, steals the family’s car, and uses it to die by suicide. The opal miner leaves a note begging for forgiveness, and his spirit receives help from Skarthach to pay back those wronged. The creature grants his request to give away money, but her efforts disrupt people’s lives. The opal miner serves as an ironic character whose unusual death instigates the plot.