End of an Era - Bad Machinery

Once upon a time there was a comic named Bobbins, which followed the adventures of a group of friends working at a local listings magazine in the West Yorkshire city of Tackleford. It was… 

End of an era, take 1.

Okay, honestly, it was probably a miracle of the internet that Bobbins got off the ground and a testament to writer-illustrator John Allison's perseverance that it made it through the difficult early period when the illustrator part of his job title was more a function of necessity than of ability. Like many webcomics it took a while for the strip to get its art style in hand, and Allison has bounced back and forth between hand drawn, computer drawn and something inbetween pretty much ever since, with Bad Machinery perhaps his first comic to adopt a consistent style from beginning to end. 

Bobbins ran from late 1998 to early 2002. Leading character Holly West vanished in the Himalayas and returned an unrepentant bitch queen to run the City Limits magazine into the ground. The magazine folded, the cast were laid off and they stepped aside to allow minor characters Tessa Davies and Rachel Montford-Dukakis, journalism students on a course run by former City Limits editor Len Pickering, to shine in their own spin off, Scary Go Round from June 2002.

You could be forgiven for expecting
the comic to be about these characters.

By October, however, Tessa and Rachel were sharing the limelight with Bobbins veterans Shelley Winters, Amy Chilton and Tim Jones. Admittedly, Shelley was dead and revived as a zombie, but you can't keep a good ginger down and she was soon sporting a sassy new pulse; and not the only member of the cast to whom this would happen. Tessa and Rachel disappeared for a while, returning as worshippers of a satanic figure until one of them went mad with power and the other allowed the cult they had formed to burn her in a wicker vole or something. Reminiscing about Scary Go Round is like what I imagine remembering a drug-fuelled wilderness period might be like; you're never entirely sure what really happened. Bobbins-born slacker Ryan died and came back, Amy and Shelley travelled back in time via teapot and gazumped Lennon and McCartney's songwriting credits, and supersexy, semi-competent superspy Fallon Young was definitely there, battling international crime with a sassy look and a Chinese burn.

End of an era, take 2.

We met younger characters via Shelley's sister Erin, including Dark Esther – later the star of Allison's actually published as a comic comic Giant Days – and the Boy (son of the Mother and the Father, despite 'the Boy' being confirmed as a nickname; apparently the Family is hella supportive.) Thanks to Jekyll and Hyde potions and an attempt to sell a difficult class to the devil to help pad the school coffee budget (I was teaching at the time; I'm not sure sticking the 'what goes on teacher training day stays on teacher training day' comic up in the staff room went down so well,) Erin sort of ended up as the Queen of Hell. An exchange trip went perilous when the Boy thwarted an attempt by a Wendigo to terrorise France in the guise of an Easter Bunny with the help of the briefly-retired Easter Bell (you see what I mean, right?)

The even younger characters Shauna Wickle and Lottie de Groote featured in a late comic. They were girl detectives, but were pipped to the post in solving a school mystery by boy detectives Linton, Sonny and Jack, despite the boys not appearing in most of the story. Scary Go Round wrapped in September 2009 and new comic Bad Machinery took up the mantle ten days later, following the feud of these intrepid young mystery solvers as they navigated the perils of big school (with some indirect assistance from reformed slacker-turned-inspirational teacher Ryan Beckwith.)

Again, you could be forgiven to thinking that Jack was going
to be the lead.

And now, in April 2017, Bad Machinery has finally wrapped. There were mystery beasts and giant flying walnuts; occult shenanigans and human douchebaggery; love and rivalry; mods and rockers; an inner city grammar school with at least two Selkies in simultaneous attendance; and an attempt to get banned from every municipal swimming pool in the UK by performing all of the prohibited acts on the pool safety poster in a single swimming session. The comic has been brightening my weekdays for more than seven years – with intermittent breaks for Scary Go Round and Bobbins revivals, the original Giant Days strips, and the story of how Erin came back from Hell at least twice and the Boy (now going by his actual name, Eustace) joined Tackleford's exclusive club for those who have actually died and come back by one means or another – but the adventures of the Mystery Solvers are over.

