Review: 'The Starless Sea' by Erin Morgenstern
Pub. Date: 8/6/2020
Publisher: Vintage
When Zachary Rawlins stumbles across a strange book hidden in his university library it leads him on a quest unlike any other. Its pages entrance him with their tales of lovelorn prisoners, lost cities and nameless acolytes, but they also contain something impossible: a recollection from his own childhood.
Determined to solve the puzzle of the book, Zachary follows the clues he finds on the cover – a bee, a key and a sword. They guide him to a masquerade ball, to a dangerous secret club, and finally through a magical doorway created by the fierce and mysterious Mirabel. This door leads to a subterranean labyrinth filled with stories, hidden far beneath the surface of the earth.
When the labyrinth is threatened, Zachary must race with Mirabel, and Dorian, a handsome barefoot man with shifting alliances, through its twisting tunnels and crowded ballrooms, searching for the end of his story.
You are invited to join Zachary on the starless sea: the home of storytellers, story-lovers and those who will protect our stories at all costs.
While I enjoyed many aspects of The Starless Sea, it did not make for an entirely pleasurable reading experience. I have been utterly gripped by books, recently, and yet I had to slog through this one, forcing myself to continue, to keep going. For a novel that is meant to be a love story to story-telling, story-telling feels like a drag. I frequently found myself thinking of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's books and how his writing is infused with the love of story-telling, with the desire to protect story-telling, but how he never sacrifices his own story to those urges. Each book in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books-series has its own plot, its own drive, its own characters. In short, Zafon never let the meta-narrative take over the main narrative. In The Starless Sea I occasionally felt that I was not reading a novel but rather a set of musings on story-telling, a set of literary tales and experiments with characters who were just chess-pieces. This could have been absolutely fascinating in its own right, but it doesn't work if it is billed as a narrative novel.
The Starless Sea starts of brilliantly, with the slow unraveling of a literary mystery. Zachary Ezra Rawlins finds a book, Sweet Sorrows, and discovers one of his childhood memories is a part of the book. So begins his hunt for more information, which takes him to a masquerade ball in Manhattan. As things get curiouser and curiouser, Zachary steps through a magical doorway that takes him to a Harbor of the Starless Sea. And that is only the start, the first 100 pages. Each chapter about Zachary's story is, initially, followed by a tale from Sweet Sorrows, or from other mysterious books he encounters. Each of these tales helps build the larger world, I guess, but it also takes away from Zachary. I couldn't really connect to him, even though he is written as a character that should appeal to me: fortune-teller mother, love for fiction, studying video games, friendly, kind, has a favourite drink. The interruption of these other tales also means that as the "story" of The Starless Sea builds, Zachary very much just becomes an element of it, as do all the other characters. His potential romance with Dorian becomes a plot device that seems to rely on insta-love, since a romance is required in the ending of the story. Because "ending" the story is what The Starless Sea is about. Stories must come to an end, yes, so new tales can be told, so a story can be savoured as a whole. But Morgenstern herself seems to be a fan of open endings, so as we spend the last 100/200 pages chasing towards an ending, plenty of threads are left loose enough for ambiguity. Usually I am a big fan of ambiguous and open endings, but if you're going to tell me how important it is for things to end, then do end them.
I very much wanted, and still kinda want, to read The Night Circus but since The Starless Sea seemed like such a love letter to reading I decided to go with it first. And now I kind of regret it, because I'm still not sure what I read. What must be said is that Erin Morgenstern absolutely excels at descriptions and beautiful concepts. The Starless Sea, the Harbor, the masquerade ball, its all described exquisitely and in such detail I could picture it easily. The concept of the Starless Sea, of the societies that swirl around it and the mysteries that make it what it is, those were all fascinating. The tales that interrupt Zachary's story are all intriguing as well. But these elements do not a plot make. I feel like what we have here is the inverse of the Piranesi-experience. I know exactly what the story or plot of Piranesi was, what events took place and what actions the main characters took. I understand the motivations and drives of the various characters. The message or theme of Piranesi is harder to determine, it is open to the reader, to the time of day. In The Starless Sea I'm not entirely sure who Zachary exactly is and what he wants, why he is down there. As a bibliophile of course I understand the draw of an underground realm of story-telling, but as a reader I need more than aesthetic. While I understand Morgenstern's theme or message, namely that stories must end for new ones to begin, that stories cannot be gatekept and must be open to all, that story-telling has an unimaginable power, I couldn't tell you exactly what in The Starless Sea shows that.
I'm aware all of this sounds quite negative and I am still kind of struggling with my own thoughts on it. There is disappointment there, because I was hoping for a story, not just words about stories. What does it say that my favourite parts of The Starless Sea were the short tales interjected into Zachary's story, before they became interwoven into the larger narrative? That even as we reached the end and things ramped up I still had to force myself keep reading? Perhaps The Starless Sea works better upon re-reading, when more details shine through, but my first reading doesn't exactly encourage me to do so. I will still be keeping an eye out for a copy of The Night Circus, but I'm not exactly making it a priority.
I give this novel...
3 Universes.
While there are beautiful moments in this novel, passages of stunning, descriptive writing, overall I didn't enjoy the reading experience as much as I should have. The Starless Sea is meant to be a book for bibliophiles, but it seems to trip itself up with its concepts and ideas.
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