Joanne Harris is still, after many years, best known for Chocolat. A wide variety of other works have emerged from her pen, including the Norse mythology retelling/re-imagining The Gospel of Loki. In The Moonlight Market, Harris mixes the style and sensibility of the fairytale with urban grit of London past and present.
Once, long ago, in a different world, the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen courted, fell in love, and had a child. But that child slipped out of their world and was lost in other ones, and the King and Queen’s love curdled to bitter hate out of the pain of that loss. The Butterflies would henceforth, vampire-like, drain love and life for their sustenance, and they and the Moths scattered down the worlds, at war—a war never to end until a Moth and a Butterfly once more fell in love.
The Butterflies and the Moths are reminiscent of the fantasy genre’s commonly repeated use of two rival courts of faerie (fae/fey/fay/fairy/faery) beings who slide through the interstices of the modern world, glamorous and glittering. Yet however reminiscent, they are their own thing, and Harris imbues them with both familiarity and unease. They are dangerous in all their guises, but also feel like a natural part of London’s own peculiar cityscape.
Tom Argent is The Moonlight Market’s central character, a bewildered young idiot of a protagonist. He’s a photographer, working in a camera shop for a lackadaisical boss who’s also his landlord. Photography is Tom’s passion, a bright light of truth amid the lonely—indeed, practically atomised—existence of the rest of his life. He’s a dreamer who lives in between the day-to-day doldrums of ordinary London and the dream of his art. But when a beautiful—dazzling—stranger enters the photography shop, he falls madly and imprudently in love. Or at least the instant fascinated passionate obsession that is easily confused for love among the young and lonely.
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The Moonlight Market
The beautiful Vanessa is, however, more than she appears, and in following her, Tom finds himself led to the borders of a world different than the one he knows, hidden slantwise from view among the alleyways and roofs of his familiar London, full of glamour, danger, and fairytale promise. A world, it transpires—as we the reader learn through the brief fairytale-esque snippets with which each fresh section of The Moonlight Market opens—that Tom has been visiting all of his life. Visiting, and then forgetting, because the coin of the Moonlight Market is memories, and everything taken from there must be paid for in full. That includes photographs, which Tom keeps taking—he just can’t help himself.
Understanding this world through a fairytale prism primes Tom to see himself as the hero in a tale of true love, rather than misdirected obsession, despite the frustration and warnings of the Moth-girl Charissa, who has—so we learn—watched him since he first encountered the Moonlight Market, and has loved him despite himself, and despite his never remembering her, all that time. The consequences of Tom’s misdirected obsession are going to come back to bite him on the arse, in a fashion just predictable enough to play well with fairytale logic, while being unexpected enough to keep things interesting.
The Moonlight Market is a short book. It clocks in at under 300 pages, slighter than Harris’s Gospel of Loki. Its juxtaposition of the fantastical and the everyday in London treads much the same ground as many other novels before it. London, it sometimes seems to me, is the ur-city for a certain kind of fantasia-in-urbes, as it were: In fiction it becomes more a set of collected impressions recalling its previous appearances than the blood-flesh-and-bones viscera of a real place. (Perhaps this is always true of heavily-fictionalised cities. I’ve never lived in London—or New York, another city that suffers under the weight of its own mythology—so perhaps the view is different when you’re not a visitor.) Harris’s London can’t escape the weight of the genre. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to try. The appeal of the fairytale, or the fairytale-esque, lies in part in its familiarity: the sense of the known, counterpoised against the liminal strangeness of the fairytale intrusion.
Tom is not all that clever. Nor is he very genre-savvy. Yet his very obliviousness makes him feel both more real and more sympathetic. Bless his heart, he does mean well. Despite his best efforts, he’s less of a hero and more of an unwitting tourist, falling in and out of trouble as the locals—in this case a strange old bloke known as Spider, as well as Vanessa and Charissa—alternately hustle him, scam him, or help him.
Harris’s narration and prose style is gorgeous without being ornate: straightforward and slightly arch, studded with the occasional vividly beautiful turn of phrase. You can tell that Harris knows exactly what she’s doing.
The Moonlight Market is a perfectly paced gem of a modern fairytale, from a writer of compelling power. This wouldn’t usually be my kind of book, but Harris made me more than like it. A+, would read again.
The Moonlight Market is published by Pegasus Books.
