"The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern

“The circus arrives without warning.”

Summary:

"The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern is a novel about a mysterious circus that appears only at night and offers a series of fantastical experiences. The story revolves around two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who are competing in a magical competition and begin to fall in love. However, they soon discover that the competition may have deadly consequences.

Review:

This book reached into my heart and drew out the most beautiful coalescence within my imagination. Despite age or how your life panned out, The Night Circus will bring out a childhood dream you never knew you had, and enrapt you in a story of star-crossed lovers and an enigmatic game of complex chess hidden within the deceptive tents of the circus.

Indeed, there are moments in the book struck with tedium. There are no action-packed scenes of violence and death, but there is beauty: enthralling, alluring beauty of words that provides a tangential route to the circus.

“When put that way, it sounds rather like magic doesn’t it?”

The overall message of the book is to pursue passions, live in the present and embrace love, but what truly captivated me was the portrayal of the wonder and mystery in magic.

As a city girl who only knows of the outside world through travelling, I’ve never been fortunate enough to view any circus before, nor have I experienced an illusion being displayed right before my very eyes. So when reading, fiction seemed to blend with reality and I wondered about the chances of magic truly being present in our world, simply hidden between so-called ‘tricks’ or ‘stages’.

“They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, and I am simply a bird in their midst.”

Perhaps I will never find out. Everyone has their own story and world in their heads, and although words overlap and amalgamate, there are stories that will never cross paths and truths that will never be discovered.

Knowledge is in a constant state of being and non-being, we might know something, but that knowledge is fleeting and fragile, easily broken, overcome or disproved; and maybe that is for the better. As Socrates said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Though I most likely won’t discover that magic exists, I will also most likely never know that it doesn’t. However, if I do somehow stumble across the answer to the existence of magic, I like to think that the odds are in my favour.