Probably every book lover fantasises about a library we never have to leave, with deep armchairs to lose ourselves in, food brought up as we need, and a place to flop into an exhausted sleep. In Erin Morgenstern’s second novel, The Starless Sea , there is such a place, not quite a library, but a labyrinth far below the earth in which countless stories are preserved. It is furnished with silks, upholstery and felines reminiscent of Angela Carter’s opulent narratives. There are acolytes and guardians to keep it all in good trim, and a polite but suspicious Keeper ready to help you out, often literally. The trouble with this fantastic storehouse of stories is that you are often not able to leave.
All meta
But let’s start with the first story, about a pirate imprisoned and facing execution. The night before he is to be killed he escapes with the girl who has come to bring him food. She asks him to tell her a story. The pirate is a metaphor, we are told. It’s metaphors all the way down into the bowels of this novel. It’s all meta, for that matter. Because soon we read the story of a fortune teller’s son faced with a door painted on a wall, a door that disappears the next day. And in the next chapter it is that boy, now grown up, who finds this book and is reading it. Zachary Ezra Rawlings is this man — the reader and the read.
Zachary is a second-year masters’ student of Emerging Media Studies, writing his thesis on video games, but sometimes, before
the term really gets started, he likes to goof off and read a book. It is an idle visit to the library that puts in his hands the odd book that recounts his own story. That evening he meets friends for a chat on video games. But they stray into the differences between video games and digital novels, where you choose alternative arcs, and into what makes a story compelling. Change, says one student. Mystery. High stakes. Character growth. Romance. And so on. So by page 35 the reader has a good idea what’s to come.
That kind of scene makes one suspect all of this was mapped out at a creative writing workshop somewhere in Maine, but Erin Morgenstern is a crafty writer and knows how to send her hero out on a quest. Zachary is intrigued, persuaded, seduced and intimidated by various characters until he ends up again in front of a painted door. This time, he opens it.
Enter the labyrinth
The painted door that actually opens, and opens for one person but not another, is not a new idea. It is as classic as the Road Runner. From Through the Looking Glass and The Chronicles of Narnia we know there are entire worlds behind a deceptively flat surface. In fact, we know it each time we pick up a book, an object sometimes less than an inch deep that draws us into a parallel universe.
So it is with this novel. Morgenstern packs in what look like one-off tales that ultimately fit into each other. One is the exquisite fable of the Sun and the Moon meeting each other in a place far from the eyes of mankind. Another is the story of the key collector who gathers lost keys and one day disappears.
Once Zachary begins wandering in the harbour on the Starless Sea, which is where the painted door leads him, he does not just explore, he intervenes. His storyline crosses the storylines of all those other people wandering the harbour. There are the lovers who struggle to find each other across time periods. Each time they cross a threshold there is a promise of reunion, but also the threat of another parting. The acolytes and guardians fight to preserve a disintegrating world. And behind it all are Time and Fate themselves, long separated but destined to reunite.
Like many fantasies, the novel becomes exhausting at times, as we try to remember, backtrack, and gather increasingly tangled narratives in our hands. Morgenstern can fully realise a character, no doubt, considering the emotion she stirs up with her individual fables, about the Sun and the Moon or about Time and Fate, but the light between the hero and his beloved is written rather than felt. Still, she does much more than tick the boxes she set up back on page 35. The quest is complex and unpredictable, the hero is worthy, the writing is a feast.
The novel progresses from quest to much more, till the book lover begins to question her fantasy of a labyrinth of stories. The story that does not end becomes a prison. We all must come back to our own world, where the sun rises and sets as expected and the sea reflects the stars in the sky.
The writer is author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year.
The Starless Sea; Erin Morgenstern, Harvill Secker, ₹699
