‘The Circus arrives without warning… it is simply there, when yesterday it was not.’ An empty field is suddenly full of black and white striped tents, each containing something more magical and astounding than the last. The circus stays for a while, open only from sundown to dawn, then moves on as suddenly as it arrives.
How I would love the Night Circus to be real… the time I spent reading just slipped away, and I enjoyed the author’s hugely imaginative descriptions of the contents of the tents and the singular people that populate them. I also loved the circus founder’s midnight dinners… the first course is served on the stroke of midnight, and sumptuous food and the finest wines continue to appear until dawn. Only then does the scintillating company disperse. Maybe I’ll host something similar myself… it’ll certainly separate the sheep from the goats.
The crux of the story rests on two magicians who enter into a wager. They groom their respective candidates over the course of years for a duel. Their competitors are never told the rules of the game, the path to victory is always obscure, and they even have to guess the identity of their opponent.
The first magician trains his daughter, Celia, from childhood, pushing her to the very limits of her emotional and physical endurance. The other picks a clever orphan boy, Marco, giving him every intellectual support but neglecting to visit him in his lonely isolation for months, even years at a time. The circus is conceived to be the venue for the duel.
Much to the chagrin of the vainglorious pair of elders, the game is complicated when Celia and Marco fall in love.
The book is an effortless read. The trouble is… I cared for the circus and the peripheral characters (Chandresh, Bailey, Poppet & Widget, Herr Friedrich Thiessen) way more than I cared for the central pair. I never felt any real sense of jeopardy, which is so essential to the experience of reading fiction.
Susanna Clarke’s ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell’ is equally imaginative in its descriptions and set-up, but was utterly compelling and full of conflict. Her characters seemed more nuanced and differentiated and their relationships were more involving. I read it years ago when it first came out, and when I finished it, I felt bereaved as I had loved my time with the book so much. I didn’t feel the same way about The Night Circus, but I enjoyed it all the same. Maybe it’s time to read ‘JN & MS’ again.
