More Symbols than Plot

[mtvessel]

Dec 2020
The Starless Sea - Erin Morgernstern – Vintage, 2019
* * *
Well, The Night Circus was always going to be a hard act to follow, and while this isn't in the same league, it is still an interesting book. As it is set partly in a fantasy land consisting of an underground ocean of honey with harbours which are story repositories, I suspect that Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories may have been an inspiration (along with Kate Bush's album Aerial, of course). Rushdie's book is a whimsical children's tale full of absurd images and characters which doesn't really do justice to its great title. Morgernstern's take is intended to be a bit deeper, but I'm not sure that it succeeds.

The story has many threads (rather too many, to be honest), but the main through-line follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a media studies student who likes reading. In the college library, he discovers a book called Sweet Sorrows which contains a description of an event in his childhood that he had never told anyone about; while walking home from school, he found a painted door with a sword, bee and key symbol that he was convinced he could pass through by turning the handle, but chose not to. Puzzled as to how the book could chronicle this experience so exactly, he does some research which leads him to a sinister organisation called the Collector's Club, a handsome stranger and a door painter called Mirabel.

Beneath the tale-telling smoke and mirrors this is actually a fairly standard secondary world fantasy, but the ornate stylings sadly do not really bring it to life. Morgernstern is a creator of vivid images which as a visual reader is something I really appreciate, but unlike Le Cirque de Rêves, the world of the Starless Sea has a dream-like, static quality, like a Dali painting, rather any sense of a living place. It does not help that the symbols that pervade the stories and locations tease deep thematic connections that I don't think are actually there.

There are similar problems of lifelessness with the characters. We spend most of the time in the mind of Zachary, who is a perfectly nice lad but rather dull compared to the colourful characters he meets and whose inner lives I would have liked to have learned more about. This applies particularly to Dorian, his romantic interest. A word to the wise: when writing a romantic storyline, it's important that both protagonists have equally deep and thought-through motivations and actions, even if we are only viewing the story through the eyes of one of them. Pride and Prejudice wouldn't work if D'Arcy was a simplistic character compared to Elizabeth.

There are a lot of good things here - the sophistication of the storytelling is a step up from The Night Circus and there is a plot with a proper ending, albeit one that takes an inordinate amount of time to get going thanks to all the prefiguring fables with which each chapter in the first half starts. However, Morgernstern's talent for dream-like descriptions is overused and a more grounded approach would have helped to engage readers more. This is a good book in many ways, but it lacks the grit of a great fantasy.