Review: The Night Circus

I was extremely excited to receive The Night Circus as a proof, but I think my reason for this was precisely and only because it's a proof - always very exciting to be able to see a book before it comes out in the shops.

Should anyone come to my shop, though, I certainly wouldn't recommend this. This is one of the worst books I think I've ever read - not only is it not to my taste, but it's just awful - and that's an objective statement. Several things in particular:

1. Present Tense. Morgenstern only ever uses the present tense. Only the one tense. Of all the tenses out there - only ever present. And yes, it is incredibly annoying. With multiple shifts in time and space, I might expect her to develop a slightly more sophisticated sense of time past and time future - but no. Concomitantly, her use of verbs really isn't that exciting. There are lots 'is's; Morgenstern, please let your verbs do the work for you.

2. Her paragraphs are, typically, one sentence long, meaning that most of the book (note: I cannot bring myself to finish it) reads like the BBC news website. One one page alone, I counted 13 paragraphs. It's all very disjointed; I think she's trying to create a sense of the eiree and fantastical, but hasn't quite got there. Had Morgenstern put all those sentences together and tried to write a complete paragraph, I think other reviewers might have picked up on her inability to write and actually, over the course of a paragraph, develop at least one interesting idea (I don't think this book is aimed at people who like interesting ideas).

3. Having a magician father called Prospero and a daughter who frequently uses the stage name Miranda, and her not having a mother - this is hardly original.  I don't mind writers taking (as Eliot might suggest, stealing) from other writers, but at least please do it with some sort of inventiveness. Copying outright is an insult to your readership (whenever Prospero and Miranda do appear, I'm just reminded of all the people who've used that idea better).

4. Whilst generally I am a fan of shifts in time and space (this is broadly a fin-de-siecle novel, but only in the sense that it's set at the right time - Morgenstern hardly imbues her narrative with any sense of urgency or chaos or drama) these are pretty naff ones. And obvious too. And, somewhat paradoxically, they are all the same. If it wasn't printed at the top of each page (of course, the chapters are each about two pages long) I wouldn't have a clue which time/space dimension we were in, because they are so totally bland and there's no sense of character to each one.

5. Morgenstern is highly unoriginal. I'm not accusing her of any sort of plaigarism at all, but J L Rowling of course invented 'Gryffindor' so what's a 'gryphon' doing in this novel? It's just a bit too similar for me to feel comfortable with.

As I said at the start, this fantasy cum chick lit cum trash thing isn't really my jazz anyway, but I was hoping to be taken away by this - I read far too much of the same stuff, and I was really hoping to have a new genre exposed to me, something that would show me a new way to read. Perhaps that was being naive - I'd have settled for 'good', at the least. But this is so utterly awful, it really should offend anyone with two brain cells. Niffenegger is actually quoted on the front of here, and I was thinking of reading The Time Traveller's Wife after my course - but if N thinks this is good, I'd hate to read her stuff. (Two birds, one stone - most certainly killed already - thanks for that, Harvill Secker.)