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The Great Night

3.19 of 5 stars 3.19 · rating details · 725 ratings · 200 reviews

Acclaimed as a “gifted, courageous writer”(The New York Times), Chris Adrian brings all his extraordinary talents to bear in The Great Night—a brilliant and mesmerizing retelling of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

On Midsummer Eve 2008, three people, each on the run from a failed relationship, become trapped in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, the secret home of...more

Hardcover, 292 pages

Published April 26th 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Jul 21, 2012 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I admit I was a little worried that "The Great Night" wouldn't be in the same league with Chris Adrian's other two novels, "Gob's Grief" (nearly great) and "The Children's Hospital" (stone-cold great). Tepid ratings on Goodreads, for instance, coupled with what seemed to me to be a plot description fraught with potential peril gave me pause. Here's the pitch: a modern-day re-imagining of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," set in San Francisco, featuring faeries from the play, faerie quee...more I admit I was a little worried that "The Great Night" wouldn't be in the same league with Chris Adrian's other two novels, "Gob's Grief" (nearly great) and "The Children's Hospital" (stone-cold great). Tepid ratings on Goodreads, for instance, coupled with what seemed to me to be a plot description fraught with potential peril gave me pause. Here's the pitch: a modern-day re-imagining of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," set in San Francisco, featuring faeries from the play, faerie queen Titania having unleashed an ancient menace; and three mortals trapped in Buena Vista Park by Titania's actions along with a group of homeless actors putting on a production of "Soylent Green."

I needn't have fretted. "The Great Night" is excellent; no "Children's Hospital," to be sure, but enjoyable even to those who aren't that into Shakespeare. I count myself as not being all that knowledgable or especially nuts about the Bard (dodging your slings and arrows now), but I plunked down $2 at my favorite local used bookseller for a "Midsummer Night's" Cliff's Notes (horrors!) and, with a quick read of the synopsis, did just fine. It's likely to resonate more with Shakespeare freaks than with those who are not.

"The Great Night" isn't as different from Adrian's other works as I had supposed. Adrian, a pediatric oncologist, continues to soak his books with the magical and the medical. In "Gob's Grief," a man, with the help of Walt Whitman, tries to construct a machine that will bring back his dead brother along with all the Civil War dead; the sprawling "Children's Hospital" includes a modern retelling of Noah's ark, set in the structure of the title, and is replete with angels and children and medicine and the impossible. In this latest novel, the death of Titania and Oberon's changeling child starts the story's fantastical chain of events. The faerie queen and king, now residing in a hill in a San Francisco park along with all manner of faeries, often had stolen mortal children, unbeknownst to their glamoured parents. But Boy sickened and died in a San Francisco hospital while the two faeries watched. Boy's death planted a wedge between Titania and Oberon, who disappeared, and in a fit of grief, Titania frees the fool Puck from his restraints. Puck, who has a grudge against Titania, is set on using his considerable powers for vengeance.

Three grief-stricken and broken people become trapped in Buena Vista Park by Titania's magics, and are caught up in the swirl as faerie creatures of every description, from a treelike being to a boy with the bottom half of a bunny, flee from the Beast (Puck). These mortals are Molly, a woman with a troubled family past and a dark guilt, whose boyfriend killed himself; Will, an arborist who once had a relationship with Carolina, the sister of Molly's dead boyfriend; and Henry, a gay man who works at a hospital and who recently broke up with his boyfriend, and who had a haunted, lost youth scarred by an abduction he doesn't remember. Then there are the five determined to put on their own version of the movie "Soylent Green" (people as food) as a warning, convinced that the mayor of San Francisco has hatched an evil plot (a song goes: "People. People who eat people are the loneliest people in the world.").

Adrian weaves in flashbacks from the pasts of Molly, Will and Henry with their experiences in the faerie world encountering strange creatures and fleeing the Beast, who appears to each person as he or she whom they most fear or are most haunted by. We're very much in Alice in Wonderland territory during these scenes, and I wonder whether a labeling of this book as a fantasy (though it doesn't really deserve it) would lead to a more-prepared reading public and higher ratings here. I guess I'd call the book a mixture of "Alice," Shakespeare and, for its occasional oddness and sexuality, John Irving. I might add that my knowledge limited to a little perusal of Cliff's Notes would make me assess "The Great Night" as less of a modern retelling of "Midsummer Night's" than a novel that takes its jumping-off point from some of the characters in it, though the "Soylent Green" players are obvious echoes of the "mechanicals" of the play.

