The Night Circus

The novel opens with the cryptic statement that“the circus arrives without warning” (3),establishing the mysterious tone of the novel.The opening chapter, which is written in the second person, describes the feeling of nervousness and excitement a visitor will experience while waiting in line for the circus to open. The circus opens only at night and closes at dawn and is described is described as being only black, white, and grey in color. 

In 1873, Prospero the Entertainer—a magician who practices the art of illusion—learns of the existence of his five year-old daughter, who has been abandoned at the theater where he works. She has a note pinned to her coat explaining that she is Prospero’s daughter. Once Prospero sees the girl, he realizes that she is, indeed, his daughter. He tells the girl that her given name, Celia, is not proper for a magician’s daughter, which makes the girl angry and she uses her magic to shatter a teacup and then, to Prospero’s amazement, reassembles it. “You might be interesting” (11), he tells her and decides to train her in order to further develop her magical gifts. 

Several months later, Prospero is met in his dressing room by the Man in Grey, who watches as Celia performs a variety of magical acts. Prospero regards Celia’s magic with tremendous delight and asks the Man in Grey—who Prospero seems to have a previous relationship with—if he is “willing to play” (18). Prospero asks the Man in Grey to engage in a magical contest with him, and proposes that the Man in Grey find a child of his own to train in the art of magic, and, at some future date have that child and Celia engage in a magic duel. Though a reward is not mentioned, it is apparent that the duel will be fought for high stakes. The Man in Grey accepts Prospero’s offer and gives Celia a golden ring that immediately burns her finger and marks it with a scar. Prospero reveals that he has an idea for where the duel should be held, “a theatrical venue” (22) owned by a man named Chandresh Christophe Lefevre. It is also revealed that Prospero and the Man in Grey have engaged in a number of previous magical battles, with Prospero losing them all at the expense of his students’ lives.

The Man in Grey travels to an orphanage in London to locate a child to train for the duel. After meeting with four children, he selects a handsome nine year-old boy who captures his interest. The Man in Grey is not interested in learning the child’s name or anything about the circumstances of his life. He takes the boy from the orphanage and spends five years training him in the art of magic. Over the course of his training, the boy is kept completely isolated from the world and is not allowed any interaction with other people. When the boy turns fourteen, he is taken by the Man in Grey to a magic show in France, where they watch Prospero perform. While watching Prospero’s show, the boy quickly realizes that Prospero is performing “real magic” (38),butis disguising his magical performance as sleight of hand in order to appeal to his audience and keep his true magical abilities a secret.

The Man in Grey moves the boy into a townhouse in London just before he turns nineteen years-old. Having been mostly isolated from other people for the past ten years, the boy is overwhelmed by the crowds in London and the hustle of the city. While sketching pictures of trees one day, the boy loses his notebook, only to have it returned to him by Isobel Martin, a beautiful young woman whom the boy feels an immediate attraction to. Isobel reveals herself to be a reader of tarot cards. She and the boy take a sudden, mutual romantic interest in each other, due to their shared fascination with magic. The boy reveals his unique magical gift to Isobel: his ability to control the minds of other. As a demonstration, he transports Isobel, mentally, to a sunny forest and then back to London. She tells Marco that what he can do is “impossible” (46), to which Marco replies that “nothing is impossible” (46). Marco explains that he has the ability to manipulate how others perceive reality. The boy then offers Isobel his full name: Marco Alasdair.

During the period of Marco’s training, Prospero retires from magic and has Celia perform as a medium. However, she feels that her performances only serve to give her audience a false sense of hope, because spirits have no true interest in communicating with the dead. As the years pass,Prospero’s training regime for Celia becomes increasingly brutal. He slits open her fingers so she is forced to use her magic to repair them, and he shatters the bones in her wrist to see if she can heal herself. He also gives her a ring to wear that burns her skin and becomes permanently attached to her finger. The ring, she realizes, also serves to establish a permanent connection between her and her eventual, and still unknown, magical rival. Prospero seems to possess no real affection for Celia, only a desire to make her into the strongest magician possible.

Elsewhere,producer Chandresh Christophe Lefevre tosses darts at a recent theatrical review of his latest productions. He is angry at a reviewer who considered his last production to be “almost transcendent” (59). While the reviewer praises the quality of the production, Chandresh considers any production that is less than completely “transcendental” to be a failure. Chandresh wonders what he can do, now, to put together a truly transcendental production.

The narrative shifts to Concord, Massachusetts in 1897, where a 12 year-old boy named Bailey plays a game of truth or dare with his young sister and their friends. The children dare Bailey to break into the Night Circus, which has just arrived in Concord, and to bring back evidence confirming he’d actually broken into the circus. Once he sneaks into the circus during the daytime, when it is empty, Bailey finds that the circus is simply a bunch of empty tents: “it seems completely abandoned, with no signs of any workers or performers” (64). While wandering through the empty circus grounds Bailey encounters a beautiful redheaded girl who tells him he does not belong at the empty circus, and that he will be punished if he is caught. When Bailey explains that he needs to return to his friends with an item from the circus to prove he had really been inside of it, she gives him one of her white gloves. When he thanks her she says, “you’re welcome Bailey” (68), even though he never revealed his name to her.

The narrative flashes back to 1895, when Chandresh was still only conceiving the idea for the Night Circus. One night, he holds a dinner party and tells his assorted guests of his plans to build a circus “like none have ever seen” (76). The guests begin to propose different circus acts that they can create and perform. A few months later, a beautiful Japanese woman named Tsukiko arrives at Chandresh’s home. He is shocked by the large tattoo of a snake that runs all across her skin, which, she explains, “is part of who I was, who I am, and who I will be” (83). In front of Chandresh and his guests, Tsukiko undertakes a complicated and seemingly impossible contortionist performance, to which Chandresh responds by telling Tsukiko that she is exactly the performer he has been searching for. Shortly afterwards, Chandresh commissions Herr Thiessen, a famous clockmaker, to build a perfect clock—one that is completely unique and original from any designed previously—as the centerpiece of the circus.

As Chandresh prepares his circus, Prospero dies from a sudden heart attack. However, his “ghost” haunts Celia. Celia reviews a number of condolence letters and finds one in a grey envelope that reads only,“your move” (86). She shows the letter to her father’s ghost, and he tells her that the Man in Grey’s apprentice is now ready for their magical duel. Prospero, however, is not actually dead. Instead, his physical form has been displaced as a result of a failed magic trick: though he can disperse his atoms and appear in different places at the same time, he is unable to fully restore himself to his actual physical form.

A year later, Celia demonstrates her magical abilities for Chandresh. He attempts to dismiss her until he learns that she is Prospero’s daughter. Marco is also working for Chandresh; he witnesses Celia’s magical displays and tells Isobel that Celia is certainly the person destined to be his rival in the magical duel. Marco sends Isobel to the Night Circus to spy on Celia.