Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Audible
Rating: Worthy!
I have long been a huge fan of the movie and review it here, so this is going to be yet another novel review and movie comparison. It's long past the time to see how the novel matches up, especially since Gaiman is the one who reads it.
It turns out that the movie followed the novel quite closely, but my favor remains with the movie - just. The novel, set in the mid-nineteenth century, is just fine, but not quite as fine as the movie version, although the two are quite different beasts. The movie is written with a younger audience in mind - but not too young; the novel has some very mature content and a much more sly sense of humor and playfulness. The biggest initial difference between the two versions is that the novel has Tristran with both his parents at home, whereas in the movie he has only his father - to begin with. In the novel there is this section where Tristran is wandering in a forest with a hairy "guy". I found that rather boring. Perhaps that's why they omitted it completely from the movie (not because I found it boring, of course, but because it's objectively boring).
For me, I'd much rather he found the star and got on with it than lolly-gagged and gallivanted so much beforehand. I mean, how wonderful a concept is that: having a star show up personified and a guy fall in love with her? I wish I'd thought of it first. In the movie, that relationship was one of the most charming, with Clare Danes doing a far better job of being a star than she does of being a CIA agent in Homeland where I'm honestly beginning to really tire of her endless whiny attitude, her teary eyes, her perpetually quivering lips, and her patented readiness to break down every five minutes. I'm about ready to ditch that series! She needs to get some lessons on backbone from Annie Walker....
The story improves immensely when Tristran actually does find the star and starts hanging with her, although the details of that encounter and their subsequent interactions differ in a lot of small ways from the way they were later portrayed in the movie. He has a much warmer interaction with Lord Primus, too. I loved this sentence: "The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe who will grow to slay me." (p122) especially when he ends that chapter with "Then [the squirrel] ran away - to bury the acorn and to forget it."!
I have to say that I really warmed to Gaiman's reading of the novel and I'm glad that he read it and no one else. He has the perfect voice for the novel's tone (unsurprisingly since it's his!). I think had someone else read it, I wouldn't have warmed to it in quite the same way, and indeed, may have become annoyed with it. He has a really winning way of turning a phrase, and a charming cadence to his voice which indicates two things: first of all, he's really enjoying himself in his read, and secondly, this isn't the first thing he's ever read aloud - far from it, in fact! It would be interesting to know if he reads that way to himself (in his own head) when he's reading a novel.
His writing is very good, too - really, exceedingly good. I mentioned in my recent review of The Midnight Dress (which is actually a cool title for a novel!) that author Karen Foxlee doesn't know how to write about the darkest blue (she said the dress was so blue it was almost black). Well, funnily enough, in this very novel, Gaiman gets it right: he says a red dress is so dark it was almost black! Curious coincidence!
So all of the novel's main points were represented in the movie, which is quite something, but the novel has a different twist to many of them, and sometimes events happen in a different order, or in a completely contradictory way as compared with the later movie version. Each of them stands alone, and the novel was wonderful. I rate this as worthy read.
