The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern
I absolutely loved this book. It was one of those books that completely pulls you into its world, mesmerising and magical - and it was so captivating that when I finished it I was genuinely disappointed that there was no more to read. I'd spent a good few weeks immersed in its world, and I wasn't ready to leave it yet. Erin Morgenstern's debut The Night Circus enthralled me because its fantasy concept was so imaginative, and The Starless Sea strikes gold again for exactly the same reason. It's a complete flight of fancy, and you end up wishing it was real.
Here is where I attempt to succinctly describe a book that defies simple summary. Morgenstern's own editor apparently once said that trying to sum up The Starless Sea was like pouring a bottle of wine into a shot glass - and I'd concur. This book overflows with rich ideas, characters, places, plot-lines and internal connections, and to reduce it to a matter of sentences does not do justice to Morgenstern's imagination. But to give just a flavour of what lies within these pages, I will say that The Starless Sea is a story about stories. In the opening chapters, grad student Zachary Ezra Rawlins takes out a mysterious unmarked book from his university library. It's a story about a series of people who discover a magical subterranean land of libraries floating on an enchanted ocean - and one of the characters is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Zachary himself. The book's underground-library-world is real, and the rest of The Starless Sea is all about what happens when Zachary goes there.
I have always enjoyed literature that plays with its own literariness - poems that probe at what poetry is for, plays-within-plays that acknowledge their own artifice, novels whose narrators are self-aware. The Starless Sea sparkled with that meta quality. It's more than just a book about books; Morgenstern's story invites you to think, really think, about what a story is and what it does. What does it mean to be living inside a story? Would living in a narrative limit our freedom, or give us comfort, confidence, safety? When is a story real? What makes it so? And does a story have to be a book, or could it come in a different form?
Zachary's status as a university student elegantly made space for such discussion points to be raised explicitly: early in the novel we see him in seminars exploring the narratives of video games, and he thinks quite philosophically about what he reads in books without it seeming out of character. But Morgenstern invites the very same discussions implicitly too, by building her book out of other books. Throughout The Starless Sea we are treated to interludes from the books the characters are reading - the one Zachary takes out of his university library and several others. We read everything from folklore to diary entries to torn-out pages of fiction, and connections abound between these books and the characters and events of the novel itself. It's such an intricate web of literary self-reference. Clever stuff.
What I most loved about this book, though, was its ideas. Morgenstern's fantasy world bursts with exciting, imaginative, playful and delightful ideas about stories. She grows storytelling into a magical concept that reaches far beyond the written word - or even the spoken word. At one point Zachary eats a story; it's like a sweet from a jar, and the flavours conjure images of brave knights and broken hearts. There's a story sculptor in this underground world, who weaves tales into her artefacts. There's a story-map, a story-dollhouse, a whispering hallway that sows fragments of myth in your ear as you pass by. Characters can tell things into existence. It's all so magical, so whimsical, and as a reader you just want to be there experiencing all these things for yourself.
World-building of this level of detail and richness requires attentiveness. The Starless Sea isn't really a book you can dip in and out of, or paddle at the edge of: it needs (and deserves) full immersion. To call it 'confusing' wouldn't be fair, because it is superbly crafted and it hangs together very well, but it has so many layers and elements that as a reader you have to hold quite a lot in your head in one go. The many connections and revelations are astonishing - but only if you can remember all the fragments you've been drip-fed alongside the main narrative. Relatedly, you have to trust that everything Morgenstern shows you is there for a reason. Many of the interludes seem completely unconnected and often a bit weird, but every piece of the jigsaw eventually slots into its place. You've got be willing to get lost in this book before you can find your way to clarity.
Zachary himself is lost for a long time - he doesn't know where he is or even what he is trying to achieve for a great many chapters, and all he can do is soak up the enchanting magical world around him and let the story happen. As readers it pays to do the same. If we can, like Zachary, suspend our disbelief and let The Starless Sea sweep us away, then the experience is worth every ounce of obscurity. Even when we don't yet know exactly where Morgenstern is taking us, we can absorb every nuance of her amazing world whilst we're on our way.
Overall, The Starless Sea was captivating, imaginative, rich, and beautiful. It treated the subject of 'stories' with a winning combination of playfulness, fondness and deep reverence - a love letter to storytelling itself. If you're a lover of books, read it.
