Book Review: Stardust
Sep. 15th, 2009 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiI said I'd start doing book reviews here, and I will. That way if anyone ever actually reads this, they will have something to read.
Or something.
So. Dissertation finished, I set forth last night to begin the awesome task of conquering my ever-growing book list. First up: Stardust, by Neil Gaiman.
It's my first Gaiman book, barring Good Omens. And yes, I admit it: I bought it because I love the film and wanted to know how it originally ended.
I seem to be a little unusual among lovers of the film; I prefer the book's ending to the film's. It's sweet, sad and anticlimactic, and much more thought-provoking than that of the movie. But what I didn't love, I'm sad to say, was Gaiman's prose.
I felt the book dragged. On more than one occasion, I got to the end of a long sentence and found the last clause to be disjointed (something I do myself, I'll admit, but I'm not a best-selling published author), and had to read back over it to work out what was being said. I felt there was too little indication to the reader that nine years had passed before Tristran and Yvaine got back to the market at Wall; I had a sense that time had passed, to be sure, but only a year or two. Certainly not nine of them.
I am not sure how I feel about the relegation of all the 'real' adventures to set-dressing and backstory; on the one hand, it creates a great sense of the world and of the characters growing, and we all know that serial adventures are a bad format for a book. On the other, I felt cheated.
The problem partly comes, I think, from sustaining a fairy-tale voice for the length of a novel. There is a reason fairy-tales are short; they're meant to be told in a night, two at most. Over a novel, the story began to become bogged down under its own descriptiveness.
The story itself was good; I've already mentioned that I prefer the original ending, and I also prefer the original beginning - both Dunstan's and Tristran's. It makes a good deal more sense than the necessarily shortened version used for the film. I liked the little hairy man; I liked the limbus-grass scene, which worked so much better here. I liked the fact that Yvaine had an actual reason to be carrying around the Power of Stormhold. I liked the fact that it took them nine years to fall in love, although see my complaint about that not being obvious enough. Basically, overall, I prefer the book... just not its prose style.
I therefore plot to get Stardust on audio: I think that the fairy-tale voice would sound better when read aloud, the way it's supposed to be delivered, and an actor might be able to make those disjointed lines make sense.
Will I try Gaiman again? Probably, one day; I think a lot of the problem with Stardust is the slightly affected fairy-tale style, which will hopefully be gone from his other works. But I'm not rushing to buy any more from him. I have a reading list to get through, first.
Or something.
So. Dissertation finished, I set forth last night to begin the awesome task of conquering my ever-growing book list. First up: Stardust, by Neil Gaiman.
It's my first Gaiman book, barring Good Omens. And yes, I admit it: I bought it because I love the film and wanted to know how it originally ended.
I seem to be a little unusual among lovers of the film; I prefer the book's ending to the film's. It's sweet, sad and anticlimactic, and much more thought-provoking than that of the movie. But what I didn't love, I'm sad to say, was Gaiman's prose.
I felt the book dragged. On more than one occasion, I got to the end of a long sentence and found the last clause to be disjointed (something I do myself, I'll admit, but I'm not a best-selling published author), and had to read back over it to work out what was being said. I felt there was too little indication to the reader that nine years had passed before Tristran and Yvaine got back to the market at Wall; I had a sense that time had passed, to be sure, but only a year or two. Certainly not nine of them.
I am not sure how I feel about the relegation of all the 'real' adventures to set-dressing and backstory; on the one hand, it creates a great sense of the world and of the characters growing, and we all know that serial adventures are a bad format for a book. On the other, I felt cheated.
The problem partly comes, I think, from sustaining a fairy-tale voice for the length of a novel. There is a reason fairy-tales are short; they're meant to be told in a night, two at most. Over a novel, the story began to become bogged down under its own descriptiveness.
The story itself was good; I've already mentioned that I prefer the original ending, and I also prefer the original beginning - both Dunstan's and Tristran's. It makes a good deal more sense than the necessarily shortened version used for the film. I liked the little hairy man; I liked the limbus-grass scene, which worked so much better here. I liked the fact that Yvaine had an actual reason to be carrying around the Power of Stormhold. I liked the fact that it took them nine years to fall in love, although see my complaint about that not being obvious enough. Basically, overall, I prefer the book... just not its prose style.
I therefore plot to get Stardust on audio: I think that the fairy-tale voice would sound better when read aloud, the way it's supposed to be delivered, and an actor might be able to make those disjointed lines make sense.
Will I try Gaiman again? Probably, one day; I think a lot of the problem with Stardust is the slightly affected fairy-tale style, which will hopefully be gone from his other works. But I'm not rushing to buy any more from him. I have a reading list to get through, first.