OK, I said I would be back on email today, but I just finished this book and I wanted to write about it instead.
Title: The Night Circus
Author: Erin Morgenstern
I liked this book so much that I almost fear reviewing it, afraid that someone else will read it and see that thing I’m missing that makes it silly or trivial.
The circus arrives without warning.
Much the same could be said for this first offering by Erin Morgenstern, for The Night Circus for me falls into a category of novel that is nothing short of miraculous. It immediately takes its place with novels like The Princess Bride or Creator which are so different and captivating and engrossing that I am torn by horses pulling me on to the end and the sirens calling me to stay and savor each page.
Orphan apprentices of two long-magicians are raised from childhood to participate in an unspecified challenge. Celia and Marco are bound to this task by a power beyond their free will, and only gradually do they come to understand its rules and only much later its conclusion. After moving from their mentors, the two are involved with a mysterious circus that travels worldwide without notice and without visible means. Les Cirque des Reves, which opens at dusk and closes at dawn, is a gathering of tents, each with its own performance or attraction. A visitor moves among these tents finding the familiar acts, animal performances, a fortune teller, a magician (Celia) blended with new and unusual tents offering various physical and emotional experiences.
As the plot weaves through place, time and characters, the reader understands that despite its “creation” by a consortium led by an empresario and his aide (Marco), the circus is maintained by a complex balance of the talents of the two apprentice magicians. However, once they meet and fall in love, this challenge takes the form of cooperative competition, each one building on the accomplishments of the last and expending more and more energy to keep everything balanced and moving like the ornate clock at the entrance.
Just as Celia and Marco build a circus of dreams, so Morgenstern creates pages of wonder as the events of plot are interspersed with descriptions of tents and their attractions. Thus the reader becomes simultaneously the recipient of the story and a follower of the circus, joining the ranks of the Reveurs, the aficionados of the Circus who follow its travels and document it’s history. Woven into this history are discussions of time and space, of free will and determinism, of art and magic. Allusions to The Tempest make the story richer, and not derivative.
A cursory glance at the Amazon reviews of The Night Circus reveals a far from consistent reaction. There are one and two star reviews, one reviewer commenting on the whole thing as “twee,” and another saying that the story would probably be best for those who like circuses. So perhaps I am missing the cynical realization that makes the entire thing fall apart, but like Celia and Marco I choose to accept the mystery and wonder as valid in the midst of a naughty world.
OK. Maybe after The Cat’s Table.