Well, that is to say that they will no longer be front and centre. In 2002 we thought we were losing Shelley and co. and they couldn't stay away for six months. Against pretty much all expectation, Ryan turned out to have trained as a teacher and was in Bad Machinery almost from the off, and even more unexpectedly, Amy turned out to have married him, and later gave Shauna a job. Erin Winters returned from Hell the first time before Bad Machinery kicked off and has been a thorn in the Mystery Girls' side (and source of befuddled admiration for the Mystery Boys) since.

What this means for the future is that I would be most surprised if this is the last we ever heard of Shauna and Lottie, or Mildred, or the Mystery Boys, or Little Claire never turned up again as we march forward into a bold new era of All-New Scary Go Round.

End of an era.

Reading Roundup - March 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

Once more I've hit my two book target, so I'm a steady one book behind. I may rethink the Big French Summer idea. In March I wrapped up Gothic with White is for Witching and began Mad People with The Bell Jar, which proved to fall alarmingly within my existing headspace. Still no poetry.

I kicked off Audible's Definitive Sherlock Holmes collection, written of course by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and all excellently read and foreworded by national treasure and fellow Old Queen(1), Stephen Fry. It’s fascinating coming back to the Holmes canon as an adult, steeped in the various western traditions of detective fiction, because as detective fiction they are actually a little unsatisfying. It’s the character who is fascinating; his deductions appear more in the manner of a parlour trick, or perhaps the half-technobabbled reasonings of a CSI CSI. A substantial chunk of many of the narratives – especially the first two novels – is given over to the criminal’s own account of their life, and in this too the stories are notable: That a good half of the perpetrators are as sympathetic as their victims, if not more so.

Naturally, the collection begins with A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Holmes novels. This initial foray into the world of the great detective serves to highlight some of the limitations of the formula, especially when it comes to the longer stories, with almost half of the narrative given over to Jefferson Hope's story, and a number of Holmes' deductions based on information not made available to the reader (a complaint which Doyle later owns, with Holmes making the same criticism to Watson, albeit from his perspective of wishing a clear elucidation of his methods.) The story also hinges on a perception of the Mormon faith which buys into pretty much every ill its early detractors thought of it.

A Study in Scarlet is followed by The Sign of the Four, which wraps up the story of Holmes and Watson with the latter going off to get married after what is very clearly only their second case together, whatever later entries may say. Conan Doyle is on firmer ground with the Indian mutiny than the founding of Salt Lake City, but while his Indian characters are very well-drawn for the time, dear lord but the Andaman pygmy Tonga is something else entirely, a near-bestial creature with the same alien ugliness Conan Doyle ascribed to dinosaurs in The Lost World.

This is followed by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first of the short story collections, including such classics as 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' and 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches'. Even at this stage in the proceedings, a certain repetition was apparent in the stories. The Speckled Band and 'A Case of Identity' both feature women grievously misused by stepfathers to control their fortunes, with the latter featuring one of the cruellest devices in the canon, while 'The Five Orange Pips' is notable for featuring the Ku Klux Klan in much the same role as the Mormons in A Study in Scarlet, as a ruthless secret society employing mysterious, inescapable assassins to punish deserters.

'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' is one of the stories in which the conceit of the narrative most conflicts with the narrative itself. It refers to events which Holmes conspired to conceal, as the guilty party was dying and the innocent not at threat, which feels odd given that Watson is apparently publishing this well within the lifetime of most of those involved. It is especially noteworthy as on several other occasions he refers to matters that he cannot discuss, and the untimely death of Helen Stoner freeing him to speak of the events of the Speckled Band.

'The Man with the Twisted Lip', 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' and 'The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor' are lighter affairs, with no murder involved in any of the cases. 'The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb' is the first of a number of stories in which Holmes addresses a problem before ever visiting the scene (arguably; he never leaves London in 'The Five Orange Pips' either, but he had planned to.) It is also referred to as one of only two which Watson brought to his attention, although this is soon overturned in the next collection, and features a gang of villains who get away while Holmes is rallying the official force. This is another feature we will see again.

