It demands that its readers interpret it in an older way the way we read The Faerie Queene. Terry Pratchett, if not the king then definitely the senior jester of the fantasy royal court, famously advised that if you’re going to write about flying pigs then you ought to consider the traffic disruptions. Photograph: Michel Urtado/RMN/Grand Palaisīut this is the very opposite of the world-building logic we normally expect of fantasy writing. When we look at the 16th-century tapestries of The Lady and the Unicorn, we all know the unicorn is a metaphor, not a real creature with a stable and its own supply of apples.ĭetail from The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. The novel reads like panel after panel of mythic illustrations: it expects a certain acceptance of unlikely images, and that’s hardly an unfamiliar mode of thought. Nobody explains why the Starless Sea is honey, or how a honey sea isn’t full of dead flies. There is no logic that binds these lovely set piece tableaux. On Dorian’s back is a gorgeous tattoo, the story of the Owl King. At the mysterious Collector’s Club, Allegra assembles the doorhandles of every door to the lower world she has dismantled, and displays them in mobiles hanging from the ceilings. Deep down in the hidden world is an ice statue of Fate, and tiny ships stand frozen on her dress. Although the core of the novel is a simple story about a young man who wants to know his fate, these other strands make such a complex tapestry that the images blur and warp.Įach image is assuredly beautiful. Sometimes these are self-contained fairytales, sometimes snippets of other characters’ backstories, or even the accounts of nightmares written down by a sailor who folds them into stars and casts them away. The Starless Sea, though, is 500 pages long, and Zachary’s story intertwines with many others.

Erin Morgenstern’s second novel arrives eight years after her bestselling debut The Night Circus, and summarised like this, the plot is clear.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern