by Chris Adrian
Bobby! he thought. Forgive me! He meant, most immediately, Forgive me for forgetting you, and yet he also meant Forgive me for everything else, and yet also just as soon as he said it he realized it was not what he meant to say. Or rather, there was something more important to say to Bobby and not much time to say it. He tried to hurl himself across the country, but his body wouldn’t budge, and he tried to fling himself there as a whispering wind, but that was too hard, too. Maybe impending Death was fickle with his gifts, or maybe he was too close now to actually dying to manage it. He needed a messenger. Everyone seemed so busy. The faeries were packing, and Puck was still weeping, and Molly and Will were shambling down the hill. It seemed unfair, anyway, to make them carry his message; they had their whole lives to get on with. He considered Titania briefly, and though it would have been satisfying to make her deliver his message—as his murderer she owed him something, he was sure of that—he knew she would ultimately be too hard to convince. It would take too long, and he didn’t really have forever until he died. It only felt that way.
He settled for a squirrel. Its brain was small and its will was weak, but it was changeable and so he changed it into his messenger. Listen, he said to it, you must go tell Bobby the good news. And Henry told it, in rather a hurry, what it should say. The faeries had mounted their wagons and their chariots and their steeds, and Puck was sitting all alone by Henry’s body, weeping silver puppy tears that rolled like marbles down the hill, and Molly and Will and the others had nearly made it through the fog.
There is magic! the squirrel said.
Exactly! Henry said. And then: No, no … there is love! That’s what I mean to say. Or did he mean magic? Just tell him the whole story! he commanded, not knowing if the squirrel could do it, but wanting so desperately that it would. There it is, he thought. The last thing I want! He knew it was his mightiest moment as a magician, and he very carefully failed to want anything else while his fellow mortals found the steps out of the park and the faeries began their wild ride to find a new home, leaving behind a host of treasures under the hill, and leaving the body of Titania’s boy, which began very subtly to rot, and leaving Puck to weep as long as he would next to Henry’s body and then be free to harass the park and the city with muted mischief, but taking with them the secret word that might unbind him so it would never be spoken again.
Henry died just at dawn, and did no more magic in the world. From the west side of the park a host of faeries streamed down Waller Street, and birds fell out of the sky, and cats danced on garbage cans, and early rising widows fell down at their windows, blinded by the glorious glowing sight of them, and they rode faster and faster, so by the Outer Sunset those who witnessed their passing saw them as a wind full of color. They passed onto the ocean and were gone. From the east side of the park the mortals spilled out: Molly and Will, naked and hand in hand, just above the Duboce Steps, where they were quite startled by the lovely sunrise over the city; Princess and Huff and Mary and Bob and Hogg a little higher up. “I got one,” Princess said, because she had stuffed a faerie in her pocket, but when she brought it out she saw that it had been replaced with a bunch of sticks and a little grass. And from the north entrance a squirrel ran out and paused on the sidewalk on Haight Street, standing up on its hind legs and sniffing the air a moment before dropping to all fours and starting the long journey to Boston.
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR THE GREAT NIGHT
“Adrian can pack more depth of understanding about what makes a human human into a single page than many novelists wedge into entire books. More than perhaps any author today, he understands people.”
—Esquire
“The Shakespearean fairy world—lusty and cruelly orgiastic—seeps into the mortal world, where pain always accompanies love and often overtakes it. Adrian, who is a medical doctor, approaches the fantastical with a sensitive realism that gives even the selfish Titania poignance.”
—The New Yorker
“This wonderful novel is much more than a simple adaptation … . In Adrian’s hands this is a play about grief … . The saddest and most lovely scenes of this sad and lovely book are those in which the fairy queen waits in a San Francisco hospital. Her child is sick, and her magic cannot save him … . This is what Adrian has taken most powerfully from the play: the sad knowledge that heartbreak and love are necessary transformations, ones we need but cannot control.”
—Financial Times (London)
“In a shimmering, shape-shifting take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Adrian imagines the fairy kingdom and the mortals who stumble into it by way of Buena Vista Park … . Less a retelling of Shakespeare’s comedy … Adrian’s book is more like the play’s dark twin … . Black humor goes hand in hand with crushing sorrow, and sexual debauchery sometimes offers the only relief. Only through the commingling of two worlds, fairy and human, can Adrian’s very mortal beings confront their worst fears, the mistakes they’ve made, and, most frightening of all, their own personal demons … . A tender and all-too-human book.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Imagine Guillermo del Toro channeling the horrific majesty of Pan’s Labyrinth into a Shakespeare comedy and you’ll get an idea of Chris Adrian’s take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream … . Enthralling … lusty, darkly comic.”
—Josh Davis, Time Out (New York)
“Adrian’s recurring idea that the line between reality and surreality is most blurred in either tragedy or ecstasy whisks this story out of the physically fantastic and into the emotionally real. A sweet fever dream of a book. The Great Night is playful, erotic, hilarious, and, of course, heartbreaking.”
—Susan Stamberg, NPR’s Morning Edition
“Magical flora … wondrous … The Great Night is rich with hints of Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and L. M. Montgomery, but full of Adrian’s detailed and evocative imagination … . A novel ripe with crepuscular dreaming and starry dread.”
—The Portland Mercury
“By turns brilliant, cruel, tenderhearted, visionary, poetic, and profane.”
—Elle
“[Adrian] uses Shakespeare’s comedy not for a virtuosic display of stylistic mimicry but as a vessel to help him access and contain the amazingly bountiful, sparkling ‘jewels from the deep’ (as the Bard calls them) of his rich imagination.”
—NPR
“Droll, dark, and challenging … Ribald, raucous, and seriously funny … Chris Adrian is masterful.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Intense emotion always puts you on the threshold of the magical, in that it opens up a portal to a new plane of experience. The mash-up world Adrian has created, where the fantastical sits uneasily, queasily, alongside the mundane, captures this notion beautifully—particularly the way the loss of a loved one can push you to a place where you become estranged yourself.”
—Slate
ALSO BY CHRIS ADRIAN
Gob’s Grief
The Children’s Hospital
A Better Angel
CHRIS ADRIAN is the author of Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, and A Better Angel. He lives in San Francisco and New York City.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Eric Chinski, Eric Simonoff, Nathan Englander, Cressida Leyshon, and Deborah Treisman for the use of their wisdom and intelligence to improve this novel, and to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the means to complete it.
THE GREAT NIGHT. Copyright © 2011 by Chris Adrian. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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First published in the Un
ited States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
eISBN 9781429961004
First eBook Edition : May 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition as follows:
Adrian, Chris, 1970–
The great night / Chris Adrian.—1st ed.
p. cm.
A retelling of Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream
ISBN 978-0-374-16641-0
I. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Midsummer night’s dream.
II. Title.
PS3551.D75G74 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010047603
Picador ISBN 978-1-250-00738-4
First Picador Edition: May 2012
