The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
There is a world accessible through hard-to-find doors that contains your story.
It has been a while, so we needed to start back with a bang. A great book.
This is a book about a man, a book, and a choice regarding a door.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student studying video games, but he loves stories. He goes to the library often, and he reads many books. He takes them off the shelf when they speak to him.
One day, he picks up a book called Sweet Sorrows that has no author. It’s not even properly in the library system when he checks it out. And in that book, he finds his own story.
When he was young, he walked down an alley and he saw a painted door on a wall that always had graffiti on it. The door looked real. He wanted to open it, but he convinced himself that it wasn’t really a door and he walked away. The next day he decided it was, and tried to go back for it, but it had been painted over.
The story said it was a door to the Starless Sea, and that he had missed this chance- but implied that there would be another chance for him through a mysterious Not Yet.
So Zachary chases this idea of ‘not yet’ to a masquerade ball in New York, and then into the secret Collecting Club, and finally into the heart of the mystery itself.
But this is too simplistic a storyline. The book is told with multiple overlapping stories. It starts properly with the story of a pirate, and a girl who rescues him. And then a woman who becomes an acolyte and sacrifices her tongue so that she might hear stories instead of create her own. It has other stories, too, of a young girl who slays the Owl King, dolls in a dollhouse in a paper town, and a tale of a man who got lost in the labyrinth of the Harbor of the Starless Sea.
The magic of this book is that it is many books woven into one, and all of the stories, no matter how disparate, collide at the end in a satisfyingly messy way.
The characters are complex. Motivations are not always made clear, and even personalities are fluid- particularly so when people’s names are constantly shifting and never the same (a character names himself Dorian and also Mr. Smith, depending on the situation, and neither is his real name- which is left unknown). There’s always an edge of uncertainty, a certain guarantee that faith is required, in order to make the next leap, which we make with the main protagonist as he progresses. He knows no more than we do, though everyone around him is frustratingly well informed and not always willing to share.
The shifting storylines at first are a bit disorientating. Holding so many stories in your head is difficult, but as the book progresses, it gets easier. Similar motifs and images repeat, and characters start to come back into the narrative, and it’s simpler to remember each one. I am in awe at the author’s absolute mastery to weave together so many separate narratives into a cohesive whole.
Books are central to the story. As someone who loves books passionately and holds the stories in my head as truth while I read them, this book played right into my heart. There is a whole place that is a temple to stories here, with the tales that are actually the past and the future, sometimes written in metaphor, living in the walls, or existing in pages.
The story has strong queer storylines, but they aren’t distracting. This book excels in many ways where other stories with queer narratives falter: the gay relationships and other relationships exist, and are part of the motivations of the characters, but are not the sole motivations or personalities of the characters. Each person has dimension and exists outside of their partner. Also, the romance is never the ‘focus’ of the book- this isn’t a Court of Thorns and Roses, if you get my gist (and if you don’t, I will leave it there- glad you haven’t heard of that particular book; good for you, you’ve escaped the media heyday).
I don’t think I recall ever reading a book that was written in this way, or about anything like this. The closest I can say is that there are books also about guarding secret libraries like Olivie Blake’s Atlas Six (which I did NOT like, despite its strong premise, as it was too much like the book mentioned above) and books about doors to new places like The Ten Thousand Doors of January (which I did like, and would recommend: but it had a more historical fiction flavor and was not the same exactly as this one in terms of its scope).
Finally, for those who always love a good cat, there are many cats throughout the book as guardians and as friends, including a particular Persian with a squashed face.
Rating: 5/5 stars.
