Review
FANTASY
THE STARLESS SEA
By Erin Morgenstern
Harvill Secker/ Paperback/ 512 pages/ $27.95/ Books Kinokuniya
4 stars
American author Erin Morgenstern's second novel is thick with stories. They are in the pages of books hidden on shelves and locked behind glass, but also painted on walls, laid in tiles upon floors, baked into the crackled glaze of teacups and more.
Morgenstern, 41, excels at enchantment. She dazzled with her 2011 debut, The Night Circus, in which a black-and-white circus becomes the battleground for two duelling, star-crossed magicians.
Unlike The Night Circus' heady rush of magic, the spell that The Starless Sea weaves is much slower in its workings. But if you let yourself fall into its labyrinthine coils, it will unfurl irresistibly.
It starts with Zachary Ezra Rawlins, who is pursuing a degree in Emerging Media Studies, borrowing a book from the university library that should not be there. It bears on its back cover a string of symbols: a sword, a key and a bee.
Soon, it has led him to a mysterious costume party, introduced him to a handsome if morally dubious stranger and put him on the hit list of a sinister sect.
It might also be the key to the Starless Sea, a secret place beneath the earth where countless stories are kept, which Zachary almost reached as a child but failed. There are doors to this place, some painted by Mirabel, a dauntless pink-haired adventurer, but they grow fewer and fewer.
Morgenstern has a background in theatre and her worlds are crafted with a scene designer's eye - a hallway where a thousand doorless doorknobs hang from ribbons, tagged like corpses in a mortuary; a library sunken into a reflecting pool and inhabited by cats; empty cities of honey and bone.
Interspersed throughout the main narrative are snippets of other stories - of pirates and owl kings and dollhouses - that seem at first to be independent, but are slowly revealed to be elements in the intricate puzzle-box of the novel.
This is a book replete with symbols, though if you are looking for sensible meanings attached to any of them, you are likely to come up short.
If one insists on digging a little deeper, the novel feints fleetingly at broader themes: the evolution of storytelling in the modern age - Zachary, after all, studies video games and there are aspects of that medium in the way his adventure unfolds - and the disjunction between a book's content and its aesthetic, as well as the debate over how stories are best preserved.
"Can you imagine what could happen if it were to become common knowledge?" says one of Zachary's adversaries of the Starless Sea. "That some place magical, for lack of a better term, waits beneath our feet? What might happen once there are blog posts and hashtags and tourists?"
But there is far more pleasure in forgetting sense and letting oneself be carried away by this susurrating stream of smoke and honey. This is the kind of book so exquisitely furnished you fiercely wish you could inhabit it, and you marvel at the kind of wonder that can be crafted with words alone.
If you like this, read: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino (Vintage, 1979, reissued 2015, $17.95, Books Kinokuniya), a metafictional masterpiece in which you, the reader, go into a bookshop to buy the latest book by Calvino - but it is not exactly the book you think it is.
