Review: The Starless Sea

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the last several years, I’ve offered up a consistent top-two when it comes to thoughtful fantasy novels written in the last decade: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

The Night Circus, if you haven’t read it, is simultaneously a love story, a story of magic in the literal sense, and a story that basks in the magic of its own telling. It feels like a dream, yet you can put it down, reflect on the wonder that someone actually wrote it, and then pick it up and get lost in it again.

And she wrote it when she was still in her early 30s.

So I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, and I’m glad to say it sustains my sense that Morgenstern is one of the most beguiling writers we have.

This is a book full of wonders. One of the first is a magical moment (magical within the story and to someone reading it) when our protagonist, Zachary, the son of a fortune teller, reads about himself in an ancient book he’s found in the library.

Others include a vast sea of honey rather than water, a man who becomes lost in time, cats and keys and bees that serve as determined and overdetermined symbols, a magical kitchen that can supply any desire, a heart that beats inside a clever wooden box, and a dollhouse that reflects and maps the larger world around it.

Throughout, the prose almost always glows, and I found myself pulled along with every page I turned. This is a book about the magic of reading, and it manages with that to make reading it a magical experience.

Even with all that avid praise, though, I do think this one falls short of The Night Circus.

For one thing, this is simply longer than it needs to be. I can’t point to anything specific I’d want to see cut, but there’s a laxness to the narrative in places. The first 15-20 pages feel as if they’re superfluous, but Morgenstern eventually redeems them into the full narrative. Maybe it would make sense to cut some of the plot threads – do we need three love stories? Do we need as many back-and-forths between the world below and the world above? Do we need so many simultaneous quests?

The answer may be yes. As I say, nothing is superfluous, and the novel never went sour on me, but I did find myself worrying toward the end that it would somehow fail. That is, I always felt the magic, but its spell went on so long that I could feel its limits. In The Night Circus, I never felt outside the power of the circus itself.

And that, I think, is a big part of the issue here. The Night Circus is bounded; all its events take place within the defined space of the circus itself. This one is sprawling. There are multiple levels of reality and time and multiple stories from a deep history and a present. We’ll get characters (modest SPOILER: Kat) who appear early as supporting characters, vanish for hundreds of pages, and return for purpose that doesn’t seem all that insistent.

I can see how that might have happened. If I’d ever managed to write something as masterful as The Night Circus, I suppose I’d be tempted to see if I could write something even bigger, something that broke out of the defined space I’d made for myself.

So, I do recommend this one. I was glad to have some of my enthusiasm tempered by not-quite-glowing reviews, so I’m happy to return the favor. Definitely read this, and start the countdown for Morgenstern’s third novel. But recognize that this one doesn’t always entirely hold up under its sweeping ambitions.


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