A fantastical, impossibly swirling world
Once upon a time there was a story sculptor, writes Erin Morgenstern a quarter of the way through her second novel, The Starless Sea. She could almost be writing about herself. The fictional storyteller sculpted her stories from fleeting things ‘‘like snow or smoke or clouds’’, gone in moments: ‘‘Passionate love stories that were manipulated into the vacancies between raindrops . . . Fairy tales shaped from sand and seashells on shorelines slowly swept away by softly lapping waves.’’
The Starless Sea is largely set in a book-lined fantasyland deep below the earthly world, where dozens of candle-lit passages and caverns contain dozens more temporary doors, leading eventually to an underground sea without stars.
Books and their excerpts, typed on to paper ribbons or in star-shaped origami, are everywhere. Stories abound.
A book about stories must contain its own stories, and there are, indeed, numerous deftly told vignettes.
But the main story is, at best patchy, and not terribly compelling, stretched out over just
500 pages with all the other stories inserted within.
American college student and son of a fortuneteller, Zachary Ezra Rawlins (his name, in full, stylistically begins each chapter of his story) finds a mis-shelved, untitled book in the university library and, to his astonishment, finds it contains a story about him.
After a series of further strange occurrences, he is led by the mysterious Dorian in the middle of the night to New York’s Central Park, where a door suddenly appears in a stone archway.
Upon turning the handle, Zachary is pushed through the door by Dorian, and falls through a cascade of gold paint into a cavern.
He is alone. Dorian has disappeared. Three clues on the book cover lead him on – a bee, a key and a sword.
Dorian reappears several times in the underground labyrinth, each time drawing the gay Zachary closer to his affections, along with a cast of fantastical characters whose lineage is never certain, including the parliament of owls and the Owl King, the innumerable bees and their surging sea of honey, statues of stone and ice that come to life, and the anchoring Keeper, the one constant in this ever-changing other-world.
The setting is also ever-changing, creating something of a barrier: there are so many corridors, so many caverns, so many different locations Zachary finds himself in, that the intense detail each one is afforded becomes overwhelming. Additionally, Zachary’s general purposelessness fails to engage us in his quest.
There are brief nods to Alice through the Looking Glass, the Narnia books (wardrobes are stepped through), and several other literary references, but The Starless Sea lacks the engaging characters and purposeful quest that these classics provide.
Neither does it build a story compelling or interesting enough to suspend disbelief.
In the end, this fantastical, impossibly swirling underground world is hoist by its own petard: its whimsy is too fleeting, too much like wispy smoke or clouds to hold our attention. Lovers of fantasy may disagree.