Woof. Been a while.
Besides the world being on fire and plugging away on the next great American novel, I realized I’ve really stressed the “occasionally” part of my author bio (“…plus a blog that he occasionally updates at” yatta yatta) partially because I haven’t really had anything to say. Nothing especially positive, insightful, or worthy of public discourse, at any rate.
“But Evan,” I said to myself the other day, “what do you mean? You’ll rant to anyone with ears about Stardust.”
Fair enough, me.
(And quick side note since I’m terrible at plugging things: Go check out the Fire & Ash Anthology by Dragon Soul Press for my story “In the Shadow of Iron”. It’s got dragons and airships and all sorts of cool stuff. Genuinely some of the best dark fantasy I’ve managed. An old reviewer once said it was “like the Heart of Darkness meets Lord of the Rings” and that remains to date one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten. Okay. As you were. Thanks.)
So, back to the misleading title with a cheers to not further burying the lead: It’s sarcastic, in this case.
Stardust the movie, starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes atop star-studded cast, is excellent. It’s absolutely in my top ten favorite films, and probably my top five. It’s associated with a lot of happy memories, and outside of Lord of the Rings, is probably the property my brain has most used when imagining fantasy and fairy tale stuff. It’s fanciful, whimsical, and a little bit cheeky, campy, all while knowing when and how to get serious when it needs to.
So imagine my surprise when I found out that it was a novel first (Yeah, Gaiman stuff notwithstanding). I found a copy at a library book sale and was excited to dive into the book which inspired one of my favorite stories ever…
Maturing into adulthood is sometimes learning to accept the cold wash of disappointment which can pale cherished pieces of your childhood.
I hated it. I hated it sooo much. And truly, I cannot stress this enough, truly in a death-of-the-author fashion. My reasons for disliking the book are completely disconnected from the real world outside how much it falls short of the movie. It physically pained me how disappointing I found it, and I keep that copy in my nightstand drawer as an artifact of my hate.
And trust me, there was a while where I felt it was pretentious to hate literature, that it was more intellectually honest to find the positive in a work than tear something down, and to a degree that’s totally true. I’ve read plenty of books and stories that were good, or okay, lacking staying power. But Stardust remains one of only two works I’ve read that I actively despise, but that’s a tale for another time…(lookin’ at you, Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu).
Remember, this rant is primarily for me to vent into the void, but if you are here, the moving forward, it’s best if you have a passing familiarity with at least one version of the story, ideally both. But if you don’t care or you’re just down to rodeo in the dark, then please join me below.
There are three primary reasons I despise Stardust so badly, and all three deal with character assassination in different ways.
The first is the protagonist, Tristan Thorn. He’s a grocery boy in a tiny English village nobody’s ever heard of. He’s naive, bordering on dumb, and a little impulsive, but in the film he’s at least likeable. That’s due in heavy part to Charlie Cox I’m sure, bringing across a sense of innocence in his pre-Daredevil days. But that’s who he is, a simple maybe-dullard with a good heart, who wants to go chase a fallen star so that the popular village girl will agree to marry him.
That’s about where the similarities between the book and movie end, though.
In the film, his adventure with Yvaine the fallen star changes him. He realizes through this magical journey that the world is so much hopelessly expansive than his small village life. Between battling witches, traveling with sky pirates, swordfighting with royal baddies, and generally roughing it in an adventurer’s life, he takes on maturity and a sense of his own limits and priorities.
One of the penultimate scenes sees him juxtaposed next to his childhood bully, Humphrey. In the early scenes, Humphrey beat the crap out of and humiliated Tristan. But now, being hardened and seasoned by magical adventure, it’s crystal clear just how much Tristan’s grown, to a degree that it’s obvious by their stand-off how a fencing match would play out between them, and through sheer aura, Tristan gets Humphrey to back down and gives away Victoria (the village prom queen) like a pair of bitchy shoes he’s outgrown.
In the book, he goes through all the same stuff (mostly), but without showing anywhere near the same kind of development, emotionally. There’s a scene where Yvaine basically accepts committing suicide by passing into the real world, where she’s become a lump of rock instead of a woman because she’s so depressed being bound to Tristan throughout the adventure, and instead of the empathy and growth he’d attained in the movie, Book Tristan basically goes, “Woof. Holy cow, that would have been a bummer. Well’p, come hither, star wife.”
After the anti-climax that is the final confrontation with the witch coven, Tristan claims his inheritance as the future king of Stormhold, like in the movie, but takes his time getting there. When he and Yvaine do eventually arrive, she remarks, “Wow, this place is kinda shit. You’d rule it so much better than it has been.” And he nods along, “Yeah, probably, but I don’t really feel like it yet.” Like, bitch, what? You were a grocery boy a couple weeks ago, where the hell did you get the confidence to feel like you’d mastered statecraft and Machiavellian politics required to rule a fantasy kingdom whose customs you don’t have the foggiest inclination into their workings. (Tell a lie there, actually. In the book it’s stated repeatedly how he just knows things. Where does he need to go next? That way. Why? He just knows. Where is the Star at this moment? Over there. Why? He just knows. I hate it.)
