Under the Heading of Places I Wish Were Real

Sometimes I read a book that has such a strong sense of place that I feel literally transported there.  Sometimes this is a bad thing, like in Elie Weisel's Night Or A Thousand Splendid Sun's Afghanistan.  But sometimes it is a wondrous feeling, especially when the place in question is full of magic.  This is how I felt when I read the Narnia books for the first time, and frankly I'd still like to visit Caer Paravel and hang out with Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.  Erin Morgenstern, in her debut novel The Night Circus, creates just such a magical place in Le Cirque du Reves, the setting for her imaginary game of one-upsmanship between two talented illusionists.

Celia and Marco are just children when their training begins.  Their teachers, Celia's father Prospero and Marco's guardian Alexander, are old rivals who have, over the years, challenged each other to a game.  The "game" involved pitting their pupils against each other in a challenge like no other.  Their task is to manipulate the physical world as a test of their skills, and their playing field is a circus-a magical circus that is only open at night. But things do not go as the old masters planned when Celia and Marcos stop seeing each other as adversaries and start seeing each other as something else entirely.

Le Cirque du Reves as imagined by Morganstern is a place full of amazing people doing amazing things.  There are the usual acts of contortionist and fortune teller, but there are also tents full of things that defy reality-a garden made exquisitely out of ice, a cloud maze that allows you to literally climb into the heavens, a wishing tree where wishes really come true.  Even if the book was nothing but a long description of the marvelous things at the circus I would have read it and been happy.  But there was also this really intriguing, mysterious story going on that had my interest piqued.  While I did not get all of the answers that I was hoping for about exactly what was going on, the fact that I am still thinking about the story and what it might have meant shows what an affect it had on my imagination.

I don't usually read other reviews of a book before I write my own, but I was curious about how other people were affected by the story.  I was not surprised to find that the New York Review of Books was not exactly over the moon about this book-I imagine if does not meet their rather high-falutin' definition of literary.  But the other reviewers I read all felt similarly to me.  For a first novel, this book does a pretty good job with evoking mood and setting up a solid plot structure.  Character development is oddly lacking, given the rich possibilities for the creation of a mythology to explain the enchanters and their pupils.  But unlike some of the other reviewers, I actually saw the circus itself as a character, or at least an extension of Marco and Celia.  I felt like a learned a lot about them through the kinds of creations they made for their customers.  I know that some readers may be put off by the non-linear narrative, but I didn't find it distracting at all, since each section is clearly marked, and there is no real jumping back and forth within sections, only between them.  One reviewer I read felt that the ending set up a sequel, but I'm not sure about that.  While the fate of the circus seemed rather open-ended, I was OK with it.  I like imagining the circus, traveling the world, appearing and disappearing like magic, delighting everyone who is lucky enough to discover it.

Queen of Sorcery, David Eddings

So a couple of weeks ago I posted a review of Pawn of Prophecy, the first book in David Edding's Belgariad series.  I talked about how it was a well-written fantasy series, with well-developed characters and well-paced action.  All the typical archetypes are there-the sorcerer, the witch, the warriors, the rogue.  It is an enjoyable journey in a sometimes dark fantastical world.

I just finished the second book in the series, that chronicles the further travels of Belgarath, Polgara, and Garion and their allies on their search for the orb.  As for my review of said book-I can only say...

ditto.

Who Were the Witches?

For someone as avowed in my atheism as I am, I have a hard-to-explain attraction to all things magic.  Perhaps it is something left over from my childhood, when Madeleine L'Engel and Terry Brooks were two of my favorite authors.  I've spent many hours immersed in the fantastical worlds of Tolkien and Donaldson and Gaiman-I love to get swept up in a world where the normal rules don't apply and a whole new mythology determines the actions of magical creatures.  Call it my inner geek-and I love her to the point of spending days playing RPGs like Final Fantasy.

It is a rare author that can combine the elements of the fantastic that I love with the "real world".  Michael Crichton did it in Timeline, and Neil Gaiman does it frequently in novels like Neverwhere and American Gods.  We can now add Katherine Howe to the list in her novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.  The book centers around  Connie Goodwin, a Phd. candidate at Harvard in American Colonial history.  Her mother, Grace, a New Age aura reader living in Arizona, asks Connie to clean out her grandmother's house and prepare it for sale.  Connie, who never even knew that the house existed, travels the 60 miles or so to Marblehead, Massachusetts and begins the arduous process of clearing out decades of dirt and detritus.  She arrives to find a small house, hidden away behind a tangle of vines and an overgrown garden.  She discovers, hidden in a family bible, a key with the name Deliverance Dane rolled up in the shaft.  So begins her journey into the history of her family, and into a world where witches and vernacular magic really exist.

The story is framed in the history of the Salem witch trials, a shameful period in early American History if ever there was one.  The author, through Connie, explains the various theories people have about the whys and wherefores of the panic, long seen to be the product of perceived threats by women in the community against the strict Puritan teachings and leadership of the time.  As Connie delves deeper into the history, and mystery, of her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's missing book of "recipes", she discovers a new theory-what if the magic was real?

The book is well-paced, with a satisfying balance of exposition and action.  The descriptions of New England, both the geography and the social history, are well done and evocative.  The author herself is a descendant of two of the accused women-one who survived the trials and one who did not.  As a result, she takes a pretty dim view of the tourist attraction nature of modern-day Salem.  Her disdain is initially shared by her character, but as the book progresses reason and wonder battle in Connie's mind, and one can imagine that Katherine Howe herself wishes that the magic were real.