Friday, September 2, 2011
“The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern (Reviewed by Robert Thompson & Liviu Suciu)
Read An Excerpt HERE
Watch the Book Trailer HERE
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Erin Morgenstern studied theatre & studio art at Smith College. She is a writer and artist whose work is described as “fairy tales in one way or another.” The Night Circus is her first novel.
PLOT SUMMARY: The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, “the Circus of Dreams”, and it is only open at night.
But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.
True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead...
CLASSIFICATION: From a literature standpoint, The Night Circus reminded me of a cross between Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, and Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish. At times however, The Night Circus feels more like a movie than a book, and in that regard I kept thinking of Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland) and Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch).
FORMAT/INFO: The Night Circus is 400 pages long divided over five titled Parts and chapters that are unnumbered, but titled and dated with the location included. Narration is in the third person—both limited and omniscient—via Celia Bowen, Marco Alisdair, the man in the grey suit, the Night Circus’ proprietor M. Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre, the clockmaker Herr Friedrick Thiessen; the Murray twins Widget & Poppet, the engineer Ethan Barris, the Burgess sisters Tara & Lainie, the fortune-teller Isobel, and the dreamer Bailey, etc. The book also features short interludes written in the second person. The Night Circus is a standalone novel.
September 13, 2011 marks the North American Hardcover publication of The Night Circus via Doubleday. The UK edition (see below) will be published on September 15, 2011 via Harvill Secker.
Erin Morgenstern’s debut is a special novel, offering readers a magical, one-of-a-kind reading experience. An experience that may vary depending on the person. For instance, some readers might find themselves enchanted by the turn of the century setting—the novel takes place between February 1873 and January 1903—with an enigmatic circus serving as the main attraction. For others, it could be the story, a non-linear narrative that cleverly begins where the novel ends, with a competition between two magicians, a love story that challenges fate, and a dreamer faced with life-altering decisions contained in between. In some cases, the novel’s cast of charming and mysterious characters—Prospero the Enchanter and his daughter Celia Bowen; the man in the grey suit and his student Marco Alisdair; M. Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre, proprietor of the Night Circus; the clockmaker Herr Friedrick Thiessen and the rêveurs; the Murray twins Widget & Poppet; the engineer Ethan W. Barris; the Burgess sisters Tara & Lainie; the fortune-teller Isobel; Mme. Ana Padva, a retired ballerina; the contortionist Tsukiko; the dreamer Bailey—might be the culprit. For yet others, it could be Erin Morgenstern’s accomplished writing and elegant prose:
“Stories have changed my dear boy. There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act. Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with his prey.”
For me, it’s the sense of wonder I felt as I was reading The Night Circus. The same kind of feeling I had when I first read Alice In Wonderland or the Arabian Nights or Harry Potter. This sense of wonder is a combination of many factors including the author’s vivid imagination; a dreamlike ambiance that exists throughout the novel; characters who are full of magic, both real and symbolic like the Murray twins born at the very same time Le Cirque des Rêves first opened; and a story comprised of several mysterious subplots: the purpose of the contest, the relationship between the man in the grey suit and Hector Bowen, the bond between the Night Circus and its performers, how Bailey and the rêveurs fit in the picture, etc. Of course, of all the wonderful things that Erin Morgenstern manages to include in her novel—Midnight Dinners, a ship made of books sailing upon an ocean of ink—nothing is more captivating than the circus itself. With its black-and-white theme and astounding attractions—the Carousel, the Wishing Tree, the Labyrinth, the Stargazer, the Cloud Maze, Bedtime Stories, the Drawing Room, the Menagerie, the Ice Garden, the Hall of Mirrors, the Pool of Tears—the Night Circus is truly a “feast for the senses”:
“More than a carnival. More than a circus, really, like no circus anyone has ever seen. Not a single large tent but a multitude of tents, each with a particular exhibition. No elephants or clowns. No, something more refined than that. Nothing commonplace. This will be different, this will be an utterly unique experience, a feast for the senses. Theatrics sans theatre, an immersive entertainment. We will destroy the presumptions and preconceived notions of what a circus is and make it something else entirely, something new.”
