Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories.
One day, the son of the fortune teller is walking home from school when he finds a fantastical door painted on an alley wall. The door has been painted so cleverly that it looks real, ready to be opened the moment someone decides to turn the doorknob and walk into an impossible world of adventure hidden just inside.
The boy turns around and walks away. When he checks back later, the door has been painted over and the wall is now just a wall.
Years later, grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins stumbles across a miss-shelved book in the university library. The book is at least a few decades old, and is filled with fairy tales: pirates and acolytes and owls and a love-affair between two metaphors. Some of the stories are hard to understand; all of them are beautiful.
One of them is about him.
Zachary (always introduced at the start of his chapters as Zachary Ezra Rawlins. Because he’s important.) doesn’t have a bad life. In fact in many ways it’s pretty good: he’s intelligent and not bad looking, he has a loving and entertainingly eccentric mom, and an extroverted best friend who’s skilled at dragging introverts into social situations where they’ll actually have fun. But he’s a little lonely, and a little aimless, and there’s always that half-remembered feeling of regret at not opening that door when he had the chance.
The road not taken and the adventures he didn’t have very likely nudged him towards his in-progress thesis on video games and all the ways that story is influenced by choice (video games are obviously a great love of the author too; gaming and literary references are sprinkled liberally like confetti throughout the novel). It’s no surprise that he jumps at the chance to step back into the epic story he missed out on as a child, but he’s very quickly in over his head as he’s caught up in a kind of secret war between two opposing parties (or three. Or five. Or an infinite number of stars and owls) who are fighting for control (or protection. Or destruction.) of the Harbor on the edge of the Starless Sea.
And it is really hard to get too much further into the plot because Morgenstern cuts the whole concept of plot into pretty pieces, bathes the pieces in wine and hangs them up in ribbons by candle light. The story here is epic and intricate and beautifully hard to follow and understand, and there’s layers and layers of peril inside a world that you can only reach through painted-on doorways.
“Do you know how simple it is to destroy a door made of paint?”
“How simple?”
“As simple as throwing more paint on it, and they always have paint.”
Everything in the story is symbolic (the key, the bee, and the sword are particularly important, but they’re far from the only ones). Sometimes the symbols are metaphors and sometimes they’re primary characters, and occasionally they’re both, depending on where they’re seen and who’s seeing them. The viewpoint jumps from Zachary, to stories from the miss-shelved library book, to other lost and found stories, and at any time the characters in these stories will be the history of the people Zachary has met, although the moment you think you’ve matched up the characters to the people, things will slip sideways and suddenly nothing will be what you thought it was.
The stories themselves can be in books, or on ribbons, or carved in stone, or stored in jars and eaten like candy. Stories can be sculptures that are made out of clouds, or trees, or the changing pattern of light in a ballroom, or the pieces of an ancient book as it crumbles to dust in your hands. Sometimes the story drifts away without an ending, and sometimes the ending is shockingly violent.
Zachary and the people he meets all react to all of this in the most entertaining ways possible. Zachary has a great way of summarizing a situation (“She threatened me with tea”), the enigmatic Dorian has a storytelling style that’s very close to seduction, and Max (or Mirabell) has seen it all and she’s a very good companion to have in all this craziness, by which I mean she drags people into trouble about as much as she gets them out of trouble, and she always has a ready supply of snide remarks.
“I was born down here.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. I hatched from a golden egg that a Norwegian forest cat sat on for eighteen months. That cat still hates me.” She pauses for a second before adding, “Yes, really.”
(What’s really bizarre is that her explanation about the Norwegian forest cat is exactly as plausible as everything else that happens.)
The esthetics of this book are everything that I love. The Harbor is an underground wonderland made almost entirely of ever-changing rooms and hallways of books: books on shelves that stretch to the ceiling or curve around in arches, books that hang from ropes in flocks from the ceilings or hide entrances to secret rooms filled with even more books. Beautiful or surreal (or beautifully surreal) paintings appear randomly, cats wander from room to room or nap on the many comfortable chairs, there’s bottles of wine to be opened right next to the interesting book you’re reading, and an unseen kitchen that will send up exactly the kind of food you want.
He has untangled himself from vines blossoming with story-filled flowers. He has traversed piles of abandoned teacups with text baked into their crackled glaze. He has walked through puddles of ink and left footprints that formed stories in his wake that he did not turn around to read.
I quickly lost count of all my favorite images: a snow-sculpture of a women who has a flotilla of tiny ships carved into the folds of her dress. A ballroom dance that involves bowls of gold paint which the party-goers dip their hands into so the room becomes more and more covered in gold. Trees hung with books and candles and crystals, falling cherry blossoms that gradually turn into snow, and an utterly cinematic short-story ending that involves a lantern-lit garden filled with keys.
A re-read of this one isn’t just an option, it’s mandatory, not just to enjoy all the lovely images while sipping honey whiskey (my favorite liquor, and very appropriate for this book), but because every new reveal changed what I thought was going on. The book is a mystery, but also an adventure and a love story, several interlocking love stories, actually. Also, the rules about time work differently in the Harbor, and various entities have no trouble breaking all the rules, so cause and effect twist around in a way that will set your brain on fire trying to keep up. Following all of this is a little like a puzzle box that won’t open until you solve all the other puzzle boxes nested inside it.
It’s been eight years since Morgenstern released The Night Circus, which remains one of my very favorite books. I’ve loved that one ever since I first read it, so much so that it feels oddly disloyal to say that I think The Starless Sea…is better.