Read This: The Great Night

In my latest Shelf Awareness review, I tackle The Great Night, the new novel from Chris Adrian, which expands upon “A Tiny Feast,” his New Yorker short story about Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen, in the modern world, with a changeling boy being treated for leukemia. The novel begins a year or so after that story—their marriage has been torn apart by grief over the child’s death, and Puck has seized an opportunity to take revenge upon the entire fairy court, which in this day and age is located in the middle of San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. You will not be surprised to learn that a small number of mortals get caught up in these events.

The plot’s structure is loosely borrowed from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though Adrian uses Shakespeare less as a template than as a springboard. About the most “faithful” transposition is the Bottom subplot, re-imagined as a troupe of homeless men and women who are corralled by their leader, Huff, into performing a musical version of Soylent Green. (Huff is acutely paranoid, and has his reasons for believing this is political theater.) Otherwise, Adrian spins the story in directions of his own choosing—leaving several clues to the subtle connections between his three primary human characters. I read The Great Night through the prism of literary fantasy, and in that frame of mind I quite enjoyed it: A bit slow in spots, and anticlimactic, but still quite a good story.

19 April 2011 | read this |