So in the film, you have the fulfillment of a hero’s journey, with the protagonist having grown from his journey for the better, and in the book you have the same waifish kid, except now he’s undeservedly arrogant.
Point one, Movie.
Next up is Robert DeNiro- I mean, Captain Shakespeare.
In both tellings, he’s the captain of a sky vessel.
…
Cool, glad that’s covered.
In the movie, he’s awesome. They aren’t just a sky ship, they’re lightning-stealing pirates. They fly around in the clouds capturing lightning during storms to sell at black markets around the kingdom, and they accidentally catch Tristan and Yvaine in their nets. (They were up there for a much better reason in the movie, too. Magical mishap, but in line with their respective characters much better than the book.) When Shakespeare hears Tristan is from England, he takes him under his wing, but surreptitiously. To the people of the magical world, England is wondrous to them – rumors and legends and stories. He took his name from the Bard because he secretly loves theater and dress-up, but maintains his reputation as a ruthless pirate, so people hear “Captain Shake-Spear, rawr!” He’s got depth and dimension and humor and sincerity and- gah! He’s just great. He changes Tristan’s appearance and takes him on as his “nephew” to teach him swordplay and culture in a montage that sees Tristan and Yvaine actually come to like each other so a happy ending makes sense, rather than the dismal shit you get in the book
Speaking of…
In the book, he’s in it for, like, four pages. Tristan and Yvaine in the clouds for a lazier reason, Tristan goes, “Help! Anybody!” and the Captain (not named Shakespeare, just nameless, if memory serves) goes, “Oh, hey. I heard coincidentally heard you. Here’s supplies and passage to where you want to go. Goodbye now.”
Then he fucks off. Gone. Poof. No development. No heart. No soul. No character. Just a convenient way for the protagonist to get home.
But even that doesn’t compare to what they did to my boy, Septimus. My beautiful boy.
Played by Mark Strong in the movie, he’s everything you want in a villain: he’s ruthless, cunning, merciless, and persistent. He’s a constant, dogging presence in the background of the film pushing the protagonists and even the other villains, the witches, forward. There’s a terrific scene where he’s been thrown off course in his hunt for the star by a soothsayer planted in his ranks to falsely guide him, lying to Septimus about the results of bone dice he uses to divine questions, and they come to a beach with no way forward:
Sep: “You said to go east, so we went east. And yet, no star.”
Soo: “I’m sorry, my lord. It’s the runes. I do as they tell me.”
Sep: “Well, I have a question. So let’s consult them again. Am I the seventh son of the king of Stormhold?”
Soo: <consults stones> “Yes!”
Sep: “Is my favorite color blue?”
Soo: <consults them again> “Yes!”
Sep: “Has excessive begging or pleading ever convinced me to spare the life of a traitor?”
Soo: <consults the stones>
Sep: “What do those symbols mean?”
Soo: “No…”
Sep: “I want you to cast them again, real high this time.”
<the stones are tossed high>
Sep: “Do you work for my brother?”
<stones show ‘Yes’>
<Septimus immediately stabs the soothsayer and finds a new way to press forward>
Gah! He’s wonderful! And even in the final scenes of the movie, in a battle with the witch coven, he holds his own against dark magic, then dies tragically against the Big Bad’s voodoo doll sorcery in one of the more creative and thrilling villain deaths you could ever want.
In the book…he gets bit by a snake after contributing NOTHING to the story.
And that could be hyperbolic, but not here. In fact, that’s mostly what lies at the heart of this rant, how my hatred for the book really festered. I sat back, soaking in the end of the novel and realized that if you plucked Septimus out of the book version of the story, absolutely nothing changes. He’s described with all the attributes from above – cunning, ruthless, blah, blah, blah – but he goes on to display absolutely none of them.
At one point, it’s implied he follows his brother Primus into a town, but Primus shakes him and tricks him into getting onto the wrong boat by shaving his beard and changing his coat. Later, Septimus discovers Primus’s dead body and knows with absolute, unwavering and unexplained certainty that the big bad witch lady is the one who did it, and so by the laws of his people or whatever now has to kill her before he can resume his hunt for the star. He tracks here to a small cottage that he lights on fire and revels in her death, only to be bitten by a snake that turned out to be the witch who was one step ahead. He dies, she builds a new hut, and the story goes onto its whimper of an ending. Take him out of it and NOTHING changes. Primus is barely inconvenienced and the witch kills him like she’s dealing with an inconsiderate girl scout.
Bonus rant: That witch, by the way, suffers from Irredeemable Idiot Disease by the end. She goes from being a long-lived and wise woman of the swamp who’s felled cities with her terrible magic to cursing a fellow witch with the inability to ever perceive the Star they’re after, then later interrogates that same witch if she’s seen the star. It makes me want to bite off my own toes.
And for those things, I will forever loathe this novel. It has some genuinely cool ideas and fun imagery throughout, but they’re just plastered into it without meaning, like playground stickers into an attempt at a college-level essay.
Phew. Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Please check out Fire & Ash.
Ciao.
The Light of Day 