Stardust by Neil Gaiman (1999)

[lightreads]

A village boy in Victorian England sees a falling star, and makes a rash promise to his beloved that he will bring it back to her. The journey takes him deep into faerie and entangles him with a succession battle, a peddler and a captive slave, and a powerfully evil witch also seeking the star. And as for that star, something which is just a lump of rock and metal in our world is, in faerie, a beautiful (and rather irritable) girl who’s just taken a nasty tumble.

Okay, confession, and don’t throw stones or anything: I’m not actually, you know, that into Gaiman. I mean, I adore Good Omens, but that’s a joint work and quite different from his usual stuff. And his usual stuff is . . . you know there’s nothing wrong with it, but it just doesn’t do much of anything for me.

Case in point, this pretty fairy tale for grown-ups. I do like these sorts of stories which haven’t had the spice of sexuality and violence sanitized out for the kiddies, and Gaiman writes with a deceptive simplicity that makes the prose almost invisible.

But I just didn’t care. The magic was occasionally kind of neat, and there were a few delightful references, but I never engaged beyond the very surface.

Gently charming, a bit wry, noticeably lacking in interesting female characters (though to be fair, I didn’t really find anyone interesting), a bit oddly paced through the middle. Probably more fun on the big screen, and how often do I say that?

Comments

[nomadicwriter]

Yeah, I've got your back here. It's sort of odd, because I tend to enjoy Gaiman's writing in his blog and a lot of his short stories, but his novels always seem to leave me cold. The only one I remember really engaging with at all was American Gods, and I think I still had to slog through about the first two thirds before I started getting properly interested. I want to like his novels, and there's stuff in there I feel I should like, and yet somehow it never quite fully gels.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, precisely, right down to enjoying the last third of American Gods more than anything else.

I think I'll try one of his collections next, since I'm not actually familiar with his short work.

(I have an unsubstantiated theory that some of his fans are fond of him because they like Sandman so much, but of course that's unavailable to me, so).

[nomadicwriter]

Snow, Glass, Apples is probably the short story of his that's stuck in my mind most. It's a while since I read one of his collections so I can't remember too well how hit and miss it was, but I do have a vague feeling that his style works better in short form. (Probably because, in a short story, you're expecting not to be so engaged with the characters.)

Huh. Maybe the trouble is that he is primarily a comic book writer? Which is an art form where, like TV, you watch the characters from the outside rather than fully getting into their heads. Because I think that's at the root of the problem I have with his books; there's some fairly interesting stuff going on, but I'm just witnessing it from a distance rather than being in there experiencing the highs and lows of the characters' emotions.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point, actually. About the comic books, I mean. Which also explains why his blog can be so fun and pithy -- I don't know why, but blogs sometimes feel like text panels on comics to me.

*insert appropriate picture here*

"Waaaaaaank!"

[livingbyfiction.livejournal.com]

Stardust was the first Gaiman book I ever read, and I didn't like it either. It's sort of cute if you catch it at a particular angle but mostly the sort of book that you finish and think, "Well at least it was short."

I also didn't really like American Gods (messy), Coraline (unimportant), or most of the stories in Fragile Things.

Anansi Boys is pure wonderful. A remarkably generous, downright big-hearted story. Where American Gods is about the Norse pantheon and human sacrifice, Anansi Boys is about the African trickster god and karaoke. It finds small things and makes them big. Halfway through, I looked at the jacket photo and asked, "Who is this man? I am in love with him! Did he really write Stardust?" Everything else since has been more or less a disappointment with the gigantic exception of Sandman.