Stardust
By Neil Gaiman
248 pages. HarperCollins Publishers. $13.95
Left without a Climax: The Incredibly Unrealized Potential of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust
Queen Victoria is reigning, still in her youth; Dickens is writing and publishing Oliver Twist; Mr. Morse is finally done fiddling with that code of his; and Mr. Draper has caught the moon on camera. All of which is of no importance to a small little town, too far from London to walk, on the edges of a long wall which borders the lands of Faerie. The town, aptly called ‘Wall,’ holds a man named Dunstan Thorn who gets to know the locals of Faerie a little too closely during the nine-a-year fair. And nine months later gets his own package; a son, Tristan Thorn, the hero of this tale, a boy from both worlds.
Fantastical with a starting jolt of humorous irony is just what one would expect when cracking open a Neil Gaiman book and in the land of Wall and Faerie, there is no disappointment on that front. In Stardust, the town of Wall is very country and as commonly described as Faerie is whimsically and so the hero of the tale Tristan is just as so. He is a young boy of seventeen remarkably stupid in love with a woman who has no interest in him. Even in this possibly dull setting with an exceptionally familiar situation, Gaiman’s prose manages to capture the reader into his spell. This does not stop throughout the rest of the novel and if prose alone would make a masterpiece, Gaiman would have one on his hands. “Victoria Forester [Tristan’s object of affection] laughed at the skinny shop-boy, laughed long and loud and delightfully, and her tinkling laughter followed him back down the hill, and away.” The reader will feel the rhythm and movement of the words, but be so enraptured with it and never notice the mechanics involved. Tristan’s quick plight where he ends up promising Victoria to get her a star that fell out of the sky, an idea that even Victoria (the rational, logical, and somewhat catty) finds laughable. Tristan being completely enamored and stupefied by love goes off beyond the wall to find the star. But the star landed in Faerie, and in Faerie all is not what it seems and Tristan soon finds that the star is a stubbornly beautiful woman who is more than a little pissed that she had just been knocked out of the sky. Tristan, unhindered by the fact that she is not bits of rock, decides to bring her to Victoria anyway.
The star, named Yvaine is not dreadfully pleased with this idea either and Tristan is not the only one after her. In one of two subplots that artfully come together, the royalty of Faerie filled with a cast of fratricidical Princes who in the grand tradition of the recently deceased King are set to all at once, kill their brothers and capture the stone which Yvaine wears and which consequently (by the dying King) knocked her out of the sky. Three witches are also after Yvaine, hoping to eat her heart and regain their power and youth. These plots intertwine as one and the tension mounts and builds up as they perfectly fold into one another and meet up with the main plot. Tristan has some troubles before and after that and proves his bad taste in women and manners does not apply to the earnest nature of his heart as he slowly grows on Yvaine.
The plot is whimsical, funny, and easily adaptable to children and adults alike if not for a few placed adult words and themes that could easily be removed for bedtime stories. Still catching onto the fantasy steeled in real experience that Gaiman is so crafted at, Stardust manages to lighten in evocative prose as well as plot, to be more diversely enjoyable. This novel would be near perfect, except with all the mounting tension and build up to a climax – there is none. Stardust, in still completely entrancing prose, tapers off into walking and discussing things with Deux Ex Machina of the balloon losing air kind. The subplots do not achieve the grand conclusion they deserve and Tristan and Yvaine come to sensible ends with no real tension involved, something of quaintly ever after. There is something to be said for the quietness of the ending and epilogue, which may have be better achieved with Gaiman’s usual medium of graphic novels – but what instead occurs is the reader left feeling swindled after they finally come down off the sweetly affective prose high. It seems to be easily solved if Gaiman were to instead of summarizing a large portion of Tristan and Yvaine’s journey (all of which sounds interesting and easily readable) that he would write this out in the same manner as the rest novel. Then perhaps the reader would reach the tapering slow conclusions as the characters have and not feel so shafted by their sudden decisions and less than dramatic plot wrap-ups. Unfortunately the promise and artistry of the writing and plot of Stardust leaves the taste of the ending ultimately bitter and stale.
Neil Gaiman’s Stardust manages to be all at once enjoyable and effortlessly readable, but where it could have been exceptional easily with a hundred more pages, it manages (with a lightened ending and stilted climax) to be just slightly above average. Maybe that is good enough for Gaiman, but with light and airy prose, it was not quite good enough for me.
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