November 27, 2011
Morgenstern is both a writer and a visual artist, and the world of The Night Circus is elaborately designed, fantastically imagined and instantly intoxicating — as if the reader had downed a glass of absinthe and leapt into a hallucination. Like Rowling, Morgenstern conjures a setting so intricate and complete that imposing a plot on it feels almost worthy of extra credit. But that's where the comparison ends. The Harry Potter saga, played out through the hijinks of its young wizards, was propelled by an epic battle between good and evil; The Night Circus uses romance, not morality, for fuel.
Marco and Celia, the novel's star-crossed heroes, are gifted magicians who enter into an epic contest set down by their mentors as a kind of gentleman's wager. The pair are still in grade school when the gauntlet is thrown, and so do not fully understand what they're training for and why. Yet, through arduous study with their masters (old rivals on the Victorian magic circuit), the young apprentices develop impressive skills, like the ability to heal wounds and read glyphs. Later, when as teenagers they meet by chance outside a London cafe (in the rain, of course), they fall suddenly and deeply in love.
Indeed, the darkest and most engaging element in the novel is not the circus but the relationships between the children and their guardians, who resemble nothing so much as the kind of overattentive, hyper-achievement-oriented, controlling parents much decried in modern media. I felt, at times, that the text that perhaps most speaks to “The Night Circus” isn’t “The Tempest” but “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” got up in face paint and spangles. The peculiar imprisonment and constant education in isolation — a sort of early home schooling — that Marco’s guardian imposes on him; the way Celia’s father, before his death, repeatedly slices her fingers so she can “learn” to heal them with her mind, and breaks her wrist with a paperweight when she’s not being quite magic enough: these are authentically dark, strongly imagined moments, the stuff that nightmares, if not dreams, are made of. I don’t really know what “magical air” might be, but I can feel what it might be like to have your caretaker smash your wrist. Strangely, the two most powerful kinds of magic there are — the power of cruelty and the power of love — receive the least page time here, their pungency muffled in ice gardens, intricate clocks and floor-sweeping gowns that change color. Magic without passion is pretty much a trip to Pier One: lots of shrink-wrapped candles. One wishes Morgenstern had spent less time on the special effects and more on the hauntingly unanswerable question that runs, more or less ignored, through these pages: Can children love who were never loved, only used as intellectual machines? What kind of magic reverses that spell? It’s not as pretty a spectacle, but that’s a story that grips the heart.
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