Adrian's flashbacks often bleed into each other; it can be tough at times to see where one time period ends and another begins, though the book as a whole is not difficult. The first half of the book is not as strong as its conclusion, and it takes time to build up momentum as Adrian hops from the story of the faerie king and queen to the mortals trapped in the park and their backstories.

"The Great Night" is filled with wonders, depravity, humor, weirdness, warmth and sadness, blending delightful hijinks among the faeries with stories of heartbreak. Adrian's earlier books had been populated by people wanting to beat/overcome death; there is not as much of a weight of mortality, here, though it includes the death of people and the death of dreams, as well as dreams of happiness. Adrian's story doesn't always flow seamlessly, but his way with words is, as expected, thrilling. I won't spoil the story by telling the point at which everything comes together and the novel turns from merely quite good to astonishing, but it encompasses the book's final third. Adrian brings everything home with a brilliance that at times is staggering. If we get there in sometimes choppy steps, the destination is well worth it. Adrian, one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40," which spotlights our best young writers, continues to prove that he is, in fact, one of our most talented storytellers. His humanity, his unusual (odd, if you will) scenarios and approaches, his startlingly beautiful observations and turns of phrase, make him, three novels in, one of my very favorites.(less)

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Oct 21, 2011 Dee at EditorialEyes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction, fantasy, reviewed-on-my-blog

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For this review and others, visit the EditorialEyes Blog.
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4 out of 5

Something is gloriously, tragically amiss in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. In fact, to mix my Shakespeare quotes, something wicked this way comes. It’s also something strange and chaotic and deeply human.

In Chris Adrian’s The Great Night, the faerie court of Titania and Oberon are celebrating another Midsummer Night, many moons after the events of Shakespeare’s play—though “celebrating” is not exactly the right word. Af...more ~*~
For this review and others, visit the EditorialEyes Blog.
~*~
4 out of 5

Something is gloriously, tragically amiss in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. In fact, to mix my Shakespeare quotes, something wicked this way comes. It’s also something strange and chaotic and deeply human.

In Chris Adrian’s The Great Night, the faerie court of Titania and Oberon are celebrating another Midsummer Night, many moons after the events of Shakespeare’s play—though “celebrating” is not exactly the right word. After the cancer death of their changeling son, Titania has spurned Oberon, who has subsequently disappeared, and her unchecked grief rules the night. Unable to manage or even comprehend her sadness fully, Titania does the unthinkable: she removes the magic that binds the trickster Puck to the royal will, unleashing him upon the court, the park, and eventually the city. Into this world wander three heartbroken humans whose own histories are rife with the kind of tragedy Titania is languishing in, as well as the requisite rude mechanicals (in this case five homeless people who want to put on a musical version of Soylent Green to bring to light a Swiftian cannibalistic conspiracy they believe the mayor is perpetrating).

All of which is to say, a lot is going on here. This book is billed as a reimagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which isn’t quite right. This is far closer to a sequel or at least a jumping-off point.Unlike the merry mayhem of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, The Great Night is, above all else, a tragedy. The book uses the well-known faerie characters to spin tales of heartbreak, tracing the pasts of each of the five main actors (Will, Molly, and Henry the humans, Titania, and to a lesser extent the rude mechanicals), showing us their origins, their intersections, and, ultimately, their fates. Much remains mysterious at first, which makes this a real page-turner. You want to know what’s happened to these lovely, broken people, and what will happen to them if Puck wins the night.

As it turns out, Puck is not that, well, puckish creature you remember from outdoor summer stagings of the play. He is an ancient menace, deeply powerful—perhaps unstoppable. Kept in check for millennia by Oberon’s magic, he is out for vengeance, for reasons both straightforward and mysterious until the end. Adrian delivers him as a palpably dangerous villain and the terror he inspires in the faerie court creates jittery suspense for the present-day part of the narrative. His promise to Titania, “I will eat you last,” gave me shivers.