Finally, 'The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet' is notable for having a female villain (‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ has a female member of the gang, but she breaks ranks to aid the victim.) As is often the case with such characters in the Holmes canon, she gets away scot free, but with predictions of future unhappiness as her comeuppance.

I also managed to clear up The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes this month, which means everything up to the death of Sherlock Holmes is covered. As The Adventures begins with the unequivocal classic ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and “the Woman”, so The Memoirs opens with ‘Silver Blaze’; perhaps a less known story overall, but featuring the original curious incident of the dog in the night time. ‘The Yellow Face’ has a similar deal to ‘The Noble Bachelor’, with a young widow and a second marriage, although here it is a half-black child whose appearance disrupts the happy routine, and I can’t believe that it wasn’t pretty progressive that not only Holmes and Watson but the husband in the case accept the child completely. Similarly, ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’ treads similar, but not identical, ground to ‘The Red-Headed League’, with a gang providing a too-good-to-be-true job as a means of getting someone out of the way for a time.

‘The “Gloria Scott”’ and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ treat of early cases. The first is notable for the solution being entirely provided by the written narrative of the victim rather than by any deduction of Holmes’, while the latter once more features a female villain who vanishes into the distance to a presumed life of doubt and fear. ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’ pits Holmes against the country set, while another classic, ‘The Crooked Man’ returns to familiar territory with an old offence from India leading to a tragic ending. ‘The Resident Patient’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’ each feature a puzzle that Holmes successfully solves, but too late to save a life, and the lack of sympathy for the dead man in the latter story is quite shocking. In both cases, the criminal gang involved vanishes into the wind; by this point it is clear that Conan Doyle has a limited interest in arrest and trial scenes.

‘The Naval Treaty’ sees Holmes act for the good of Queen and Country, and his client, and features one of the strongest puzzles in the canon to this point, with pretty much every step of the deduction available for the reader to follow. Finally, in this collection, Fry brings the vital catch in the voice to the closing lines of ‘The Final Problem’, as Holmes gives his life – or so it seems – to end the career of the Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty. Given that it recounts the crowning glory of his career as a detective, ‘The Final Problem’ is notable for not giving any details of the chain of reasoning which led Holmes to his nemesis.

In between chapters of Holmes, I caught a couple of short stories by Neil Gaiman which follow the protagonist of American Gods, Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon. ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ sees our hero in Scotland on a roundabout return route from Norway, walking the walks and seeing the sights, when he is offered a lucrative job acting as bouncer for a bunch of posh folks from England having a party in a local manse. The locals are an odd bunch and Shadow is having weird dreams, but he chooses to take the job, against the advice of the enigmatic barmaid Jenny and finds himself caught up in an ancient struggle between men and monsters, with no-one to say truly which is worse. Then ‘Black Dog’ brings him to England, and a rural couple with a secret to keep.

The two shorts have many similarities: The rural settings, the old traditions, and of course Shadow’s relentless bad luck with women. Critically, Gaiman captures the difference of feeling between Britain and America. Assuming by its popularity there that his depiction of the roadside faith of America is accurate, he does the same for British folk beliefs, especially those in ‘Black Dog’, practiced slightly furtively by unassuming folk, almost more as habit than anything else. As always, Gaiman as author and reader is an excellent storyteller and the stories are easy to listen to several times over.

The last book for this month is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which is one I’d been meaning to read for a while. This was the audiobook, but it’ read by Peter S. Beagle himself. As in the Rankin Bass adaptation, it tells the story of a nameless, ageless unicorn who realises that she is the only one of her kind left in the world. She goes in search of the others and learns that a cruel king has imprisoned them all with the aid of a supernatural bull, and with the assistance of an erratic wizard, a cynical romantic and a larval hero she clashes with the King for the fate of magic and her people. In fact, one of the things that really strikes me about the book is just how faithful the animated adaptation (screenwritten by Beagle) actually was. The main difference is Beagle’s cheerfully anachronistic narrative language. Reminiscent of TH White, it takes the novel’s setting from mediaeval fantasy to the same sort of timeless Neverland as The Once and Future King.

