The joy of discovering someone else’s world is one of the biggest reasons I love fantasy. When fantasy is rooted in real life, it demands more of us. We’ve to suspend disbelief in parts – which is perhaps more difficult.
Two men believe in two different schools of magic. How does one know which is better? They pit their students against each other. The challenges lasting years and governed by rules that no one, not even the men who designed the challenge fully understand. The challenges set not in a ring – but in the real world. The Night Circus is a book about two such rivals pitted against each other in the most ambitious venue in which this test has been given – a ‘Night Circus’, a circus that appears at midnight and disappears by dawn.
This book itself is the story of Celia and Marco. Celia is Hector’s daughter. She is born with innate magical abilities and can control physical objects with ease. Marco was plucked out of an orphanage by Alexander. He was taught by Alexander – but also mostly left to study and train himself on magic for years. Marco has learnt to manipulate human minds – making people see and experience worlds that exist only in Marco’s mind.
While Hector believed that talent alone is enough to triumph over others, Alexander believed that anyone with years of training could learn magic(though I think he’d take offense to it being called magic because like he says “This is not magic. This is the way the world is”). This, I felt was the two different schools of thought – Hectore believed in nature while Alexander believed training would make all the difference(nurture).
What Hector and Alexander didn’t account for, was that all they did for the test was to bind two people together. They couldn’t decide the nature of the binding. Hector and Alexander decided there would be a battle. But Celia and Marco designed the battle not to try and kill each other but to create tents – each tent a gift of wonder, joy and comfort, to the other. What made this book unique is also my favorite character in the book – the venue, the night circus. My favorite part of the Night Circus are the different tents. And I so rarely feel this way. But here the descriptions were truly purposeful. While the circus is way more than the sum of each of its tents, each tent definitely added a unique new color and character to it. If I had to pick just one tent, I think I’d pick the Ice Garden.
Among the characters in the book, there isn’t a true villain. But if there had to be one – it’d by far be Hector. While he never formally trained his daughter, he made her practice by leaving her no option but to practice. He’d cut her fingers open, crush her wrist, make her perform much against her desire to perform. Hector in the book, eventually fades away from the story – quite literally. He tries to remove his body and to inhabit everything everywhere all at once. This was perhaps the closest allegory to being a soul. But he fails – because without a body, he needed something to tie himself to. while also finding it increasingly difficult to bring himself back to a cohesive whole.
But, several characters besides Celia are also speckled in gray for me.
There is Marco – who has bound everyone in the circus, at its inception, to the circus. He has never shied away from taking away memories from people around him – even when the binding and this removal of memory have had really adverse effects on them(like it did on Chandresh). It is true that Celia and Marco didn’t have a say in being active participants in this test. But Marco then took away the same control from all the people in the circus when he bound them to the circus. And even when he finally told Isobel that he loved Celia – he still didn’t offer Isobel the chance to leave the circus. For a game / test started by Hector and Alexander, with no ostensible rules, Marco still designed the circus to be a cage for all its people. There is Alexander – who has agreed to run these tests. Tests that bind two students – but also impact the lives of all around the tests in truly dire ways. There is Ethan – who even when he understood the truth of the circus, referred Tara to the most dangerous person he could ask her to go see. There is Tsukiko – who has a fickle relationship with truth at best . Celia for me was perhaps one central character in the book who had perhaps no gray at all. Raised by her father, she had no reason to be the perceptive person she turned out to be. And yet – at the end of the book, she is perhaps the one who has lost the most. Given that Celia could manipulate physical objects, what control would she have while she is disembodied and haunting a circus? When Widget tells Alexander – “In a way they have the world bound only by his imagination”, he leaves out Celia’s powers. Because at the end, Marco still has his imagination to create worlds that Celia has never seen. But Celia can no longer use her powers – having given that which was inside her to Bailey.
Our book club had such varied takes on this book. And that in itself tells me that the book had a lot of impact. Like Alexander tells Widget, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
PS: This turned out to be a synopsis rather than a feelings’ review. I realized later that for me the most feelings I felt was around the venue of the circus tent itself. I felt very little emotional connection to the characters themselves. There are two deaths in the story – but the deaths weren’t that moving either. Strange that in spite of this, I did like this book.