Book Review: The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

BY ERIN MORGENSTERN

Harvill Secker, 387pp, £12.99

Review by MARY CROCKETT

The Cirque des Rêves rolls into town unannounced, its black and white striped tents erected, and perimeter fence already in place before anyone even notices it. After a few weeks, just as quietly, it leaves – to return years later or not at all. This is no ordinary circus: that it opens only at night is its least peculiar property. Those venturing beyond the ticket booth and into the labyrinth of paths within find themselves in a magical world where tents contain clouds or an ice garden, where a contortionist achieves the physically incomprehensible, an illusionist turns books into birds and a fortune-teller reads not only the tarot cards before her but her sitters’ dreams.

Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel is described as “a fin-de-siècle fantasia of magic and mischief”. It is deliciously inventive, certainly, with flights of fancy that also include an umbrella that stops the rain from falling overhead, trapeze artists with nothing but a ribbon to keep them in mid-air, and a magician whose invisibility experiment goes wrong, leaving bits of him permanently missing and the rest of him an apparition. But don’t imagine this is a light, frothy tale. For all her humorous touches, Morgenstern, a multimedia artist who says all her work deals in “fairy tales, one way or another”, has produced something darker than night.

The story begins in 1873 with a challenge between Prospero the Enchanter – aka Hector Bowen – and a fellow magician, Alexander, or Mr A H——, a man of secretive habits who appears in the shadows from time to time and is recognisable by his trademark grey suit. The wager, initiated by Prospero, is that his only daughter, Celia, then aged six, will prove herself the more powerful magician in a play-off with a to-be-determined opponent, at a time and place of Mr A H——’s choosing. It’s a challenge to the death.

To seal the deal, Hector brings out his daughter to be branded – a silver ring is placed on her finger and, being a magic ring, it burns itself into her skin before vaporising in the heat. Only the throbbing scar remains. Not nice. It’s Hector who, after proving himself a thoroughly unpleasant parent and guardian, turns into an apparition; and you’d smile at his comeuppance except that his half-visible self keeps returning to haunt his daughter. Even disconnected from his body he’s a hectoring (yes) bully.

Meanwhile, the man in grey chooses his challenger, a young boy with a lively imagination and a love of books whom he picks up from an orphanage. Marcus gets bullied too. But to stack the odds against Celia, Hector has stipulated that her opponent can learn her identity while she will be kept in the dark about his. So, a decade later, while Celia puts her extraordinary magic powers to work in the Night Circus, Marcus can be found manipulating things quietly in the background, watching Celia’s every move in his capacity as the circus owner’s trusted assistant. Celia only realises Marcus is her challenger much later, when she picks up his magic umbrella in a café by mistake – and even then the truth dawns on her painfully slowly. Shortly afterwards, though, in the way of all good fairy tales, she and Marcus fall in love and the fates are thrown off balance. There are deaths; and the existence of the circus itself comes under threat. The story plays out as time leaps forwards and back and a whole company of supporting characters are conjured into existence. There are the Burgess sisters, librarians turned dancers, whom many mistake for twins — one dies in a freak accident. And there’s Tsukiko the contortionist, who keeps an unsettling secret to herself. Not everyone is as dark: take the twins, Poppet and Widget, born on the circus’s opening night in 1886, who by the turn of the century are doing “a show with kittens” and speaking to each other in childish endearments. They befriend Bailey, a young man who first visited the circus in daytime as a dare years previously and has been under its spell ever since.

And then there’s the German clockmaker, Herr Thiessen, himself enthralled by the circus, whose fantastical timepiece plays a central role in the plot, and in his own destiny.

Lovers of the fantasy genre will be delighted with this tale of manipulation, magic and intrigue. The plot is fiendishly complicated; the romance, when it comes, is more Mills and Boon than Austen, and the dialogue would have benefited from a far more ruthless editorial pen — but will aficionados worry about that? I suspect not. The circus works a very particular magic on its readers.

And whatever they think, the book’s publishers are inviting them to Tweet their reactions. In what is billed as a trailblazing partnership, Harvill Secker have teamed up with the folk behind narrative web game Echo Bazaar to devise an “interactive storytelling experience”. It’s the kind of crossover experiment that could indeed become, as Harvill Secker predicts, the publishing sensation of autumn 2011: certainly at the Edinburgh book festival three weeks ago Audrey Niffenegger spoke about it as a thing of wonder about which she was absolutely envious. Whether Morgenstern’s story itself will be a sensation – less a circus of dreams than of nightmares – time alone will tell. And time, as one of her characters says, is the hardest thing of all to predict.