The Night Circus Thrills on Every Page

The Night Circus

By Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday, 2011

I began reading Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus in December and even when just half done I thought it the best work of fiction I read in 2011. I finished it in early January, and I’d not be the slightest bit shocked if it ends up being the best novel I read in 2012 as well. This is one of those rare books one is sorry to finish because it means an end to the wonderment.

The central premise is disarmingly simple. Today we live in a world of illusions and of skepticism. We see magicians, but we know they’re not real; there are even TV shows that demonstrate how the tricks are done. We marvel at the technology and at the clever performances that make us not see what is patently obvious once the ruse is revealed, but we don’t believe in magic. Morgenstern takes us to back to Victorian London. It too was a society in which illusionists abounded, but by the time this novel opens in 1886, most thinking people were as deeply skeptical as we are today. The floodgates opened in 1882 when the Society for Psychical Research began to expose mesmerists, mediums, and assorted tricksters as frauds. The bottom fell out of the spooky world cottage industry in 1888, when the Fox sisters, the period’s most famous spiritualists, were exposed as nothing more than carny con artists. Thus, the patrons who attend Le Cirque des Rêves marvel over the amazing illusions they witness, but they assume it to be a fantasy world no more real than the dreams alluded to in the spectacle’s name. But what if they’re wrong? What if they are witnessing bona fide magic and the real illusion is getting audiences to assume it’s chicanery? What if the entire circus was created by the paranormal powers of just a few individuals who were so good that not even the circus’s putative designers, managers, and other performers were entirely aware that most of their “artistry” was accomplished through magic?

If magic is real, what kind of alternative reality can be created? Morgenstern, a 2000 graduate of Smith College, gives her own imagination free rein, and what an imagination it is—gowns that change shape and color, ambrosia-like foods whose ingredients no one can quite pin down, gravity-defying rooms that appear to be made of clouds, ice-curtained fantasy realms without refrigeration, thrilling rides that defy the laws of physics, acrobatic kittens, clocks of greater complexity than a modern computer, actors that seem never to age… And it all unfolds within black and white tents that mysteriously appear overnight, as is appropriate for a circus that commences at sunset and closes at sunrise.

The circus, it seems, is actually the set for an elaborate contest between two ancient master wizards, Prospero and Alexander, which they wage through their proxies, Prospero’s gifted daughter Celia, and Alexander’s chosen ward Marco. The latter are also pawns, unaware of the degree to which they must participate, but increasingly drawn to concerns over the welfare of the circus, the innocents whose lives they control, and to each other. Who are Prospero and Alexander? Greek gods among mortals? Competing demons? Two cranky wizards who’ve been competing for so long that the game has become all-consuming?

Some critics have compared The Night Circus to Harry Potter and the works of Neil Gaiman. I can see the Gaiman connection, but this one is far more adult than Harry Potter. It also bears atmospheric similarities to Terry Gilliam’s The Imginarium of Doctor Parnassus and to Steven Millhauser’s Pulitizer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler. And life inside the show bears some resemblance to Cirque du Soliel.

Does The Night Circus deserve to be mentioned amidst such august company? I’d concede that there are flaws that betray the author’s youth and inexperience. I wondered why she didn’t set the main action in New York, as she’s clearly American in her sensitivities and her evocation of Victorian London isn’t exactly Dickensian. Some of the characters have great depth, others seem sketchily underdeveloped. I’m sure that serious critics would say that there’s quite a bit of sleight of hand in the novel. You know what? I don’t give a damn. I haven’t been this engaged in a novel in years and I don’t care if the entire thing is as phony as the Fox sisters. I bought into the fantasy cape, cane, and rabbit.