The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Doubleday, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-0385541213

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook,  audio CD

The Starless Sea starts with a book-loving graduate student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, who is writing his thesis on video games, finding a mysterious book of stories in his school’s library that includes a description of an incident from his childhood about a door he saw but didn’t open. Off he goes to find out more about the book and how he comes to be in it, that early on involves discussions of narrative and the differences between how it works in written works and in games. An inquisitive librarian tracks down information on the book for him, and between her help and a lot of searching the Internet, he is able to use clues from the book to connect it to a literary masquerade taking place in New York City in just a few days. Shortly, Zachary is on a quest, and the masquerade turns into a mystery, a chase, and an adventure that gives him the opportunity to walk through another door.

Once through the door, it is permanently closed behind him, and a different story begins for him. Zachary has entered a Harbor on the Starless Sea, an underground world where books and stories are safely kept. He is in a maze, or maybe it’s a hotel, or a library, with many doors, some locked and some open, where paths in time sometimes cross and sometimes do not, and people who meet in one room may not see each other again after leaving through the door. In addition to the Keeper and Zachary, there are just a few other people who appear in the underground world behind the door: Rhyme, the last guardian of the stories; Dorian, who may or may not be Zachary’s savior, killer, or true love, or a combination; Allegra, who wants to close all the doors so the story of the Starless Sea can never end;  Simon and Eleanor, lovers who lost each other in time; and Mirabel, their daughter. All of them appear in different incarnations across different times and spaces as Zachary travels through the lands of the Starless Sea, and the sea itself.  The world Zachary enters is dark, empty, often lonely and sometimes frightening or beautiful. His purpose once he arrives is unclear: even the Keeper of the Harbor doesn’t know, or want him there.

Erin Morgenstern writes gorgeous, lyrical, visually evocative prose. She started out as a visual artist and you can really tell from the way she has used words to create her worlds on paper. And if you are a person who loves books and stories and storytelling, who has always wanted to go through a portal or door to adventure, that might be enough for you to fall in love with this book. The weakenesses in plot and characterization are serious flaws, though. While Morgenstern starts out strong, once Zachary is through the portal, we lose the thread of his quest and it doesn’t get picked up again for a very long time (although there are a number of nods to the Narnia books throughout). There are multiple side stories that make you, as the reader, want to know where things went next, like the story of Simon and Eleanor, which has one foot in our reality for at least part of the time, and the story of the innkeeper falling in love, which feels like a fable but might not be.

The tales and fables in The Starless Sea are transformative, tragic, bleeding and dark. I was willing to try to track Zachary, as the anchor to the narrative, through his adventure because I wanted to know how some of these stories connected with his, but in many cases they were just vignettes, with the threads left hanging, or they returned in another incarnation. Then about three-quarters of the way through the book, Morgenstern, having constructed this elaborate, recursive story,  suggested that Zachary, the Alice in this wonderland, might be an unreliable reporter. That is, that nothing I had experienced (as a reader) with him could be trusted, and that he might not actually even be in the world of the Starless Sea. Although she backtracked shortly after that, it derailed the story. Once it’s out there, it can’t be unsaid.

Morgenstern was able to create a fairytale atmosphere, but in attempting to make her characters archetypes, she weakened them to the point that it was hard to care what happened to them, and this betrayal of the reader made that even more difficult. In constructing and connecting multiple layers and versions of potentially linked stories that reflected the possible choices of the characters, she left them adrift.  In interviews she has said plot is her weakness, and that she knew she had shortchanged her characters, and that’s really obvious here.

Because of Morgenstern’s amazing worldbuilding and gorgeous writing, and because I think she had some really interesting things to say about the way we structure stories in books (where the reader has a single path), versus games (where the player has many choices and can try different ones if the first ones don’t work), The Starless Sea was worth getting lost in. I feel like Morgenstern tried to present what it could look like to see what happens when a character makes different choices (like going through a door or not) by giving us a bird’s eye view of what it could look like to see the branchings and connections, outside the format of a game or a “choose your own adventure” book.

It’s an interesting experiment, but the observer’s position is unsatisfactory to me when I’m reading for enjoyment.

In adventure games, you get to be the active participant making decisions and dealing with their consequences.  “Choose your own adventure” books are written in second person, making “you”, the reader, the decision maker, with the ability to go back through your chain of decisions and change them, hoping for a different ending (getting to make your own choices is so vital that Chooseco just developed a series of board books). I just wasn’t invested enough in Zachary’s story to want to watch him make decisions (often random) without having more direct interaction.  Storytelling, if it doesn’t involve the reader or listener directly in participation, engages us when the storyteller invites us in. As gorgeously written as The Starless Sea is, it didn’t feel inviting to me as a reader. While the author created a memorable fictional world, she never opened a door.