Review: The Night Circus

The Night Circus is the debut book by Erin Morgenstern; at this point it’s also the only book by Erin Morgenstern. She has some poetry and several smaller essays on her website, but for now this is her only novel. And while I’d like to see another book by this author, at this point I can’t imagine her writing anything I’d love more.

I’ve mentioned this book in the Valentine’s Day post (Our Favorite Literary Couples), and a quick summary makes the story sound a little predictable: two powerful magicians are locked in a battle of skill. Since for some reason it’s out of the question for them to compete directly against each other, they each select a child to train – one boy and one girl –  who will eventually face each other on a to-be-determined battlefield. You just know that the two apprentice magicians are destined to become star-crossed lovers, tragically in love with the one person they have to spend their whole lives trying to defeat in combat. The cliche didn’t bother me even a little bit in this case, because the battlefield for this combat is a circus. Celia and Marco, the two main characters, learn while the circus is still being designed that their duel will involve trying to out-do each other with one impossible magic act after another.  The way the book is written makes Le Cirque des Rêves and all its labyrinth of magical tents a main character all on its own.

The story shifts back and forth in time, from the genesis of Le Cirque des Rêves and the duel between Celia and Marco, to a character sometime in the near future and his growing love-affair with the Circus. In between are these lovely little undated vignettes, each focusing on one small element of the Circus and its peculiar design. There are also snippets of essays written by a fan, yes, the circus has a community of actual fans, trying to describe all the reasons why he and his fellow Rêveurs are so dedicated that they follow the mysterious circus as it travels from country to country.

The book takes place mostly in the late 1800’s, but the fact that it’s in the Victorian era is secondary to the setting of the Circus itself. Imagine having a traveling show that’s been designed to be perfect, from the costumes and the acts and the food, right down to the smells and the design of the sign-posts. Then imagine if you could have all of that without having to pay too much attention to the laws of physics. And you could go every night for a week and still not see everything there was to see. I don’t really want to read about this circus, I want to be there.

I think my only complaint about the whole thing (other than the fact that story is kinda secondary to spectacle) was I didn’t think the readers were getting enough. The very nature of the ending meant some things were skipped, and I wanted to know more about how it all turned out. That said, I think I feel the same way about a sequel that I do about having the author write another book: to me this is a perfect little gem of a story, and it’s hard to imagine another book would really add anything to it.