Just as splendid is Adrian’s Titania as the weeping queen, the bewildered mother, and the battle-hardened commander marching to war. Her tragedy is at once immediate and distant. She finds herself mired in the horrors of the contemporary world: a child lost to leukemia whom modern medicine could not save, a husband who has left her, possibly for good. Both concepts—disease/death and loss of love—are foreign to her, and one of the best parts of the story (in fact, what started out as its own standalone story, “The Tiny Feast,”) show Titania and Oberon fretting over their adopted boy as he slowly fades away from them. At one point, as the chemo begins to work, Oberon praises the doctors by saying “you have poisoned him well!” The modern world is as strange and mystical to the faeries are their world is to us, and each side’s inability to deal with the other’s mystery makes for excellent reading.

The human aspects of the story are as important as the chaotic faerie framework. Each of the three singular characters comes from a very different background, but each intersects with the others in wonderful and unexpected ways. Their stories and their heartbreaks twin with the faerie tragedy unfolding incomprehensibly around them, and their reactions to the magic and to each other are wonderful: Molly with the suicide of her boyfriend and her almost cultlike upbringing; Will and his destructive relationship with a strange woman in a strange house; and Henry, whose boyfriend has left him, who cannot remember his childhood because he was abducted for several years, and whose mother is possibly more damaging to him than the abduction was.

The group of homeless fares less well: they feel dropped into the story because there must be rude mechanicals, and their lunatic quest and conspiracy theory don’t hold up as well. They are less well developed than the rest of the characters, and while they, too, have suffered sadness, it feels sketched out and at times more of a caricature. A nodding glance toward the Bottom-the-ass part of the play, in which Titania is temporarily enchanted to fall in love the homeless’ leader, Huff, and make his musical better, feels rushed through.

Indeed, at times it feels like Adrian is trying to do too much, which is perhaps not surprising, given the number of characters and plots and intrigues going on here. And until the very end, no one sub-plot or character is given precedence over the other, which means the story is at times hard to pinpoint. A weakness, but also part of the point: the faerie court is chaos incarnate, and the book reflects this precarious, Pisa-style layering of stories tilting dangerously against each other. The visual descriptions, however, are stunning, and work to anchor us within the surreal world of the park. Adrian also does some subtle work with coincidences, echoing the uncanniness of the faerie court: a character named Peaches followed by a scene where Titania demands a peach; repetition of first names here and there; and genuine intersections where characters have met one another, or almost met them, outside of this night.

This phantasmagorical, often sad, often funny, very scary tale is a mind-full. While it stumbles at times in pacing and characterization, its heaps of tragic, magical, surreal narrative are definitely worth spending a great night (or three) with.(less)

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Aug 08, 2011 Miriam rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: San Franciscan Shakespeareans

Shelves: fantasy, theater

This book takes place here:

My parents used to take me to this park as a kid -- not often, it was farther away than the Panhandle. As a little urban child I thought it was like the real forest.

And it is the real forest, in The Great Night, the forest that is endless, and dangerous, and beautiful, the forest where you lose your way and find yourself -- or a horde of crazy fairies, or some bums putting on a play of Soylent Green, or some other heartbroken souls lost on their ways to a party none o...more

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May 01, 2013 Marc Kozak rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really can't resist a mostly realist book with supernatural elements. After finishing a book like this, I walk around for days wishing it was real. I have a long history of secretly desiring magical explanations for the most mundane of things. Don't you want to live in a world where, instead of casually explaining to people that the reason you are humming "Call Me Maybe" is because you must have heard it in the background somewhere, the real reason is because the Bird Prince of the Hills neede...more I really can't resist a mostly realist book with supernatural elements. After finishing a book like this, I walk around for days wishing it was real. I have a long history of secretly desiring magical explanations for the most mundane of things. Don't you want to live in a world where, instead of casually explaining to people that the reason you are humming "Call Me Maybe" is because you must have heard it in the background somewhere, the real reason is because the Bird Prince of the Hills needed to reclaim his usurped throne, and used the songs of Carly Rae Jespen (which is an anagram of Pearl Jay Censer) to transmit a spell through the airwaves in order to use the combined aural might of millions of people singing the same song in unison, thereby filling his bird spirit with enough power to fight off the Dark Cardinal Prince, the resulting victory of which is celebrated by all of bird-kind, which we perceive as birds singing? This is my big dumb wish before I go to bed every night.

I'm not sure why I do this - it's not like real life doesn't have enough surrealism in it. I guess I just think it would be so exciting to go through what the characters in Chris Adrian's fantastic second novel go through. Three humans walk into a park one night and are suddenly brought into a war between magical beings. Described as a retelling of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the story tells of the Great Night where Puck is about to destroy the faerie kingdom, only opposed by a diminished faerie queen and a few dumb humans who spend the entire time stammering like morons (because they aren't used to seeing seven foot tall talking trees and half boy/half bunnies). This may seem silly, but it is actually told in a refreshingly non-smirking, and at times terrifying manner, while never losing sight of the human theme of overcoming sadness.

What makes this really work is Adrian's outstanding imagination and impeccable prose. He writes a lot like Jonathan Franzen - sharp dialogue, beautiful turns of phrase, and relevant portrayals of modern suffering. The story weaves in and out of the three human's lives, covering their troubled pasts and sad presents out of order, until they all weave together spectacularly. At times you can't see where any of it is going, but by the end it all comes together extremely well. I can't remember being satisfied by an ending as much as this one in a long time.

And of course, the magic! If you've read anything by Adrian, you know he is one warped dude. You don't even need to be versed in Shakespeare to enjoy this - the connections are more tangential than anything. Adrian populates his faerie world in a very similar vibe to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series - everything is dark and sinister, and mortals clearly have no place in the world they find themselves in.

Which also got me thinking - how come every story like this ends in complete tragedy for the humans? It's like we are playthings for these otherworldly beings, and when they tire with us, our memories are wiped and we're doomed to roam the world in a depressive haze until we unceremoniously die by getting ironically murdered by a child molester. Just once I want to see a story where the mortal is completely unfazed by all of the magic, and totally bitch slaps the faerie queen.

At any rate, I'm off to start writing a novel based on that last sentence. What you need to know is that Chris Adrian is one of the most intelligent and imaginative writers there is today (and he's under 40!). His last book, The Children's Hospital, was 5-star madness, and this one is almost just as good.(less)

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Oct 18, 2012 Kaycie Hall rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is one of the best I've read this year. The ending is a little hazy and confusing, but overall I loved it. The third chapter was published in the New Yorker a year or so ago, and I still think that it can stand alone as a beautiful story. It's about Titania and Oberon and the changeling boy they've come to love as their own and his struggle with cancer.Really the scenes with Titania and Oberon and their struggles with death and mortality and human sadness are the most moving parts of t...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Tasha Robinson rated it 4 of 5 stars

A startlingly strange, rich novel that has repeatedly been described as a retelling of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but is something more interesting — an original story that borrows some of the characters and a couple of plot twists. This is top-flight literary fantasy, a Neil Gaiman-esque story about myths and magic and how they intersect with the real world. The prose is lyrical and beautiful, and the scenarios Adrian comes up with to background his mortal characters —a woman whose family for...more

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Apr 01, 2012 Larry Hoffer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes a book has a beautiful story at its core, but the thread tends to get lost in overcomplication. That's the way I felt about Chris Adrian's The Great Night, a well-written book that meshes the emotional, relationship-driven crises of three San Franciscans with characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with mixed results.

It's Midsummer Eve in 2008. Three strangers, each dealing with the wreckage of a relationship, enter Balboa Park, headed to the same party. But unbeknownst to them, Ti...more

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Dec 08, 2011 Sam Ruddock rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, read-2011

The Great Night is one of those rare books that I’m impossibly grateful to have found. A modern reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is conceptually daring, stylistically exciting and presents a view of humanity that is stark and powerful and unlike anything I’ve read before.

It is Midsummer’s Eve in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, where Oberon, Titania and their faerie kingdom have set up court. But the Great Night celebrations do not go quite as planned. Unable to deal wit...more The Great Night is one of those rare books that I’m impossibly grateful to have found. A modern reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is conceptually daring, stylistically exciting and presents a view of humanity that is stark and powerful and unlike anything I’ve read before.

It is Midsummer’s Eve in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, where Oberon, Titania and their faerie kingdom have set up court. But the Great Night celebrations do not go quite as planned. Unable to deal with the all-too human feelings of grief and loss that have assailed her on the death of their adopted son and subsequent failing of her marriage, Titania sets free an ancient menace that threatens to bring an end mortal and immortal life alike.

