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]

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!"