19. The Starless Sea

By Erin Morgenstern

Someone on Librarianologist raved about The Starless Sea and had me at  “secret, magical library”.  I have yet to read The Night Circus, but thought I’d see if The Starless Sea was available as an inter-library loan.  Sure enough, it was.  I figured a library loan was safer than finding my own copy as I’ve been wary of schmaltzy fantasies ever since The House in the Cerulean Sea.   

Despite my suspicions, I got sucked into The Starless Sea quite quickly.  I very much enjoyed the first two-thirds.  Each chapter alternated between a fantastical tale and the “real” world, in which we follow the life of Zachary Ezra Rawlins, an introverted graduate student in Vermont.  One day at the university library, Zach comes across a mysterious book called Sweet Sorrows.  It contains a collection of stories (including a few that the reader has already read), but the book reveals neither author nor publishing info.
 
Zack is then gobsmacked to discover there’s a story about him as a young boy inside the book he’s holding.  The text describes in perfect detail the day he found a painted door in the alley. This boy was also tempted to open it, but for some reason, he talked himself out of it and went home.  The next day, the boy went back to the door, but it had been painted over.
 
Zachary then proceeds to the front desk and asks a friendly librarian for more info about Sweet Sorrows.  The book was apparently donated by The Keating Foundation via the private collection of J. S. Keating.  From there, Zach embarks on an investigation to uncover the mystery surrounding the origins of the book.  Zach’s sleuthing leads him to the annual Algonquin Literary masked ball in Manhattan.  Coincidentally, the event takes place in a matter of days. Zach’s curiosity is great enough that he takes the train and books a hotel near the venue.  Zach eventually meets Mirabel and Dorian, and not long after, he ends up in the secret, magical, underground library, which is the Harbour to The Starless Sea.
 
At this point, I was very much drawn into Zach’s adventure. I was also enjoying the magical world of the library and meta-ness of it all, as Morgenstern makes many references to storytelling, as well as literary references to famous novels.  There’s a passage where one of the “story” characters, Simon, picks up a book that is only described as “a heavy volume with footnotes and a raven on its cover”.  He finds himself “so drawn into its tale of two magicians in England that he loses track of time.”  Clearly, a reference to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell!

[Another book I've read that was also influenced by Clarke’s epic novel was The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019).  The Starless Sea (2019) is better written than Ten Thousand Doors, but it’s still a pale imitation of Clarke’s masterpiece!]

Later, Morgenstern references another famous novel, this time by Donna Tart, in the bar scene that unfolds from Dorian’s POV.  He’s sitting in a corner, pretending to read The Secret History while spying on Zach and his friends.

      He has quietly longed for relationships with the type of intensity of those within its pages, regardless of the bacchanalian murderousness, but never found it and has now reached an age where he expects he never will. He has read the book seven times already but he does not tell the waitress that…

He thinks the group he is looking at does not have the same level of camaraderie as the characters in his hand but there’s something there. Like each of them individually is capable of the intensity if not the murder but this is not the right grouping. Not quite. He watches their table, watches the hand gestures and the arriving food, and watches something make all three of them laugh and he smiles despite himself and then hides his smile in his drink.

After Zach becomes a guest at the Library and meets the Keeper, the narrative starts getting more convoluted. Around the halfway point, more characters are introduced (as well as many cats, who inhabit the library).  We gradually learn how the various characters are connected to one another in the space-time continuum. But The Starless Sea also starts to gradually divorce itself from any logic and devolves into complete whimsy.  I was curious to see how the author was going to wrap everything together.   Then it just seemed to fall apart.  I was very disappointed.  Even after I had finished, I needed to refer to the plot summary to keep track of what had happened. 

I also had many questions that the narrative never really explored nor addressed.  Why were Miriam and Dorian at the annual Algonquin Literary costume ball?  Does the library contain all the stories of the universe, real AND fabricated?  How did Fate and Time meet, how did they get separated?  So Simon is the father of Mirabel?  At what point did she become Fate?  Why is Mirabel’s hair pink?  What do bees have to do with storytelling?  Why is the starless sea made of honey?  Why was Zach the one chosen to find the lost man again?  So the bees were The Kitchen.  The bees can make almost anything.  That’s kinda… silly?
 
For an almost 500 page novel, the characters were surprisingly underdeveloped. Some reviewers found Zach too passive and thinly drawn.  I had recently watched A Quiet Place: Day One, so all I had to do was picture Joseph Quinn as Zachary Ezra Rawlins and voila, instant likablility and empathy!

So Dorian, he was supposed to be a hot, older man.  Like Viggo Mortensen. We knew very little about Dorian, except one thing, that he used to work for Allegra, the leader of The Collector's Club who's been trying to destroy all the doors to the Library because she's trying to protect it for some reason that I forgot.  We never learn what he was like before he joined Allegra's secret society nor what Mirabel had said to Dorian that ultimately led him to renounce his calling.  This seemed to be a significant moment, especially in a novel about storytelling, but this story was never explored.
 
Zach and Dorian would've made a cute couple, but the two characters barely spent any time together, yet they seemed to be inextricably drawn to one another.  Why?  And little is known about The Keeper and Fate’s history together.  I didn’t really care about their relationship so much, but I was more interested in Zach’s relationship with his mom.  All we know is that he’s the son of a fortune teller.  Kat and Zach’s mom had more interaction and development than Zach did with his own mother!
 