It is on this night, just after dark, that Henry, Molly, and Will separately walk into that same park and find themselves utterly lost. Like Titania, they are each struggling (and failing) to overcome romantic losses. Henry, kidnapped as a child and now paralysingly obsessive-compulsive has driven away Bobby, the one person he’s ever loved . Molly is rebelling against her extreme upbringing but unable to escape the suicide of her boyfriend nearly two years earlier. And Will, a tree-surgeon, is desperate to patch up his relationship with Carolina, who discovered his infidelity and left him. All three have encountered magic before, but nothing like the faerie magic they are about to be caught up in tonight.

Such an introduction inevitably sounds bleaker than the book is. The Great Night is often laugh-out-loud funny and utterly absurd. Puck is given a new, ominous role, and the Mechanicals make an appearance in the guise of a group of homeless people who believe they can bring down the mayor and stop his evil plot by staging a musical production of Soylent Green.

Simultaneously, The Great Night is existentially mundane and magically extravagant. It charts the luminal space between dreams and reality. Through magic, Adrian presents the profound realities of mortal life, through humour, the unremitting sadness of loss. It is a book of opposites, “at the same time one of the strangest and most ordinary things” I’ve ever read.

Chris Adrian, named in the New Yorker as one of the 20 best writers under 40 years old, certainly lives up to that billing. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now a fellow in paediatric haematology-ongcology, he marries literary craft with a visceral understanding of the human body to create one of the most explicitly embodied books I’ve read. The Great Night is psychologically explicit, mortally explicit, sexually explicit. His prose is unassuming and easy-to-read, a coherent medium through which to convey his unique view of the world.

I read The Great Night on the back of two stunning reviews in The Independent and The Guardian. It is a beautiful book to hold and to read and the praise on the jacket fizzes and pops with effervescent exuberance*. Yet just as there are those who think that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about as comic as experimental pile surgery, The Great Night is likely to divide opinion. From such a brilliant premise, the plot sometimes gets indulgently lost and the back stories of Henry, Molly and Will can feel a little forced at times. For some, it will feel a little too like a male sex fantasy in faerie land.

But for all who hate The Great Night there will be those who love it. I’ll certainly be exploring Chris Adrian’s back catalogue further and looking forward to future books from him. This is an intriguing work from a writer who, in a world where too many books feel like they were written from a ‘how to write fiction’ guide, offers a fresh view of the world. He’s a storyteller with an almost unbounded imagination, and he routes his story in the very human lives of his characters. This is exactly what modern fiction can and should be. (less)

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May 16, 2012 Cheryl Gatling added it

This was one weird book. It is advertised as a re-telling of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream in contemporary San Francisco. There are some elements that are the same: young people wandering confused in the woods, poor people practicing a play, and faeries (always spelled that way in the book) being faeries. But this book is a good deal darker, and has details that are so bizarre it makes you wonder what the author was smoking when he wrote it. It's funny, too, though. The Great Night is Mi...more

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Feb 13, 2012 Lianne Burwell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: magic-realism, literary, library

On the Great Night, a number of mortals enter a park; a group of homeless people rehearsing their musical version of Soylent Green, and three people traveling seperately to a party that they never reach. And Titania and the fairies are celebrating the Great Night, and mourning the continuing absence of Oberon, who left after and argument with Titania.

In the course of events, Puck -- or The Great Beast -- convinces Titania to set him free to seek Oberon, and goes on a rampage, trapping everyone i...more

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Jun 26, 2011 Danny rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-book

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 24, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 3 of 5 stars

In this phantasmagorical tale, Chris Adrian reshaped “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” into a mammoth, messy, tilted, erotic, meandering reimagining 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 and atavistic population of characters that you will meet in this multiple narrat...more In this phantasmagorical tale, Chris Adrian reshaped “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” into a mammoth, messy, tilted, erotic, meandering reimagining 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 and atavistic 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 visionary epic 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 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 doleful memories of forsaken loved ones are lost and trapped in the park on their way to a summer solstice party. The tangled backstories 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 and now 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 I had with this book is that the fantastic elements were crowded with too much symbolism, and I had difficulty getting a purchase on the concepts. The visual surrealism, rather than taking me seamlessly to a deeper consciousness and serving as a metaphor or counterpoint, began to pile up and distract me. I was often bewildered with the action and commotion of the faeries. Rather than surrendering to the story, I had a more cerebral and exhausting experience. I lost control of the narrative—or did Adrian?