“What it needs is style, panache. Ingenuity in its engineering and structure. To be infused with the mesmerizing, and perhaps a touch of mystery. Unusual yet beautiful. Provocative while remaining elegant.”
As amazing as The Night Circus is, especially for a debut, Erin Morgenstern’s novel is not perfect. For starters, characters lack depth and are unsympathetic because of the large cast and an omniscient/limited third-person narrative that prevents readers from becoming intimate with the novel’s characters. As a result, it’s hard to feel anything except indifference when a character dies, falls in love or is asked to make a difficult choice. At the same time, the story drags in certain places, while the novel’s climax and conclusion can feel a bit underwhelming.
Apart from these issues with the characterization and story, I have nothing but praise for Erin Morgenstern’s remarkable debut. Not only is The Night Circus one of the year’s best releases, ranking right up there with Félix J. Palma’s The Map of Time, it is a book that I highly recommend to anyone and everyone. After all, like attending an actual circus, The Night Circus is the kind of thing that every person should experience at least once in their lifetime...
LIVIU’S ANALYSIS: One of the more hyped novels I have heard of in recent times, The Night Circus came with very high expectations and I have to say that they were generally fulfilled and the hype mostly deserved, though there were several niggles I will talk about here too.
The Night Circus works magnificently at the prose level: lyrical, wonderful, descriptive, imaginative, the book is just a pleasure to read and imagine. The author writes superbly and the book never stops enchanting. If the style does not work for you, I doubt the book will work.
The storyline is not that complicated - there are some powerful magicians in existence, one disguising himself as a stage performer, another just being mysterious - and they have an ongoing rivalry for centuries now which they test once in a while when they each train a pupil and pit them in a strange contest involving magic and real life, contest that usually takes decades and ends with only one of the two pupils standing.
When the novel starts in 1873, Hector Bowen aka "Prospero the Magician" receives an unusual package from a "former fan" - his 5 year old daughter Celia, left in his care by his mother whom he had seduced and abandoned years ago; a bit annoyed, Hector - who like his mysterious opponent Alexander is not a very nice person, centuries of life and all - soon realizes that Celia has power too and he decides she will be the perfect tool to get back to Alexander whose pupil had won the last contest.
Alexander accepts and in turn collects Marco a 9 year old boy with the right personality/traits/etc from an orphanage and starts training him for the next 12 years or so.
And then in 1886 the contest starts in form of the Cirque de Reves, which Marco now the personal assistant/right hand of a wealthy eccentric patron of arts "builds" - it's more complicated than that but that's the idea - and Celia who is hired as illusionist, actually enhances and sustains with her magic while embedding it in reality.
In the process we meet a great number of characters, most of them quite fascinating, we visit a lot of places though usually the Cirque takes precedence to the locale and the novel twists and turns a few times too. The tension ratchets slowly but it reaches quite a high level and the ending is excellent though it is somewhat telegraphed earlier - I clearly saw it from a long way back as the main possibility of "solving" the contest.
Now the niggles mentioned: since the main characters get progressively stronger and become more than human in many ways, the author's decision to keep them at an emotional remove from us and introduce a lot of supporting characters, some who take the center stage later, is warranted but it also lessens a little the book which at some point becomes "competing gods" and the puny mortals involved.
The main romance is both telegraphed and not that interesting and while again it was most likely needed for the structure and resolution of the book, I wish the author would have made other choices within the framework of her novel.
Marco and Celia start very interesting but become less so as their power increases though there is balance with the supporting characters who become more important. The real life grounding - while talked a lot about and in a way being the main point of the contest - starts strong, but then as the quantity of magic involved increases considerably, the grounding gets shakier.
