When an author produces a masterpiece on her first attempt, it’s tempting to compare her second novel to her first. For Rita Morgenstern’s first two works, I won’t compare The Starless Sea to The Night Circus. They are different and only connected by the author’s literary talents.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a university graduate student, finds a book in his university’s library and checks it out to read. He discovers a passage in the book that describes one of his childhood memories. How does it happen that Zachary, a real person, is in a book? And how is the book tied to a clandestine society who believe in a world devoted to storytelling?
That summary doesn’t do this book justice at all. Many books have been written with self-aware characters. This book doesn’t even start with Zachary. Instead, it starts with a three-page chapter that not only captures the reader’s interest but imprisons it as well. The reader is reading the book-within-a-book Sweet Sorrows interwoven with Zachary’s narrative. And this is handled with care and precision and prose that reads like fine poetry.
Stories are made of three things: themes, character/plots, and the writing itself. Here, the writing itself is the superstar. It never fails through the entire book. Many authors would give up a lung to write one page as elegantly as Ms. Morgenstern. A nearly 600-page novel flies by on a wave of details and humor that makes readers force themselves not to read any longer. She truly has talent.
How does the story hold up? Filled with creativity, Morgenstern eschews the modern convention of setting rules and over-explaining how things could possibly work. This is more of a fable or fairy tale with an emphasis on art, specifically the art of storytelling. It asks why storytelling is important. It explores whether stories are still relevant today given so many would rather watch YouTube or get lost in a game. What the book has to say on this subject is illuminating. And again, the way the book tells stories is a magic trick I’ve never seen before.
Thematically, it’s rich. The prose is stunning. How are the characters and the plot? Here, the novel falters a bit. While the sub-plots are rich and the chapters entrancing, The Starless Sea feels aimless in the last hundred pages. Some of this is a switch of focus from a portal fantasy to a love story. There are three love stories, in fact. All feel underdeveloped, as if the characters are in love because that’s what is in service to the story. While one story, Simon and Eleanor’s, is fascinating with a jaw-dropping idea, it still feels like they fall in love because they should, not because they want to. As a fairytale, this works just fine. But there are reasons why fairy tales are short and not over five hundred pages.
I was also worried about the ending. Could The Starless Sea give the reader an ending that lived up to the first three-quarters of the book? I’m happy to say the book’s ending is solid, neatly tying things up. More importantly, it does justice to its theme of storytelling. Too many times in the modern world, the ending seems like an afterthought. Here, it’s essential and fulfills the promise given to the reader at the start. And what is that promise?
“Come with me. I’d like to tell you a story.”