The Great Night by Chris Adrian review
Puck and co move from ancient Athens to modern San Francisco in a dazzling reinvention of Shakespeare's play
On midsummer night, the walls between worlds are said to grow thin, making it an ideal temporal setting for writers wishing to cross-pollinate the mortal realm with the fantastic. Shakespeare might have staked out the territory, but Chris Adrian's audacious, bewitching third novel (his first to be published in the UK) proves there's a good deal more to be said about the intermingling of lovers and faeries.
In this mesmerising reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the action is transposed from a wood near Athens to 21st century San Francisco's Buena Vista Park. Despite the night's festive requirements, Titania is in mourning. Her beloved changeling Boy has died of leukaemia (the problem with mortals, of course, is their mortality), and in her grief she's driven Oberon into exile. Her court of faeries is suffering a collective depression, while Puck, who seems to have been hybridised with Caliban, isn't so much a merry wanderer of the night as an enslaved creature of infinite malevolence known as the Beast. When Titania kicks off proceedings by releasing him from centuries of bondage he expresses his intentions by announcing with a bow: "Milady, I am in your debt, and so I will eat you last."
Befittingly, the three lovers who wander into this dangerously enchanted playground are all nursing broken hearts. Molly's boyfriend has killed himself, Henry's OCD has driven his away (there's only so long you can tolerate a lover who won't allow shoes in the house and smells distinctly of bleach), while Will's partner left him after a spate of sullying sexual infidelities. As for the rude mechanicals, their parts are taken by a group of homeless people hell-bent on staging a musical of Soylent Green under the eccentric belief that the local mayor is decimating and eating the vagrant population.
From K eats's "Belle Dame Sans Merci" to the fertile imaginings of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, the fair folk who live under the hill have exerted a potent grip on the literary imagination. The great night was thick with magic long before Shakespeare got his hands on it, and there are echoes of much older tales here, among them "Thomas the Rhymer" and "Tam Lin". Adrian seems to have had a good deal of fun with the furnishings of this borrowed ancestral landscape. Titania's retinue are jolie-lade hybrids, one resembling "a very large bee with the head of a Vietnamese woman"; another "a librarian made out of leather". Later the lovers find themselves trapped in a whimsical maze of rooms that includes the Hall of a Hundred Little Windmills and the Library of All the Same Book.Any fantasy worth its salt is going to be adept at this sort of conjuring, and what lifts The Great Night to a very different level is its bleak and compelling take on the pleasures and perils of temporal existence. Like Susanna Clarke, who used the fantastical Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as a way of exploring the disenfranchised voices of the 19th century, the kind of questions posed here are not exactly escapist. Chris Adrian is a hospital doctor and fellow in paediatric haematology-oncology, which is to say he knows precisely what a child with leukaemia looks like. Despite the supernatural colouring, the shadows he casts are real. Take the scenes in which a bewildered Titania and Oberon rush their sickening Boy to hospital, where he is poisoned "exquisitely" by chemotherapy and forbidden even the solace of food. None of their magic can protect him. The best they can manage is a "tiny feast", complete with supernaturally miniaturised chickens and fudge cakes the size of dimes. The fact that Oberon might while away the miserable hours by "playing a video game with a brownie perched on his head", or Titania consider endowing the bereavement counsellor with cat's eyes, only underscores the human register of emot! ion illn ess has forced them to inhabit.
Grief is a leveller among the lovers too. Without giving too much away, as the links between them begin to emerge, it becomes clear that at least one of the ways Adrian is using his immortal cast is to contrast an existence that is all pleasure, novelty and delight against the "dangerous swells" of a life that encompasses the possibilities of loss. Since he is unsparing in showing the terrible cost the latter might exert, when Molly cries at the very end that what she was offering her partner was better than all the blandishments of fairyland, it seems a profoundly hard-won statement of faith in the consolatory powers of ordinary human love.
That such a deep compassion exists hand in hand with linguistic playfulness and structural dexterity is as disarming as it is beguiling. Though this isn't precisely a comedy, Adrian takes his cues from Shakespeare in providing plenty of rough larks, largely of a sexual sort. There's a flurry of orgy scenes, while flashbacks to Molly's childhood in a Christian family band prove he can handle that deadpan suburban weirdness that is common currency among his contemporaries. Indeed, one wonders whether he took Bottom the Weaver's final admonishment "Rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains; be perfect" to heart, for this magical and fearless work is a near-blueprint of what a novel ought to be.
Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate.
Comments