I can’t believe that I’ve only just read this!
I adore the film and for some reason it has never occurred to me to read the book. While on holiday recently I listened to the audiobook which has a wonderful interview with Neil Gaiman at the end of it.
Tristram, the hero, has to journey through the realm of Fairy in order to retrieve a fallen star to prove to the girl of his dreams how much he loves her. The only problem is that the fallen star is not a lump of rock or a jewel as he imagines but a woman. This results in a journey back through Fairy while being chased by witches and other interested parties.
I found Gaiman’s interview especially interesting because the book differs from the film so much. In the film some of the secondary characters are much more rounded than in the book (Michelle Pfifer and Robert Deniro do steal the show!), but these changes work as the film is played far more for laughs. Although the ultimate endings for some of the characters are different, I still found them satisfying and I can see why those choices were made for the film. I’m glad I watched the film first though, as I’m sure that I would have been rather disgruntled as the endings are so different. Stardust was also published as a graphic novel and again some of the characters were different for stylistic reasons. This has made me realise that a story doesn’t stand still. Sometimes it needs revising or changing for different reasons. Orson Scott Card wrote many versions of Enders’ Game before he was finally happy with it and all of the different tellings of it from the Enderverse just shows that it is still possible to build on a good story.
Gaiman cites ‘The Princess Bride’ as one of his inspirations for the book, which connects to Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson, as he was partly prompted by his wife asking ‘What would it have been like if the Princess had gone out to rescue Wesley instead of waiting at home for hm to come back’?
Guess what’s next on my To Be Read pile?!
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