The Neverending Story seems destined, by dint of its advertising budget, for financial success. Since, in addition, it is an import from Germany and will therefore automatically be embraced by those who ride the bandwagon of reverse cultural chauvinism, I must confess to a certain initial prejudice, which redoubled when, on reading the first few pages, I found out that this was yet another book about an alienated person who falls into a fantasy universe. Any fantasy enthusiast will probably be able to rattle off a hundred titles of novels, from Lewis Carroll's all the way down to Stephen R. Donaldson's, which have made use of this plot. With competition like that, a novelist would have to be a consummate genius to bring it off completely.

That Michael Ende has taken this bewhiskered plot, endowed it with a certain amount of originality, populated it with characters who do not appear to be entirely stolen from the works of predecessors … is indeed an achievement to be proud of, and for this reason alone his novel is worth recommending. However, the reader will need perseverance because the book doesn't really get going until about page 160, and in general its pacing is not quite what Americans are used to.

What's more, the book's opening will seem to be dreary and cliché-ridden. We meet the young and preciously named Bastian Balthazar Bux, who is having soap-operatic father-relationship problems and has run away from school into a weird antique bookstore. The mundane root of his alienation is that of being too fat. Bastian steals a book (printed, like this book, in red and green ink) called The Neverending Story, sneaks off to read it, and soon becomes engrossed. Slowly but surely he is sucked into Fantasiana, the magic kingdom in which the book is set.

While we wait for our hero to make an appearance in the fantasy universe, Ende marks time by parading before us a ragtag array of kobolds, elves, and other standard fantasy-world furnishings, who go off on a bunch of hackneyed adventures. The universe itself seems an annoying hodgepodge of other writers' universes….

Now Fantasiana and its ruler the Childlike Empress are—you guessed it—in danger, and the only person who can save the universe is the one who's reading the book. For half the book we are treated to the exposition of these dire truths and of the ho-hum wonders of Fantasiana. Then, just about at the point when you're ready to fling The Neverending Story across the room, Bastian finally makes the crossing—and the novel makes an instantaneous leap from the mundane into the magical.

We discover that there's a reason why Fantasiana seems to be this goulash of random ransackings from myth and literature—that others, great writers among them, have visited the magic kingdom before and have in every case created the kingdom anew, for outside visitors have godlike powers. The more they create, however, the more memories of reality they lose, and when all is lost they lose not only their powers but their ability to return home. It is on this paradox that Bastian's journey toward self-knowledge hinges.

The second half of the book is as energetic, innovative, and perceptive as its first half is airheadedly uninventive…. Suddenly we understand the rightness of the book's initial trivialities; it is the very ordinariness of Bastian's origins that enables us to understand the triumph, anguish, and ultimate illumination of his kingship.

If there is a single subject with which all great fantasies deal, it must of necessity be the nature of reality. At its best, The Neverending Story is a profound examination of these unanswerable questions. Its ambition makes it—perhaps inevitably—a dramatically uneven work; its greatest flaw is the imbalance of interest between its two halves.