Category: Fiction – Hardcover: 400 pages – Publisher: Harvill Secker
First Published: September 2011
Blurb: In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Rêves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire.
Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the rêveurs – the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter’s daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer’s apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love…
A fabulous, fin-de-siècle feast for the senses and a life-affirming love story, The Night Circus is a captivating novel that will make the real world seem fantastical and a fantasy world real.
My Thoughts: I was craving fiction after reading lots of Anglo-Saxon history. :)
This book is a collections of components rather than one coherent story and there’s lots of smoke and mirrors to deal with before you get to it.
It’s impossible to review the book without discussing the wrapper – the cover art is gorgeous and glossy, the edge of the pages are inked black, there’s a red ribbon to be used as a bookmark. It’s the book equivalent of a fancy box of chocolates, you’re being conditioned to think it’s better than a bar of Cadburys or Hershey or any book in a plain cover. It works up to a point. I don’t have anything as pretty as it in my permanent collection and I was coveting it just for the artwork, but I’d read Shakespeare whatever the cover.
Then there’s the just-one-of-us-made-good back story of the author, Morgenstern wrote the original story for this as a NaNoWriMo novel, polished it up, got rejected a bunch of times and then finally got a massive book deal, tons of publicity and all her dreams came true. There’s magic in that idea of a humble fairy story making a literary princess.
Once you’ve sidestepped the packaging and the feel-good story of the author’s journey though you’re left with a story of little skill, incomplete characters and gloss. In short, expect to see this at the cinema with a new story added in or the current one heavily added to.
The circus that forms the backdrop of the story and gives the book its title is the only thing of substance in the novel. The characters who merely inhabit it are given unlikely motivations, little backstory and unmemorable dialogue. The bits of the tale you want fleshing out as a reader are left in the shadows while the circus is given yet another attraction described in loving detail. At the start this draws you in, by the end it makes you a frustrated spectator.
The biggest disappointment though is the lack of peril in the ending. Good triumphing over evil is only satisfying if it is believably genuine. In cases where the threat never feels plausible, as in The Night Circus, then the victory feels as if the author cheating in a game of story-telling solitaire, hollow.
Rating: 4/10
(My Book Review Scale)
Source: Public library, reserved it.
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