It is intensely visual, so much so that what remains in its wake are almost exclusively images – more so than plot, or character, or even the prose itself. Highly whimsical, it is a narrative so wilfully contrived that contrivance is its raison d'être. The Night Circus is a sprawling historical novel about magic and the circus. And if a book feels to me like a film in the making, I am doubly averse to it, feeling strongly that literature needs to reveal the world in ways that film cannot. I've abandoned many novels because their premises struck me as preposterous. I abhor feeling trapped in someone else's crazy imagination: Alice in Wonderland has always horrified me I find the film Brazil unbearable.
I am hostile to whimsy, and beyond impatient with the fantastical. As a reader, I am resistant to historical fiction. In the case of Erin Morgenstern's first novel, The Night Circus, I might well have been the wrong reviewer.
One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value. T o a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter.
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