22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ancient menace during summer solstice, April 26, 2011
This review is from: The Great Night: A Novel (Hardcover)
In this phantasmagorical tale, Chris Adrian reshaped "A Midsummer Night's Dream," into a mammoth, messy, tilted, erotic, meandering re-imagining of Shakespeare's comedy into an elaborate feast of faeries and monsters, Lilliputians and giants, demons and derelicts, heart-broken humans and a group of outspoken homeless people who are staging a musical reenactment of
Soylent Green. And that is just a segment of the odd population of characters that you will meet in this multiple narrative tale of loss, love and exile. As you enter San Francisco's Buena Vista Park during this millennial summer solstice, the moon shines eerie and luminous over creatures large and small, and a thick wall of fog sluggishly spreads its fingers during the celebration known to the faerie kingdom as the "Great Night."
Adrian's fantasy adventure expands on his short story, "A Tiny Feast," centering on King Oberon and the ruthless Queen Titania and their changeling son, Boy, who suffered from leukemia. At the start of this novel, Titania is inconsolable after the death of Boy and the subsequent departure of Oberon. She unleashes a malevolent, ancient force of magic by removing the controlling constraints of Puck, thereby allowing his demonic urges to run rampant through the park.
Meanwhile, three heartbroken people with sorrowful memories of forsaken loved ones are lost and trapped in the park on their way to a summer solstice party. The tangled back stories unleash the bitter coils of pain and loss, and the mortals and immortals eventually interlock with loose springs.
Molly grew up in a pious, gospel-singing family, fuel for unresolved trauma that preys on her like a ghost, and she remains stuck and heartsick over the suicide of her lover, Ryan. Will is a tree surgeon who was dumped by Carolina, the only woman he has ever loved. Henry has a black past with memory holes; he was abducted as a child and has forgotten the terror of those years. Meanwhile, his obsessive cleaning and hand washing, which serves him well as a physician, has cost him a relationship with pediatrician Bobby, the man of his dreams who is now his ex-boyfriend.
Adrian flashes backward into the lives of the mortal three and alternates that with the captivity at the park and the faerie kingdom tale. There were shades of John Crowley's
Little, Big, as both books use some similar unrealistic elements and fantasy to enhance the realistic elements and emotional heft. However, Crowley's faeries are more subtle and subconscious, and don't violate the moral codes of humanity as wickedly as Adrian's. Crowley also combines a Carrollian and Dickensian wit and artistry that would have been welcome in Adrian's story.
The essential problem with this book is that the fantastic elements are crowded with too much symbolism and disorder, and getting a purchase on the concepts is slippery. The visual surrealism, rather than plunging the story seamlessly to a deeper consciousness, began to pile up and distract from the story. The action and commotion of the faeries often proved bewildering, and the reading experience was cerebral and exhausting. Adrian's narrative was too loose and boggy to stay engaged.
I was taken with his scuttling energy and the peering furtive faces, and felt the oppressive weight of the shadowed victims. But I was also dizzy, blindfolded and drugged by too much screwball humor adjacent to tragedy, and the clarity was muddied. Adrian's prose is rich and layered with multiple motifs. It was eventually difficult to identify the core of the story. The fate of Molly, Will, and Henry was subverted by an anticlimactic ending amid black humor and zany twists of immortal madcap magic and erotic mayhem.
However, the story resonated at many turns. There is a bizarre and churlish glee to the prose and a willingness to take the reader to unknown zones of scary emotional wilderness. Despite the novel's flabby focus, I shall inevitably look for more of this esteemed "20 under 40" writer's works in the future. He captivates with his perversely baroque and insane merriment.
This review is based on the hardcover edition received from the publisher.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Chaotic, Cluttered, Incohesive -- best when the fairies are the focus, June 14, 2011
This review is from: The Great Night: A Novel (Hardcover)
I've said before on this blog that there are often gaps between how good something is and how much I enjoy it. Usually this means that I find great pleasure reading something without particularly high technical merit. In this case, I think it's the opposite. I can appreciate that this is, for a certain literary set, well-written. I'm just not as fond of it as I might be.
'The Great Night' is a modernised retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco in 2008. A group of humans stumble into a disaster implemented by the Faery Queen, Titania, who is in the throes of deep sorrow. Following the death of their latest changeling child, Titania and Oberon had one of their marital spats -- but this time, Oberon doesn't seem to be coming back. Desperate to get the King to show himself and so absorbed with her grief that she loses all sensibility, Titania lifts the controlling enchantment off of Puck, also known as the Beast, freeing him to wreak havoc in the park. (The greater world is protected by walls of air -- nothing, mundane or fantastical, gets in our out of the park while those walls, presumably conjured by Oberon, are up). The mortals trapped within are: Molly, recovering from the suicide of her boyfriend; Will, in love with a strange woman who dumped him a year ago; Henry, who can't remember any of his life before the age of thirteen, and whose obsessive-compulsive habits drove away his boyfriend; and a group of homeless people rehearsing for a musical version of Soylent Green, led by Huff, who believes the Mayor of San Francisco is feeding the indigent population to each other in the soup kitchens. These mortals get wound up in the actions of the faeries, who are either giving over to sensual indulgence in what they presume to be their last hours, or who are seeking ways to put the Beast back under control.
