Stardust: Child vs. Adult

I've just been listening to a podcast found here about Neil Gaiman's Stardust. Most of the discussion in the podcast revolves around what makes the book a 'fairytale for adults'.

Stardust, as you know, is one of my favourite books. Gaiman describes the premise of the book:

"I wanted a young man who would set out on a quest - in this case a romantic quest, for the heart of Victoria Forester, the loveliest girl in his village. The village was somewhere in England, and was called Wall, after the wall that runs beside it, a dull-looking wall in a normal-looking meadow. And on the other side of the wall was Faerie - Faerie as a place or as a quality, rather than as a posh way of spelling fairy. Our hero would promise to bring back a fallen star, one that had fallen on the far side of the wall.

"And the star, I knew, would not, when he found it, be a lump of metallic rock. It would be a young woman with a broken leg, in a poor temper, with no desire to be dragged halfway across the world and presented to anyone's girlfriend."

In the same article, Gaiman mentions that he loved The Princess Bride when he was young, and wrote Stardust with the wish of creating another story that was "unapologetically a fairytale, and just as unapologetically for adults."

Much of the podcast discussion revolves around the single sex scene and the single swear word found in Stardust. Are these what make the novel one for adults? Or are they just the elements which make adults able to claim a fairytale as their own without embarrassment?

Certainly there is an extent to which adults are too afraid to be 'caught' reading children's books. C. S. Lewis was right when he said that if a book is worth reading as a child it is also worth reading as an adult. Anyway, Tolkien famously noted in his essay 'On Fairy Stories' that fairy stories were told to children not because they were especially suited to child audiences, but because they had become unfashionable with adults.

I believe, however, that it is not the inlcusion of a sex scene or a swear word that makes Stardust (or any other story) a story for adults. Stardust is a story for adults anyway, which is what makes it natural for Gaiman to include the swearing and the sex. The reason that Stardust is a story for adults it that it's complex.

There are lots of narrative threads, lots of intertextual references, lots of big words. Laura Miller floats the idea in this fascinating podcast that the difference between the way children read and the way adults read is marked by the complexity of our approach to the text rather than by the text itself. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia now is a very different experience to reading them when I was seven, simply because now I bring all sorts of background knowledge (about literature, about fantasy, about religion, about the world) to the text which I simply didn't have when I was seven.

Stardust demands a sophisticated readership. And that is why it's a fairytale for adults.


View on fishpond: Stardust