This will be a review in two parts. Spoilers for the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, what the hell is wrong with you? Go watch it, it’s on Netflix.
So the first half of this book is, basically, the movie. I’ve seen the movie who-knows-how-many times over the course of my life, so I can’t really be said to be unbiased, but this is a case of the movie adaptation *surpassing* the original book. It’s a very rare thing. Not that there is anything lacking about the book - it inspires many of the same feelings as the movie, I just think the story works a little better as a movie than a book. But again, biased and all. It also helps that movie-Bastian is just plain more likeable than book-Bastian.
(Also, given that it’s been over 30 years since I first saw the movie, you’d think I would have been braced for poor Artax in the Swamp of Sorrows. I wasn’t. It was actually even *worse* when read.)
But as wonderful a story as *The Neverending Story* is (when we’re talking about the movie/first-half-of-the-book) it’s also a bit shallow. It celebrates the wonderful love of reading that so many of us here at /r/Fantasy share, but it isn’t a story that really challenges you. It’s one that sweeps you up and whisks you off to Fantastica, as it were.
But when we move beyond the movie/first-half-of-the-book, things get much more interesting.
So, as everyone who has seen the movie knows (are you still here if you haven’t? Seriously, go watch it and thank me later) the movie ends with the Empress telling Bastian to wish for anything he wants, and the more he wishes, the more wonderful the recreated Fantastica will become. So we get a montage featuring Atreyu riding on Artax, and the Rock-biter, and everything else destroyed by the Nothing back the way it was and better than ever.
The book takes a different tack.
Bastian is in Fantastica, and again the Empress tells him to wish for whatever he wants. And since the wishes come from his innermost self, Bastian finds himself tall and strong and charming and, to be honest, an asshole. Bastian spends pretty much all of his wishes on himself, which is (if we’re being honest) what most of us would default to.
So how can Bastian make Fantastica a better place by being a selfish asshole? The short answer is that he can’t. It’s not a new idea - “be careful what you wish for” is older than dirt - but Michael Ende does a great job exploring it. This book is a coming-of-age story in a way the movie is not. It’s only when Bastian realizes that the things that he *thinks* he wants aren’t the things he *actually* wants that he can put things right at all.
Overall reading this was a somewhat odd experience. The first half was more-or-less just reading the book-of-the-movie, and a much-loved movie at that. Nothing surprised me, I enjoyed it, and I was vaguely wondering (given the pace and how much of the story was left, based on my knowledge of the movie) who the heck there was so much book left. I did not expect to find that the end was only the middle, and that Bastian’s real journey was only beginning.
Not entirely sure how this book ended up something I had never gotten to before now, but I’m glad to finally say that I have read it. It was a rewarding read, and well worth the wait.
Bingo square: book-about-books (hard mode)
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