There are things about this book which are really great. It's definitely at its best when the faeries are the main focus. Titania and Oberon are sweeping, dramatic figures, and Adrian describes the lesser faeries in a way that balances nicely between whimsical and grotesque. The flashback section where Titania and Oberon have to watch their changeling child die is the strongest portion of the book. Because their magic cannot work on anything they care for, they have to turn to human medicine to try and save the Boy. They're also struggling to deal with the emotional consequences of actually caring for a mortal child, as their self-absorption usually prevents such deep attachments to their changelings. Adrian does a great job showing how mortals perceive the faeries when they enter the mundane world, how the little magics affect them. He also -- through his own background as a pediatrician -- is able to evoke the tormented feelings of parents watching a child die with great sympathy and precision. The emotionality of this section is strong and compelling, and it paints a very clear picture.
As for the humans, their stories generally start off well enough -- Molly, Will, and Henry, at least, inhabit complex emotional and psychological worlds. Huff and his tribe I could have done without. They seemed extraneous, none of them besides Huff developed any real personality, and I can't figure out the purpose of the Soylent Green trope. Not having enough of a familiarity with that source material, I don't know if there's some larger theme at work there, or if the fixation is just a way to demonstrate the extent of Huff's delusions. Regardless, it seems like that subplot only exists as a tacked-on way to have an analog for the Mechanicals, so that Titania has a fool to dote on when the Beast places her under an enchantment. But the lover-analogs are fascinating, if not wholly likeable. They all enter the story in liminal states, hedging between decisions, scared to take decisive action in controlling their lives, hesitant and varying degrees of pathetic. In this way, they're precisely the opposite of Shakespeare's lovers, who take to the woods for very specific reasons, but their ambiguity serves the opening of the story, because it makes them vulnerable to ethereal interference.
The second half of the book degrades into confused chaos, though. As the humans fall deeper under the faeries' spell, the narrative quickly becomes jumbled and hazy. Molly and Will, whose stories had been compelling, get lost entirely in the enchanted shuffle. Henry's experience is only somewhat clearer. The reader does learn some more pieces of the backstory, some threads that tie these seemingly unrelated people together, but there's no real sense of a greater point to it, no driving force behind what's happening, and no ultimate goal for them to work towards.
And perhaps that's all to the author's purpose. Perhaps that chaos is precisely what Adrian is aiming for, to portray the senselessness of the whirlwind the Beast creates. Which is why I say, if that's the case, then it's extremely well-done. But even well-done, it interfered with my ability to enjoy the book. I like a good, solid story, some sense of cohesion, which 'The Great Night' lacks. As the mortals falls deeper into the madness of the night, their experiences become clogged with symbolism. Adrian takes it a step too far, I think, laying the metaphors on a bit too thick, and the story loses both coherence and emotional engagement as a result. Certain sections also edge into what I would consider pointlessly pornographic territory. I'm no prude and I'm certainly not against sex in literature, but so much of it felt like Adrian inserted it into the story just so he could shockingly juxtapose crude earthiness with the idea of the faery magic, or just so he had an excuse to jar the reader with naughty words. It's yet another discordant thread -- perhaps intentional, but it didn't particularly serve the story.
The ending of the book is a problem. Abrupt and anticlimactic, it circumvents any kind of resolution for the characters. The mortals' stories, set up so well at the beginning, reach no conclusion. They don't even move along -- we don't see any indication that they've been changed by their time in the woods, that they'll go back to real life different than before, because we don't see them at the end. There's no sense of alteration or growth. No one has a dramatic arc except Titania, perhaps, and even her story ends ambiguously, with no denouement. Adrian throws the reader into a maelstrom and then never calms the seas. Again, this confusion might be intentional, but it's unsatisfying.
Ultimately, I'm glad I read this book. I always enjoy seeing how other writers interpret Shakespearean themes, and sections of 'The Great Night' are quite strong and worth reading. The story as a whole, however, just doesn't hang together. The disparate threads never reconnect, too many characters never reach resolution, and too much seems extraneous. 'The Great Night' is an interesting experiment, but the book would have profited from more tightening and precision.
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