There were often long gaps before we returned to a character.  The bar scene involving Zach, Kat and a third woman was near the beginning at page 44.  When the narrative returns to the bar that night, it's told from Dorian’s POV, it was more than 200 pages later.  Kat’s POV came about at page 391 (Interlude V) when we read her secret journal entries.  The novel is just shy of 500 pages.  Kat’s POV was actually quite interesting, but by then, it was too late.  The author should have included her journal entries much earlier on in the narrative and I found it odd that she didn’t.  Surprised that an editor didn’t catch that.
 
There were some nicely written passages, but at some point, The Starless Sea felt like a jumbled mess of nicely written passages.  Take this case for example.  In the “real” world, Zach had been gone for weeks since he left Vermont to attend the Algonquin Masked Ball in NY.  Kat had been trying to convince the police that her friend is missing, and trying to retrace Zach’s steps before he disappeared.  The passage below is poignant in the way it captured their fleeting friendship:

     “How well do you know him?” they asked me, over lukewarm police-station tea in an environmentally unfriendly disposable cup with the teabag in it, trying to be more than leaf-flavored water and failing.
     How well does anyone know anyone? We had a handful of overlapping classes and all the game people know each other more or less. We hung out sometimes at bars or by the crappy coffee machine in the media building lounge. We talked about games and cocktails and books and being only children and not minding being only children even though people seemed to think we should.
     I wanted to tell them that I knew Z well enough to ask him for a favor and to return it. I knew which cocktails on a bar menu he would order and how if there wasn’t anything interesting he’d get a sidecar. I knew we had similar views on how games can be so much more than just shooting things, that games can be anything, including shooting things. Sometimes he would go dancing with me on Tuesday nights because we both liked it better when the clubs weren’t so crowded and I knew he was a really good dancer but he had to have at least two drinks before you could get him out on the floor. I knew he read a lot of novels and he was a feminist and if I saw him around campus before 8 a.m. it was probably because he hadn’t slept yet. I knew I felt like we were right at that place where you go from being regular friends to help-you-move-dead-bodies friends but we weren’t quite there yet, like we needed to do one more side quest together and earn a few more mutual approval points and then it would be something a little more comfortable, but we hadn’t figured out our friendship dynamic entirely.
     “We were friends,” I told them and it sounded wrong and right.

But Kat and Zach never saw each other again.  There were many half-formed or under-explored relationships throughout The Starless Sea.  Zach and Mirabel also became friends in a way.  At one point, after the library had been destroyed, Mirabel appeared alive if somewhat dishevelled.  She enlists Zach to aid in her search for the lost man (Simon).  Yet they get separated early on.  I understand that Morgenstern is trying to subvert conventions/expectations of a fantasy adventure, but come on.  Why spend so much effort setting up Zach and Mirabel to embark on a quest.  It’s frustrating and just not fair to the reader.
 
I was quite involved in the narrative for hundreds of pages, which seemed to be building up to something, and then to have a story that at first seemed so cohesively imaginative, all disintegrate into whimsy, it felt like such a cop-out.  Instead of a world that made sense, it just seemed like anything goes.  Like when Zach found himself rowing in an ocean made of paper confetti.  Like what?  Is this subverting a genre, or just being whimsically lazy?  It’s much, much harder to create a fantastical work of fiction that has logic and cohesion.  At some point, I didn’t much care what each character signified.  So Zach drowned in the Starless Sea…?  Oh, too bad.  Wait, he came back?  Whatevs.  By then, my faith in having a satisfying conclusion had been shattered and I just wanted it to end.
 
Still, I enjoyed most of The Starless Sea, but the denouement could go to hell for all I care!  The writing could have really benefited with another editing pass, especially for the final act!  I suspect that anticipation for the author’s follow-up to The Night Circus might have been a factor in the rush to publish.  Morgenstern is no Susanna Clarke nor Donna Tartt, but she’s still a damn good writer.  The first two-thirds of The Starless Sea was impressive enough for me to want to read The Night Circus.  It’ll be another library loan though!

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     “Where is everyone?” Zachary asks, the annoyance obvious in his voice but the Keeper does not look up from his writing.
     “You and I are here, your friend is in his room, Rhyme is likely watching him or attending to her duties, and I do not know Mirabel’s current location, she keeps her own counsel.”
     “That’s it?” Zachary asks. “There’s five of us and…cats?”
      “That is correct, Mister Rawlins,” the Keeper says. “Would you like a number for the cats? It might not be accurate, they are difficult to count.”
      “No, that’s okay,” Zachary says. “But where…where’d everyone go?”
     The Keeper pauses and looks up at him. He looks older, or sadder, Zachary can’t tell which. Maybe both.
     “If you are referring to our former residents, some left. Some died. Some returned to the places that they came from and others sought out new places and I hope that they found them. You are already acquainted with those of us who remain.”
     “Why do you remain?” Zachary asks.
      “I remain because it is my job, Mister Rawlins. My calling, my duty, my raison d’être. Why are you here?”
     Because a book said I was supposed to be, Zachary thinks. Because I’m worried about going back because of crazy ladies in fur coats who keep hands in jars. Because I haven’t figured out the puzzle yet even though I don’t know what the puzzle is.
     Because I feel more alive down here than I did up there.
     “I’m here to sail the Starless Sea and breathe the haunted air,” he says and the echoed statement earns a smile from the Keeper. He looks younger when he smiles.
     “I wish you the best of luck with that,” he says. “Is there anything else I might help you with?”