I was taken with his scuttling energy and the peering furtive faces; I 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 I was seeking was etherized. Adrian’s prose is rich and layered with raucous, ribald wit and 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 with me 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 captured me with his perversely baroque and insane merriment.

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May 01, 2011 Cass Morris rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fairy-tales-folklore, fantasy, magical-realism

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 lo...more 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.

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.

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Jun 03, 2011 Brian Herrick rated it 4 of 5 stars

As a Shakespeare guy (I'm actually seeing King Lear tonight), it's hard not to read this and try to draw extensive comparisons to every character, motif, plotline, etc. But, seeing as this is a different work, I was tried very hard not to. But still, the bones of a Midsummer Night's Dream are there: Titania and Oberon (mmmm beer) quarreling over a mortal. But this time it's a child, and it dies, and instead of a series of playful tricks in which everything is fine, the stakes are higher.

BUT it m...more

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May 18, 2011 Alissa rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is literally a clusterfuck; as in, people and faeries are clustered together. Fucking. A lot. They are also masturbating, having sex with trees, spying on people masturbating, and spying on people masturbating on trees.

Well, I see that you're kerflummoxed as to why I gave this book a lowly three stars. Truthfully, I was thinking two until the tree sex scene.

So anyway, what is going on in this beautiful disaster of a mind f-ing? A bunch of heartbroken, lonely ass people stumble into Bu...more

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Sep 16, 2011 Nathan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: other-fiction

Did not enjoy, alas. Interesting idea: Titania and Oberon are separated, and bored Titania frees Puck while at a feast under a tree in a SF public park. Four interesting SF residents are caught up in the subsequent action. However, the novel isn't about the action or resolving the situation, the situation is a premise by which to explore the messed-up humans and their backstory. The story is told in long three-or-four part sentences, which have a rhythm and excitement of their own, but between t...more

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Jul 06, 2012 amanda eve rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: i-give-up

I give the fuck up. I strongly disliked the book as a whole, but the whole cougar/teenage boy salad tossing/queefing scene made me want to throw my Kindle across the room.

This book is dreary and tedious as fuck. The scenes with Titania and her court were by far the most interesting parts; I even liked Demon Puck! The humans are just horrible and their stories were so dull and repetitive.

I get the sense that Adrian, in an attempt to make this a truly unique spin on Shakespeare, confused "spin"...more

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Feb 07, 2012 Maria rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I really wanted to like this book. I loved the premise, and the first half of the book was really promising. I was especially interested in the story line of Titania and Oberon and their experience of mortal loss in the death of their "adopted" changeling child.

But overall I was quite disappointed with this book. It just failed to tie the stories together in a meaningful way, and the final twists were more frustrating than surprising or exciting. I didn't care much for any of the characters...wh...more

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Jul 27, 2012 Lauren rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I am sad that the average review for this one is hovering near 3 stars, because I found it one of the better books I've read this year. Maybe that's just because I spent so much time sunk into crazy Vorkosigan-land, but there was a lot here for me to like.

It's not perfect, but the magic is done well; there is no airy-fairy shit in this book. I don't usually cry when reading books, but the scenes in the hospital got me pretty close; even though the whole thing is crazy and manufactured, there is...more

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Jul 07, 2012 Meg Cox rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is a modern take on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Oberon and Titania live under a hill in a San Francisco park, in a very colorfully depicted fairy world. Puck is there, too, of course, causing trouble. Three lovelorn human beings walking through the park get swept up into the fairy world, and thinks turn dark and dangerous.

Very promising, and I heard it lavishly praised on NPR by someone bemoaning the fact that no Pulitzer for fiction was awarded this year. The person said this wa...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Judy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel

I would give it a 3.75, I think...

