To like or not to like?

I started this book with high expectations considering Erin Morgenstern’s first novel Night Circus was an absolute hit. The Starless Sea in contrast was a painstakingly slow read. Yes the descriptions were colourful, the world build up was magical. BUT THERE WAS NO PLOT!! Reading a story with no plot is like walking through a dark tunnel with the hope of seeing some light at the end of it, only to realize that you were simply walking towards a blank wall. It was an agonizing read!

Fans of Morgenstern would argue that “agonizing” is too strong a word. “Just look at the sub-plots!” they would cry. Yes, the sub-plots were magnificent. There were many individual stories that if read alone are works of a true creative genius. Morgenstern does have a wild imagination. Yet to me, The Starless Sea felt as though one fine day Morgenstern suddenly decided she wanted to publish all the stories she had ever written and whipped up a story about a boy who stumbles upon multiple universes with pirates and swordsmiths and talking celestial bodies but has no idea what is going on around him until the very last page. This boy unfortunately is also the protagonist of the story and hence the reader too is left in absolute darkness.

That being said I did read all 498 pages of it. Although it took me a good three weeks to complete it, I did get to the end of it. So lets look at the pros and cons:

Pros

• The writing – without a doubt it is absolutely magnificent! Morgenstern definitely has an excellent flair for writing. Her descriptions of characters, setting and events are laudable. To me as a secondary English teacher, I felt certain paragraphs had to be bookmarked for students as an example of exemplary descriptive writing. Look at this description of the party Zachary attends –
  

…this particular party is unlike anything he’s ever experienced. The bar off the main room is lit entirely in blue. There are not a great number of obvious literary costumes, but there are scarlet letters and dictionary page fairy wings and an Edgar Allen Poe with a fake raven on his shoulder…A number of people could easily fit into the works of Austen or Dickens.” (p.66)

Or this description of Zachary meeting Mirabel –

The son of a fortune teller sits in a chair surrounded by keys in the middle of a starlit forest talking to a woman made of snow and ice” (p.424)

• The stories – forget the main story and focus on the mini stories because they were magical! If I had to chose I would say I enjoyed both love stories; the one between time and fate and the ballad of Simon and Eleanor. However I also enjoyed reading about the story sculptor, the swordsmith and the pirate. There’s a verse in the book that perfectly captures the function of these individual stories –

The pirate tells the girl not the single story she requested but many stories. Stories that fold into other stories and wander into snippets of lost myths and forgotten tales and yet to be told wonderments that turn back around again into each other until they return to two people facing each other through iron bars, a storyteller and a story listener with no more whispered words left between them” (p.104)

How beautiful is this?

• Suspense – the story’s lack of a plot was made up by its suspense. This is what kept me reading. The multiple stories scattered throughout the book did seem to come together towards the end. As a reader, you are invested in the protagonist (in this case, Zachary Ezra Rawlins). You keep rooting for him as he crashes through the parallel universes trying to make sense of what is happening around him. For me, I wanted to know if he would eventually find the man lost in time (I did realize quite early on that this was Simon), and it was quite rewarding when he did. Although I did not understand what happened after.

Cons

• The writing – yes, her descriptions are excellent. However Morgenstern rather annoyingly slows down the pace of the story when it is at its climax. I mean it’s okay if it happened once or twice, but EVERY SINGLE TIME a truth bomb is dropped the story moves at a snail’s pace. And it’s super frustrating because you want to fill in the information gaps and not read about the minute details.
• Plot – 300 pages into the story and you feel like the pieces of the puzzle are finally coming together. A hundred pages later your eyes are blinded by the golden honey from the Starless Sea and you wonder what the hell just happened. In all fairness, I think Morgenstern needs a better editor. Her ideas are great, her writing is excellent; it’s just that it’s not pieced together properly.
• Characters – I found it rather frustrating to keep track of the characters in the story as they aren’t who they say they are. It’s only towards the end of the story that they reveal the true names of the characters. For instance it’s only in page 469 it is announced that Mirabel is actually the story sculptor. The role of the story sculptor however, mentioned at this point in the story maybe long forgotten given the amount of detail in the descriptions. Hence, at times it feels like you are reading a story about faceless people walking aimlessly across parallel universes.

This book falls under the speculative fiction genre; or as I call it the ‘what if’ genre. This is my first time reading a story with elements of fantasy under this genre. Speculative fiction generally falls under the science fiction umbrella, and looking at it from a literary point of view, it is quite brilliant how Morgenstern has experimented with magical elements in this genre.

Final thoughts

I really wanted to wholeheartedly enjoy this book. But I couldn’t. It was too long and too cumbersome to read. I found myself teetering towards a reading slump, but somehow managed to push myself through. The effort in the end was draining. Alas, like I said before, the book needs a better editor.

Overall rating: 3/5

Fact box
Author: Erin Morgenstern
Release date: 5th November, 2019
Genre: Speculative fiction, fantasy