The Night Circus is a novel by Erin Morganstern. It’s about a lot of things, but mostly, it’s about a magical circus. It’s a combination of regency romance and modern fairy tale, and it blends these two ideas seamlessly.
When I first put it down, the first thing I thought was, I could never write this. Why the hell did I think that? It’s just another book, right?
So, toxic masculinity is something I’ve been grappling with my whole life. I think all men struggle with it, in one form or another. Since we were children, people have been telling us to man up, to grow a thicker skin. So, we do. Or, at least we try. We put up walls, we bury our emotions. Some are better at this than others.
This manifests itself in a few different ways. Anger, frustration, misunderstandings, disconnects. It can lead to a host of problems socially, but that’s an essay for another time. I’m mostly interested in how it shows itself in a person’s writing.
There’s been a surge of grimdark stories of late. Game of Thrones, Malazan, Lightbringer. The fantasy genre has been “growing up” rapidly since the ’90s. With this increase in dark, often violent stories, character growth has also seen a dramatic change in complexity. Characters feel more human, more fleshed out. This has led to some really fascinating thematic work, but a lot of these stories have always left me with a very specific feeling that I couldn’t pinpoint until very recently.
When men try to write about the quiet, secret parts of our souls, they tend to look at them from afar. They spend a lot of time avoiding these emotions in their daily life, so they end up studying them in their writing. They explore these emotions as a watchmaker would a delicate clock. It’s safer that way. It’s yet another wall we put up between ourselves and our hearts.
That’s what was so different about The Night Circus for me: it didn’t study these emotions, it felt them.
So, to amend my earlier statement, this book could only have been written with compassion.
When the characters have emotions, those are expressed through the words on the page. They’re not described or hinted at. Morganstern plays with prose in a way that many modern authors don’t bother to. She doesn’t do it to characterize or explore the text’s themes, she simply uses the words to make the reader feel how the characters do. And I want to see more of that. I want to see more writers who just let themselves feel things.
Maybe I just need to read more regency romances.
Corey Laisure 