Stardust, Neil Gaiman

I don't know why, but I have always been under the impression that I had read Stardust, by Neil Gaiman. I had seen the film, but for some reason it didn't seem like the book I remembered.

There are 2 reasons for that -- first, I had never actually read the book, and second, the film bears only a passing resemblance to the book. (No cross-dressing pirate, a lot more colorful characters...a much better ending...you get the drift.)

First published in 1998, Stardust is a beautiful, lyrical and sometimes violent journey into fairyland.


The Blurb:
Young Tristran Thorn will do anything to win the cold heart of beautiful Victoria—even fetch her the star they watch fall from the night sky. But to do so, he must enter the unexplored lands on the other side of the ancient wall that gives their tiny village its name. Beyond that old stone wall, Tristran learns, lies Faerie—where nothing, not even a fallen star, is what he imagined.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman comes a remarkable quest into the dark and miraculous—in pursuit of love and the utterly impossible.

My Review:
First off let me just say I loved this book.  Tristran is naive yet brave, and obsessed with the notion of true love. Victoria is snobbish and not really worthy of him.  Yvaine has all the best qualities of a true star--she is coldly, amazingly beautiful, and childish.

The Lord of Stormhold and his heirs are awesome characters. They are not evil, but they are not good (good people don't kill each other as they scrap their way to the throne.)

There are 3 evil characters in this tale (though one is not a character, it's more of a doom): The obviously evil Morwanneg who wants to cut out the heart of the star so she and her sister will regain eternal youth, Madame Semele who is just plain greedy and who holds Tristran's mother captive, and the overhanging evil of what will happen to Yvaine if Tristran succeeds in taking her back to Victoria.

Each and every sentence of this book is beautiful. I fell into the prose and the dream that the tale evokes and didn't want to emerge even for food. This ability to draw a scene and set it with both mystery and clarity is why Gaiman is one of my favorite authors.
 

If you have seen the movie, and think you know the story, you couldn't be more wrong. The book holds more magic, love, epic adventure and sheer fairy tale inventiveness than the movie ever could. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman

This week we are visiting a short fantasy novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel, by Neil Gaiman. This book tops out at less than two hundred pages, but it is one of Gaiman’s most beautiful works.  I loved Stardust, and I love The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I know Neil Gaiman is not an indie, and this makes two weeks in a row that I have strayed from the indie path. This is a truly wonderful book, and well worth reading.

The Blurb:

This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real...

My Review

Not much of a blurb, but the wonderful, mysterious title sold me the book.  

The tale that is revealed within the pages of this book stayed with me long after I had finished. The lyrical prose is pure Gaiman at his best. I have frequently felt his work will bring back a new appreciation for the art of beautiful words, neatly crafted and wrapped in wonderful plots. There are no sixty-second sound-bites of action in this book—it is instead a true fairy-tale, taking us to bad places where bad things can happen and good people sometimes suffer terrible consequences.

The main protagonist is never named, so far as I could see. The unnamed protagonist returns to his childhood hometown for the funeral of a close family member, also not named. There he revisits the home in which he and his sister grew up and remembers his friend, Lettie Hempstock, who always said that the pond behind her house was an ocean.

He stops at the house where Lettie had lived with her mother and grandmother and encounters her mother. He begins to remember long-forgotten incidents from the past. He recalls a time when he was a child of only seven years old. A man he and his family knew stole his father's car and committed suicide in the back seat, having gambled away his friends' money. Somehow, his suicide allowed a supernatural being to enter our world.

The Hempstock women have magic, but they aren’t witches.  They are much more than that, and the magic they do has its roots firmly based in the solid physics of the universe, in quarks and electrons and time itself.

The atmosphere is dark and frightening in this tale, but it is also comfortable, like a fire on a chill night. The contrasting moods of the boy’s struggling home life and the old-fashioned, cozy farmhouse Lettie lives in are woven into the story with delicacy, flowing naturally and forming the background of the protagonist’s memories of a terrifying time in his life.

This is a stunning, harsh tale, frightening and yet comforting in a strange way. There is beauty here among the sometimes ugly facts of a lonely young boy’s life.

I confess I did pay $9.99 for the Kindle download, and then I read the book in one day. It was well worth it, and I will do it again for his next book!