The Many-Colored Death

I picked up The Neverending Story and now I'm about halfway through it.

I saw the movie once, about twenty years ago, and don't remember it very well. I remember it ending about a third of the way into the book, though. I can imagine why that happened, of course. The book is enormous. Things happen as rapidly here as they do in any fable. The prose is light and airy but at the same time the story can feel exhausting.

It's another case where a rational world acts as the anchor of our understanding for irrationality. Nobody's life is more rational (and sad) than ol' Bastian, but there are very few worlds that revel in their irrationality as much as Fantastica. Some of the imagery in this book is delivered so lightly while conveying ideas so huge, it really makes me question why more fantasies aren't more fantastic.

It's got me thinking a lot about storytelling in general, and how something being a cornerstone of a fantastic world does not necessarily mean that it has to be mundane, either for the habits or (especially) for us, the reader. So far, The Neverending Story has about four or five really important characters whose perspectives make them irreplaceable in the story, but they're just as well realized as any of the characters in a more grounded fantasy story like Sapkowski's Witcher stories. The difference is that they're ensconced in a world where you can capture and make crafts out of starlight, where a forest of trees can sing a song so beautiful that unwary travelers will stand and listen to it until they die, where a Childlike Empress can live in a tower that it more properly called a mountain carved into a city.

This is a very fun book.