There is a matter-of-factness about the magicians' magic, a consistency about the parameters of the circus world, that succeeds both in itself and as a comment upon the need for and nature of illusion in general. Morgenstern's patient, lucid construction of her circus – of its creators and performers and followers – makes for a world of illusion more real than that of many a realist fiction. I am a reader who should have hated this novel yet I found it enchanting, and affecting, too, in spite of its sentimental ending. Reading the novel is, in this respect, more like watching a film in the making – not an ordinary film, however, but an imaginative collaboration between writer and reader. Morgenstern paints precise, evocative and visually lush scenes within the tents of her fictional circus.
It is intensely visual, so much so that what remains in its wake are almost exclusively images – more so than plot, or character, or even the prose itself. Highly whimsical, it is a narrative so wilfully contrived that contrivance is its raison d'être. The Night Circus is a sprawling historical novel about magic and the circus. And if a book feels to me like a film in the making, I am doubly averse to it, feeling strongly that literature needs to reveal the world in ways that film cannot.
I've abandoned many novels because their premises struck me as preposterous. I abhor feeling trapped in someone else's crazy imagination: Alice in Wonderland has always horrified me I find the film Brazil unbearable. I am hostile to whimsy, and beyond impatient with the fantastical. As a reader, I am resistant to historical fiction. In the case of Erin Morgenstern's first novel, The Night Circus, I might well have been the wrong reviewer. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value. T o a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter.
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