Till I read Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, I was of the firm conviction that Fairy Tales were for children. Adults could read and enjoy them an often did but the main audience for me was always children. But in Stardust, the author has come with a work that us a fable, a parable really that portrays life and living, good and evil, joy and sorrow in adult terms, vocabulary and theme.
The story in Stardust is about Tristran Thorn, a young man whose father is a human and mother a fairie and who in a rash decision, decides to go into Faerie Land to bring a fallen star back for the girl he loves. Once in there, he gets caught up in all sorts of adventures. The twists and turns of his journey which is contained in most of the book are filled with parable endowed truths of some sublimity. The backdrop of the book is the village of Wall, a quaint Victorian village on the edge of a dark land of witches, goblins, elves and all manner of strange creatures of whom some are good and some are evil.
There is a unicorn involved among the characters, flying boats that fish for lightning, a trio of evil witches and seven murderous brothers. The border with the land of Faerie always guarded day and night except for a day once in nine years could well represent our own attempt to keep at a distance and often unsuccessfully – the evil outside. Often enough, the unknown and the stranger is always understood or rather misunderstood as some one who is evil, who is out there to harm us, destroy us.
And yet as Tristan discovers, outside the borders, in the land of Faerie, no land and no people can be type caste and good people and bad people exist every where. Some of the witches that he and Yvaine the star who fell to the earth from the skies and who becomes his eventual companion encounter are terribly mean. And yet as they reminiscence later about the witch they wonder if “she transforms people into animals or whether she finds the beast inside us and frees it”
Neil Gaiman captures well the many intangibles that are part of being human and those intangible bonds which outlast the ones that can be seen. As Yvaine the star would one day explain of Tristan himself “He once caught me with a chain…. Then he freed me, and I ran from him. But he found me and bound me with an obligation, which binds more securely than any chain ever could”
At its most basic, Stardust is a good read; a beautiful book, and most of all, perfect for all ages. Gaiman gives his characters real depth & humanity, even the non human ones and by the end of the book, the reader engrossed in all their destinies, especially that of the star Yvaine, who is immortal but can never ever go back to her mother the moon. On dark moon lit nights, long after eventual husband Tristan is dead, the lonely but immortal star climbs up to the highest point of her palace and looks achingly up at the moon lit sky which was once her home and where she will never ever be able to go back. Perhaps the author wants to remind humans reading his book that immortality is not the unmitigated bliss that we some times imagine it might be.