Erin Morgenstern, 2011
the seventieth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Shauna
I went into this book with an irrational bias against it.
See, to
my knowledge the College Board has only officially released
one AP Literature multiple choice section, and the
third-party practice tests floating around are of varying
quality, to be charitable.
I’ve spent years putting out feelers in hopes of getting a
contract to write a bunch of these myself so that I can give my
students practice tests I can actually endorse, but even though that
sort of thing was a big part of my job in the ’00s, such work
has been harder to come by in today’s wintry economic
climate.
But I’ve reached the point that I’m thinking of just
writing them anyway, for no pay, because it’s just that annoying
to be reviewing a practice test with a student only to discover
that, oh, the reason you missed #17 is that the answer key is
wrong.
Sometimes the answer key could not be right because all four
choices are incorrect.
Sometimes a correct answer could not be added to the list of
choices because the question is phrased in such a way that it
is unanswerable.
One passage that pops up all too often is followed by quite
possibly the single worst set of reading comprehension questions
I have ever encountered: nearly all the
questions are like this.
And it’s not just that the credited responses are
wrong—they’re wrong in ways that undermine my
teaching points.
I say that, in my thirty-two years teaching this exam, I have never
seen an answer choice phrased in such-and-such a way be correct, so
when you encounter that phrasing you can automatically mark it
wrong… and time after time, this set of questions presents
these sorts of phrasings as correct.
Don’t go beyond the text on a standardized test, I caution my
students, and this set of questions presents credited response after
credited response that is based on wild eisegesis.
It got to the point that I started telling my students that if they
ever run across a passage credited to Erin Morgenstern, they should
just skip it.
“Seriously, it’d just be a waste of time for both of
us,” I explain.
“Ugh. I hate The Night Circus.”
But again, this is irrational. It’s not Erin Morgenstern’s fault that the questions that follow that excerpt from her book are so awful. And the book itself turns out to be fine! It reminded me quite a bit of The Prestige by Christopher Priest (UK), as we once again pay a visit to the turn of the twentieth century to witness a rivalry between two magicians. One of them even accidentally turns himself into a ghost, much like in The Prestige. The difference is that in The Night Circus, the magicians battle by proxy. One adopts a boy from an orphanage to train to serve as his champion, while the other puts forward his own daughter. And, c’mon, even coming into the book with a bias, how long was I really going to resist a story about a magical girl learning to harness her superpowers? Here she is at eighteen, auditioning for a job as an illusionist—using the old trick of passing off real magic as stage magic:
“What manner of costume do you require?” Celia asks.
“We have a color scheme to work with, dear,” Mme. Padva says. “Or lack thereof, rather. Nothing but black and white. Though on you a full black gown might be a bit too funereal.”
“I see,” says Celia.
Mme. Padva stands and moves down the aisle to where Chandresh is pacing. She whispers something in his ear and he turns to consult with her, taking his eyes off of Celia for a moment.
No one is watching her except Marco as she stands perfectly still on the stage, waiting patiently. And then, very slowly, her gown begins to change.
Starting at the neckline and seeping down like ink, the green silk is turning a murky, midnight black. Marco gasps. Chandresh and Mme. Padva turn at the sound just in time to witness the creeping black fade into snow-bright white at the bottom of the skirt, until all evidence that the gown was ever green is gone.
“Well, that makes my job much easier,” Mme. Padva says, though she cannot conceal the delight in her eyes. “Though I think perhaps your hair is too light a shade.”
Celia shakes her head and her brown curls deepen in hue to a near black, as glossy and ebony as the wings of her raven.
“Marvelous,” Chandresh says, almost to himself.
Celia simply smiles.
Unfortunately, for me the book peaked pretty early, as the book turns out to be rooted not in theme or plot or character but in setting: much as the heart of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory lies in its tour of the titular factory’s wide variety of marvelous rooms, the heart of The Night Circus lies in its tour of the titular circus’s wide variety of marvelous tents. Here’s a brief example:
The sign proclaims something called the Ice Garden, and Celia smiles at the addendum below which contains an apology for any thermal inconvenience.
Despite the name, she is not prepared for what awaits her inside the tent.
It is exactly what the sign described. But it is so much more than that.
There are no stripes visible on the walls, everything is sparkling and white. She cannot tell how far it stretches, the size of the tent obscured by cascading willows and twisting vines.
The air itself is magical. Crisp and sweet in her lungs as she breathes, sending a shiver down to her toes that is caused by more than the forewarned drop in temperature.
There are no patrons in the tent as she explores, circling alone around trellises covered in pale roses and a softly bubbling, elaborately carved fountain.
And everything, save for occasional lengths of white silk ribbon strung like garlands, is made of ice.
Curious, Celia picks a frosted peony from its branch, the stem breaking easily.
But the layered petals shatter, falling from her fingers to the ground, disappearing in the blades of ivory grass below.
When she looks back at the branch, an identical bloom has already appeared.
While the beginning of the novel had suggested that the engine driving the story would be the contest between the magicians’ proxies, that contest ends up taking the form of creating rival attractions for the circus, and we get hundreds of pages going on about how enchanting and wonderful the circus is and how everyone loves it and a whole cult of fans follows it around and it enriches the lives of even the most casual visitors and etc. and etc. We like ourselves, don’t we. Gradually the duel evolves into a romance, as the contestants, drafted as little children into a decades-long battle to the death, try to figure out ways to escape and be together… but the love story didn’t really land for me. The idea is that making magical circus attractions is their love language, and that we will be so enraptured by Morgenstern’s descriptions of those attractions that we will fall in love with both of them. But while Celia is charming enough in her scenes, I found Marco off-putting enough as a person that a floral popsicle wasn’t going to win me over. The secondary romance between Bailey and Poppet works a little better, primarily because our introduction to Poppet through Bailey’s eyes is one of the most effective sequences in the book. But, again, that’s chapter ten out of seventy-five. This book peaks early!
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