Chris Adrian is a powerful writer. He creates characters and stories that stay with you, and The Great Night is no exception. It is (loosely, in my opinion) based on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," although there are a lot of sections that really aren't. Unless I am not seeing the parallels. That's the problem, for me, with this book - it is very hard to read, because different parts of the story are interwoven so subtly that you have to pay Really Close Attention....more

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May 06, 2011 Jon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

The reemergence of Jordan Sasscock as a minor character right from the first few pages is telling of what's in store in The Great Night. Fantastical as ever, Chris Adrian weaves another complex, multi-layered tale of average people having magical situations thrust upon them, and the relationships that brought them to that point.

Even though at a glance, The Great Night would almost appear too juvenile of a story for me to want to pick up, it ends up sneaking in some really great tales that turn...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Lauren rated it 5 of 5 stars

This modern take on A Midsummer Nights Dream is more of a loose interpretation; a jumping-off point rather than an adaptation. Oberon, Titania, and Puck are all there, but they are darker and stranger, and instead of four lovers, there are three- each of whom spends a large portion of the book in various flashbacks of their own lives and their downward spiraling love lives. Is this confusing? Yes. Especially at the end, which becomes a bit of a clusterf**k. However, Adrian is forgiven for the oc...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Gerhard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

Wow, wow, wow. What a gorgeous, heartbreaking, ribald, beautiful, mesmerising, intoxicating concoction of a novel this is. The plot is as light as fairy dust: three people wander into San Francisco's Buena Vista Park on a midsummer night's eve, on way their to a party. On this magical Great Night, Titania and her court hold sway over the park ... and our characters soon get lost, both physically and metaphorically. Chris Adrian then proceeds to tell their back stories, how they have all been wou...more

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Jun 01, 2011 Amy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Despite a pedantic problem with the narrative, I did really enjoy these intertwined stories of grieving individuals in San Francisco on one night of magic. The author uses the characters of Titania, Puck and the fairies to illustrate the universality of loss and the damage that families can do to one another. It's also a rather charming love letter to the city, which I always enjoy.

The problem I had was that the author appears to conflate Puck with Caliban in a seriously incorrect way, which, I...more

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Feb 15, 2012 Kristen Boers rated it 2 of 5 stars

I remember reading the changeling story in the New Yorker, featuring Oberon and Titania and thinking "I want more of this, always."

More to come. Beyond excited.

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Sep 16, 2011 Kim Sheehan rated it 3 of 5 stars

I liked the concept of this book: a retelling of Midsummer Night's Dream where mortals are trapped in a park in San Francisco facing destruction by the unleashing of a malevolent force. The writing allowed me to see the story in my head. I loved the backstory of Oberon, Titania and Boy, which reflected the author's background in pediatric oncology.

What I didn't like was that this story was just too darn hard to follow. I couldn't keep all the backstories of the mortals straight, and those backs...more

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Sep 08, 2011 Allyson rated it 1 of 5 stars

I don't know why I actually finished reading this book, but it was over the course of 2 weeks so just meandered along.
Maybe it was the setting of San Francisco which I found intriguing, or his writing.
I kept hoping it would pick up, start to sparkle or reveal a new depth. No.
I enjoyed reading his last book, A Better Angel but this was dismal. The plot and references escaped me and the smut was boring. Nothing at all redeeming about it and had I not had the time today to finish it in one sittin...more

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May 14, 2011 Bradley rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

Love, love this book. It's a modern day re-telling of A Midsummer Night's Dream. My reading project this year is a summer of Shakespeare so this was a great prelude to that.

The book takes place in San Francisco. Three people are on on their way to a party. Each of them are traveling separately but they are all going to the same party. All three decided to cut through a park. Unfortunatly for them, Titania, queen of the fay, has decided to unleash a lethal force in order to win back her husband,...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Caleb rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

The Great Night is a wonderfully strange trip of a novel. Though it is drenched in magic and the fantastic it is often pulled down into the mundane world where it becomes another enthralling but ultimately useless curiosity and distraction.

Frequently startling and dark in equal measure it draws the reader into its world for one night through offering a glimpse into the range of characters who are grounded and familiar but still somewhat surreal. While the fantastic and magic are the elements th...more

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About Chris Adrian

Chris Adrian was born in Washington D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he attended Harvard Divinity School, and is currently a pediatric fellow at UCSF. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. In 2010, he was chosen as one of the 20 best writers under 40 by The New Yorker.

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My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

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Quotes from The Great Night

“If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder.

"I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.” — 8 people liked it

“He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.” — 1 person liked it

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