Like many readers, I was engrossed by Erin Morgenstern's debut The Night Circus. I didn't fall completely under its spell right away, but I remember being really caught up in the final chapters and desperately wanting everything to turn out fine. What Morgenstern really pulled off, apart from making us care at least for some of the side characters, if not necessarily for the leads, was to make the titular Night Circus seem alluring. As a dream world of magic with a hint of danger, it was convincing and drew in the reader like it drew in its visitors.
Morgenstern's second novel, The Starless Sea, also invites the reader to enter another, magical world. This time, though, it took quite a while before I got properly into the book. When I did, it was partly because I wanted to see how the author would be able to tie all the disparate story threads together. The structure is really complex with stories within stories, and I was curious to know how it all connected. Also, with time, I did care enough for the characters to go "aww, thats too bad" when things seemed to be going to pot for them and to be relieved every time they cleared a hurdle. Overall, though, it didn't engage me as much as The Night Circus did.
One reason for this was that the magic world we were supposed to want to escape to didn't seem all that appealing at first. The main character, Zachary Rawlins, comes across a mysterious book called Sweet Sorrows in the library of the university he's attending, which includes a scene from his own life. There seems to be no room for doubt, yet the book is hundreds of years old, written long before the events it describes in such detail.
It's a fascinating premise, but the world that Sweet Sorrows is about felt a bit off for me. It speaks of underground harbours around the Starless Sea, where stories are stored in multitudes as in one sprawling, fantastic library. That's nice. Like so many bookish people, I'm usually a sucker for stories about the power of stories. Only, among the first things we learn about the whole Starless Sea society (for want of a better word to describe it) is that they go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their precious stories. There are three "paths" you can follow, Sweet Sorrows solemnly tells us, if you want to do your bit for the story collection: you can become an acolyte, a guardian or a keeper. Each path has its own initiation rites and examples of extreme devotion to the bookish cause. Acolytes (who seem to be glorified dogsbodies) sacrifice their tongues, the better to serve the stories of others (what?). Guardian candidates who, after being given a grand tour, declare that they are not prepared to give their life for what they would be set to guard, are swiftly killed: they are of no use to the cause and have seen too much. Keepers used to be kidnapped children who grew up training for the job, until the powers that be decided that the career choice should be voluntary. Now this, I would argue, is taking devotion to stories a little too far. What's wrong with common or garden librarians, anyway?
Because of these overtones of tyranny, the world which, by the time Zachary reaches it, is vanishing fast and well past its heyday, didn't feel like a lost paradise to me. It turns out, though, that Zachary's function isn't really to restore the particular Harbour he reaches to its former supposed glory, so it doesn't matter if you don't quite buy into the marvels of yesteryear. In a way, the declining world in which Zachary stumbles around, containing less than half a dozen people and a great deal more cats, is more appealing in its melancholic way than the Harbour in the grand old days. Zachary doesn't think so, though, and is haunted by a sense of disappointment in what he finds on the other side of his particular door-to-Narnia equivalent. Would it have been better if he'd dared to try that magic painted door he came across as child, or would he have been too late even then?
So the Tyranny of Stories angle didn't bug me for long: however, the stories-within-stories structure felt too clever-clever at times. In some ways, The Starless Sea seems less assured than Morgenstern's debut novel, as it strains for effect more. Critics usually claim that the second novel is especially problematic for many authors. I'm not sure that's true: I believe it's more a case of critics overpraising someone's debut and taking it out on the next book that comes along. The Starless Sea's problems do tend to be classic second-novel ones, though. It has a way more complicated plot than The Night Circus and throws anything but the kitchen sink at it: portals to a hidden world; a huge library; a secret society wanting to close the portals; star-crossed lovers; tales containing stars and the moon and owls and swords; abstractions that are made into characters; foreshadowing mentions of a character that turns out to be more of an abstraction etc. What with the main story being told in tandem with other narratives, one after another, you can get a little impatient with it all, especially when "interludes" are added into the mix.
For all that, I enjoyed this novel. A clue to what the author may be aiming at is that Zachary is something of an expert on storytelling computer games. This proves useful when he comes up against various difficult situations: instead of giving up when facing, say, a locked door, he searches around for clues on how to open it. His adventures resemble an ambitious computer game in many ways, which gives the book some licence for not tying up every loose plot thread. As in a game (says I who haven't played one for many a day, but I think I understand the concept), there are paths left unexplored and consequently stories left untold. There is also an underlying sweetness in the descriptions of the various love stories which is very winning. Morgenstern is clearly a romantic, and that, to me at least, is an attractive trait in a storyteller.