All in all the prose, descriptions and supporting characters make The Night Circus a strong book and an A+ for me, but I wish the author would have made some other choices as the novel progressed, keeping the story and the circus mysterious to the end since that way I think the novel could have been a masterpiece.
The Night Circus works magnificently at the prose level: lyrical, wonderful, descriptive, imaginative, the book is just a pleasure to read and imagine. The author writes superbly and the book never stops enchanting. If the style does not work for you, I doubt the book will work.
The storyline is not that complicated - there are some powerful magicians in existence, one disguising himself as a stage performer, another just being mysterious - and they have an ongoing rivalry for centuries now which they test once in a while when they each train a pupil and pit them in a strange contest involving magic and real life, contest that usually takes decades and ends with only one of the two pupils standing.
When the novel starts in 1873, Hector Bowen aka "Prospero the Magician" receives an unusual package from a "former fan" - his 5 year old daughter Celia, left in his care by his mother whom he had seduced and abandoned years ago; a bit annoyed, Hector - who like his mysterious opponent Alexander is not a very nice person, centuries of life and all - soon realizes that Celia has power too and he decides she will be the perfect tool to get back to Alexander whose pupil had won the last contest.
Alexander accepts and in turn collects Marco a 9 year old boy with the right personality/traits/etc from an orphanage and starts training him for the next 12 years or so.
And then in 1886 the contest starts in form of the Cirque de Reves, which Marco now the personal assistant/right hand of a wealthy eccentric patron of arts "builds" - it's more complicated than that but that's the idea - and Celia who is hired as illusionist, actually enhances and sustains with her magic while embedding it in reality.
In the process we meet a great number of characters, most of them quite fascinating, we visit a lot of places though usually the Cirque takes precedence to the locale and the novel twists and turns a few times too. The tension ratchets slowly but it reaches quite a high level and the ending is excellent though it is somewhat telegraphed earlier - I clearly saw it from a long way back as the main possibility of "solving" the contest.
Now the niggles mentioned: since the main characters get progressively stronger and become more than human in many ways, the author's decision to keep them at an emotional remove from us and introduce a lot of supporting characters, some who take the center stage later, is warranted but it also lessens a little the book which at some point becomes "competing gods" and the puny mortals involved.
The main romance is both telegraphed and not that interesting and while again it was most likely needed for the structure and resolution of the book, I wish the author would have made other choices within the framework of her novel.
Marco and Celia start very interesting but become less so as their power increases though there is balance with the supporting characters who become more important. The real life grounding - while talked a lot about and in a way being the main point of the contest - starts strong, but then as the quantity of magic involved increases considerably, the grounding gets shakier.
All in all the prose, descriptions and supporting characters make The Night Circus a strong book and an A+ for me, but I wish the author would have made some other choices as the novel progressed, keeping the story and the circus mysterious to the end since that way I think the novel could have been a masterpiece.
12:01 AM | 
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Robert |
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6 comments:
ohh I need to read this so bad! I definitely prefer the UK cover - so jealous!
This is a great review but you completely gave away entirely too much of the plot in it.
Both of the covers are pretty nice, but I kind of like the US version a bit more. If you live in the US Pabkins, I would recommend The Book Depository or Amazon UK to order the UK version...
Regarding the review, we try to keep spoilers to a minimum. Or at least not spoil anything more than can be found in the official book synopsis or excerpts that are available. I looked over the review and I don't think we mentioned anything major that will detract from a person's reading experience.
I am reading it now and find it very slow and monotonous.
This is one of the most anticipated books of the year- its author received a pretty massive advance from Doubleday and the rights to the movie adaptation have already been purchased by the makers of Twilight (EEK). I generally am wary of hype and am nearly always wary of novels about the circus. But the cover on this one was too great to resist!
Hi, cool review! Here's mine if you don't mind: http://lorxiebookreviews.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-night-circus-by-erin-morgenstern.html
Thanks and have a very nice day! :)