T he Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern opens a world of magic, illusion, rivalry and love into which you gratefully slide, happy to be enfolded in its fantastical embrace.
I do my reading at the end of a working day. I sit down in my big, comfy, red armchair, open a book, and lose myself in its pages. Inevitably, at some point my eyes will start to droop and I’ll nod off, seamlessly blending the book’s narrative into my dream. With The Night Circus, when I came round and resumed reading, I was really unsure as to whether I had read or dreamed the last sequence.
Like entering the Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams), the walls between fantasy and reality dissolved.
Synopsis of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
O pening in New York in 1873, Prospero the Enchanter meets his daughter, Celia, for the first time and is immediately struck by her power. Taking her to London eight months later, he introduces her to his long-time rival Alexander and proposes a wager. The deal is sealed via a branding ring on the child’s finger, and Alexander begins his search for a rival to match the girl.
Twelve years later, a select party attends one of the elite Midnight Suppers and discussions begin about an entirely new concept, a circus composed not of one Big Top but of a multitude of tents. The circus will only open at night, closing at dawn, and 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.’
And so Le Cirque des Rêves is born, a place where every visitor is cast under its spell and which becomes the venue for an extraordinary dual between two people whose powers of magic and illusion provide a spectacle such as the world has never seen.
My Review
I n The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern takes us to a fantasy world of elaborate illusions. Her richly embellished descriptors craft such intricate details that you feel certain you’re seeing creations in exactly the same way that she does. Nothing is left to chance or to mundanity. From the bonfire that greets visitors as they enter the gates, and the costumes performers wear to the complex dream worlds created by the illusionists.
Morgenstern has a vivid imagination which she uses to spin intricate plot lines and complex settings but I would have liked her to apply more of that ‘insight’ into giving her characters greater depth. I never felt that I had really got to know her protagonists and their supporting cast, for example the gradually disappearing Prospero who I was never sure had any real love for Celia or if he simply saw her as a way of beating his rival.
At times, the complexity of the descriptions became exhausting too and by the last quarter of the novel (a sizeable volume at 496 pages), I felt increasingly saturated by them.
Overall, I really enjoyed The Night Circus and applaud Morgenstern’s creative writing but if I was to have a criticism, I would say the book would benefit from stricter editing. That said, if fantasy is your genre and you enjoy pure escapism through tales of wizardry, enchantment and sorcery, this one’s for you.
