RIP Review: The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

            Two dueling magicians chose two protégés to battle one another in a mysterious contest known only as “the challenge.”  As children Celia and Marco, each learn a different system of magic.  Their teachers care only about winning, but once the two are thrown together they fall in love.  The venue for their challenge is a traveling circus --Le Cirque des Rêves--full of colorful and eccentric characters, elaborate shows, and dangerous magic.  The contest set up by their masters ensnares everyone in the circus and leads to deadly consequences as the two contestants struggle to figure out the rules of the challenge and discover what they must do to win.

            The book is written from several points of view including the main characters and several secondary ones.  It is broken up into short chapters that are often not in chronological order.  Inserted between different sections of the book are second person narratives that describe the circus as if the reader is walking through experiencing the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes for herself.  

            Overall, this is one of my favorite books of the year.  The author provides amazing details of the circus from the taste and smells of carnival treats to the intricate workings of the troupe’s custom-made clock.  Colors play a prominent and symbolic role throughout the book.  Le Cirque des Rêves is mostly black and white – the tents, the exhibits, the costumes, etc.  But here and there splashes of red appear very much in a similar way that colors often intrude in dreams.  

            In fact, the whole book has a dream-like quality not limited to the circus (which is of course constructed to be a series of dreams), but also in the structure of the narrative itself.  At first, I was annoyed by how the chapters skipped back and forth in time, but I think this fits ultimately with how dreams often are not linear stories.  Rather, they are often fragments that need to be pieced back together in order to see the whole story.  And if we see dreams as stories (as our own personal stories) then the ending is nearly perfect as we learn that what we have just read is a story being told by one of the characters to Marco’s instructor.  

            There were a few nitpicky things that bothered me—the beginning was paced a bit slow for me, sometimes the author was bogged down in her own descriptions (such as saying a character was “elegant” 5 or 6 times in one tiny chapter)—but I do think the book lives up to all the hype.  4 1/2