The Night Circus is, as you can probably guess, about a circus that only operates at night, which presents what is taken to be merely artistically ambitious but in reality incorporates the magical. Within this venue, two young magicians are pitted against each other in a contest, the exact terms of which are kept hidden from them. This book is also well-known not only for its gorgeous cover but also for being a novel originally drafted for the NaNoWriMo competition (National Novel-Writing Month, in which challengers endeavour to write a 50,000 word narrative within the month of November).

I was struck by this book’s unusual cheerfulness and optimism. Despite the inclusion of some darker subjects (not least

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child abuse, suicide, and, at one point, murder

), The Night Circus manages to sustain a childlike sense of wonder. The earnestness with which it was written is so rare today that I instantly held it in higher esteem, and I think accords it its popularity in the mode of Disney’s live-action Cinderella or even the Marvel films (though the latter are too derivative for my taste, and I think The Night Circus is classier than all that).

Morgenstern’s obvious strengths are her creativity and deftness of description: large portions of this book are purely descriptive of the Circus itself, its characters, and the surrounding settings (such as the proprietor’s house), all conveyed in meticulous detail. It constantly demands that you rewire your conceptualisation of typical objects (in order to picture white fire, fish tanks in the ceiling, gardens made of ice etc.), providing consistent challenges to the imagination. These prove to be extremely immersive, and I found it easy to get ‘transported’ or ‘sucked in’ by the book, which isn’t a common experience for me these days. This is the ultimate in escapist fantasy for the ‘aesthetic’ generation.

As a result, The Night Circus is primarily a contemplative book about the wonders of magic and artistry alike (the protagonists’ competition, it turns out, is really just as much a battle of creativity as one of magical ability), but it has to be said that it is comparatively light on plot. The author says herself that “[t]here are spaces that live in [her] head long before [she] find[s] the characters and the stories that live in those spaces”, and you can definitely tell. Having the characters age so slowly also allows both main plotlines to unfold over the course of decades (although, in a strike of narrative convenience, the two children in the Circus, Poppet and Widget, age normally), but the story is also set in a time when the world did move more ‘slowly’ in a metaphorical sense. Given the extreme level of hype that surrounds this book, I think prospective readers should know to expect this going in, and make their own judgement on whether they would enjoy this slower approach to storytelling — where I personally found it absorbing, it may strike others as self-indulgent.

Despite the premise of a magical ‘challenge’, there’s no real battle or showdown between the two magicians as one might expect; like the novel as a whole, the challenge isn’t particularly thrilling or gripping, but focuses on configuring beauty in the artistic expressions of the Circus, just as the prose and narrative structure attempt to convey the same to the reader. A bit like [b:The Wizard of Oz|236093|The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1)|L. Frank Baum|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398003737l/236093._SY75_.jpg|1993810], this is a more ‘feminine’ or female-oriented approach to fantasy narrative that avoids direct physical conflict and focuses more on the character’s emotional responses to their situations. The climax of the novel bears this out:

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Marco resolves to commit suicide to save Celia, but they find a way to become one with the Circus in a sort-of afterlife (though it is not entirely clear whether they will remain in that state for eternity — presumably Marco’s magic remains in place, given that Bailey is still proprietor of the Circus in the present day (or near-enough to present day that he now has an email address), at which point he must be well over 100 years old). The resolve to be together in a spiritual sense, outside the physical realm, reminds me of [b:Wuthering Heights|6185|Wuthering Heights|Emily Brontë|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388212715l/6185._SY75_.jpg|1565818], which is a personal favourite, but much like this book, one that receives highly variable responses from its readers

.

Although there’s nothing strictly graphic or brutal in the text, the magic itself regularly takes on a sinister tone: both magical mentors/father figures have psycho- or sociopathic traits, which I interpreted to result from the disassociation that must come with deep study of magic and the need to cut oneself off from ordinary society. It also works, once again, as a metaphor for artistic creation, in the way that great artists have a tendency to exploit others and mistreat their loved ones. This is presumably also why Celia, the female protagonist, is so obsessed with books — a book-obsessed protagonist can be a bit of a cliché in my view, but in this case must be meant to convey the distance she is forced to keep from others to avoid exposure as a magician. Nor did I understand why she says at the beginning that she is “already married”, but this presumably must be another way to avoid the social conventions of the time and remain removed from ordinary people (as well as perhaps representing her unbreakable commitment to the contest). This is also the element that remains the most ambiguous: the magic system is extremely ‘soft, with no ground rules set out (which I’m sure will bother some readers), and a lot goes unexplained. In a similar vein, many details were (presumably deliberately) left ambiguous: we never find out

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whether Isobel has genuine prophetic and/or magical abilities, and if so, how she got them; what makes the ‘Alexander’ character tick, or why he insists on behaving as he does; nor what Tsukiko’s real motivations are, or what is at the core of her character (she is also a bit stereotypically ‘oriental’, but I suppose that fits with the setting

. I suppose, much like a magician’s act, some secrets are never intended to be revealed.

The book as a whole ends up being quite experimental, despite its self-admitted loyalty to traditional ‘fairytale’ models of storytelling, and it is interesting to see how polarising it has ended up being. I hope my evaluation will help other readers to determine on which side they are likely to fall.