Stardust: the fairytale life

Stardust: the fairytale life 

Neil Gaiman’s Stardust is a firm childhood favourite of mine, and quite possibly one of yours too. What makes it such a special story? Maybe it’s the sense of nostalgia and comfort, maybe it’s the magic of romance. Whatever that special something is, there’s no doubt Stardust has within it the recipe for a classic fairytale. Stardust is a love story, a fantasy, a battle between good and evil, a textbook fairytale, in other words. By all means, perhaps it should be boring with how conventional it is. And yet we can’t deny there is magic at work here. 

Perhaps the answer lies with a lovesick young man called Tristan Thorn. Tristan’s story is, in brief, his journey to retrieve a fallen star to gift to his beloved Victoria (who happens to not care a wink for him) for her birthday. Simple enough? But of course, life is never so simple. Of course, things go slightly wrong. And therein, I think, lies the charm and magic of Stardust. Because if even in a fantasy world where stars land on the earth in the form of a young woman called Yvaine, and pirates farm lightning in a flying pirate ship, things never quite go to plan, then perhaps our real world - with a magic of its own, mind - isn’t so far from those fantastical worlds after all. If Tristan’s story needs to take twists and turns in order for him to grow and learn about himself and his world, doesn’t that make us feel more at ease when our own lives seem to not be going the way we planned? We begin to deal with adversity when we accept that things can go wrong. Life may not be a fairytale, but this fairytale is far from perfect anyway. 

And there are plenty of examples of adversity faced by Tristan and Yvaine in Stardust that might ring deeply true in our own lives. In essence Tristan’s quest is an attempt to prove himself to Victoria, but that develops into a quest to prove himself to himself, to prove he is enough of a man by his own terms, and doesn’t need to bargain for true love. Along this journey he does make some poor decisions, and he does hurt Yvaine with those decisions (in fact he risks her life when he abandons her to complete the final leg of the journey back to Wall alone). As uncomfortable as it might make us to think about it, I'm certain every one, if they’re honest, has hurt someone they care about because of a poor decision. Stardust is not a story that asks us to abandon our knowledge of reality and its troubles. 

That being said, there are plenty of other challenges in the story far enough removed from reality that we can enjoy our escapism for a little while. How many of us can honestly say we’ve been hunted by a magic-wielding witch, lured into her tavern where she’s transformed two goats to play her daughter and husband? Or been (unwittingly) embroiled in an ancient familial prophecy involving a charmed necklace which will change colour when it’s in the hands of the rightful heir (who happens to be an apparent nobody from some backwater village called Wall)? Better yet, how many of us have escaped detection from danger aboard a flying pirate ship where they farm lightning, whose captain has curated a wardrobe Barbie herself would envy? Let’s not understate the joy we can gain from allowing ourselves to be taken in by wacky adventures such as these - we all need a bit of fun, don’t we? 

Because despite the fantastical flights of fancy which drive the narrative, we can still appreciate, at its core, the human struggles Tristan faces. He is lovesick and as such his judgement is clouded; he is determined, but can be impatient. Yvaine is proud - for a long time too proud to admit she’s fallen in love with Tristan; she is stubborn, and so she clashes with Tristan. These are not unfamiliar troubles; these are troubles of the brain and heart that we might see all around us. We might approach Stardust looking for a world that is not our own, but what we find is a world which affirms what we know and feel in our lives in this world. 

There's magic in the real world that can happen when we see that magical worlds actually have a lot in common with our own. Fairytales are not perfect stories, because if they were perfect there wouldn’t be any story at all. In the imperfections we see in fairytales - people making mistakes, antagonistic forces at work, things simply going wrong - we see something of our reality, which can so often feel far away from a fairytale. Fairytales are not perfect stories. And what a relief! If no fairytale is ever perfect, perhaps our messy and imperfect realities are fairytales of their own