Within this Neverland, the story of The Last Unicorn is one of a world of failing wonder. The disappearance of the unicorns leaves a world that, for all its dragons and ogres and heroes, lacks a certain sparkle. Heroing is a job; the tropes of romance are performed in a perfunctory fashion. It’s fantasy as mundanity, and beautifully done; the book is a classic for a reason.

(1) I maintain that this is the correct term for an alumnus of Queens' College.

2017 Challenge - The Bell Jar

Book 5 (March, Mad People)

The Bell Jar, by Silvia Plath (read by Maggie Gyllenhaal)

Reason for Reading: The Bell Jar was one of the first entries on the original list, recommended by Sara, and the month's overarching theme of Mad People was suggested by Abi to link it with Trainspotting. This was a book that I went into pretty much blind. I knew that it was a novel by the poet Sylvia Plath and that it was called The Bell Jar, and that was about it.

Esther Greenwood is an academically successful girl, whose life seems to have peaked. Having earned the chance to spend a month in New York as one of twelve guest editors on a magazine she finds herself at a loss in the big city, and then unable to find herself once she returns to her home in the suburbs of Boston. She suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide, before slowly returning to health in a private asylum. The book's first person narrative follows Esther's skewed and unreliable perspective as she attributes sinister and selfish objectives to the people around her, as viewed through the distorting glass and suffocating air of the bell jar which separates her from normality.

The book depicts a world and a mental health system far removed from our own, despite the relatively short gap between Plath's time and ours. With her country tan fading Esther calls herself 'yellow as a chinaman,' and her first psychiatrist assigns her crude ECT after two sessions. While I am approaching this challenge as a means of exploring other viewpoints, however, I was surprised how much I recognised in Plath's semi-autobiographical narrative from the time of my own lowest ebb. I was never so bad that I could not read, but the sense of that distorting glass is one I once knew well.

The Audible release of The Bell Jar is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose cool, almost detached delivery renders the mesmerising language of the novel all the more affecting. And it is the language that is perhaps the most remarkable thing in this novel. Like the superb translated text of 100 Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar contains not a sentence that is purely functional, not a word that is present simply to convey a single, dry piece of information. The prose itself is art, beyond its value as a medium for the story.

2017 Challenge - White is for Witching

Book 4 (February, Gothic)

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi

Reason for Reading: This was in many ways the impetus to break from 'classic' novels, based on a very strong recommendation from The Anxious Gamer. It replaced... something older and altogether more conventional to accompany We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and although I have a number of clear commonalities with Oyeyemi as an English-born Cambridge graduate - in the same field as Ore Lind, indeed - it seems unlikely that our experiences as a black woman and a white man would have been similar even there.

White is for Witching weaves the tale of the twins, Eliot and especially Miranda, in a disjointed and experimental fashion, beginning with four decontextualised responses to an unknown questioner before proceeding with four more or less conventional narrative voices: a third person narrative following Miranda, and the first person voices of Eliot, Miranda's university friend Ore, and that of the Silver House (which may actually also be the narrator of Miranda's sections, now I think of it,) a rambling manor which the twins' father runs as a guest house. His wife, a photographer, was killed in Haiti and Miranda wears her watch, set always to Haitian time. Eliot is perhaps a little eccentric, but grounded and part of the wider world. Miranda is lost and distracted, suffering from pica, an eating disorder which compels her to consume whatever will do her no good. Ore is an anchor to Miranda at university, but at the cost of her own self, which is physically whittled away by the relationship. And the house waits, knowing that like all Silvers, Miranda belongs only with, only to it.

I'm going to start off by saying that my reading habits - I mostly get a chance to read on the train to and from work - are not well suited to gothic. I struggled somewhat to get into White is for Witching, and it only really clicked for me about a third of the way through, when Miranda went to Cambridge(1). Perhaps the Silver House was too abstract a place for me to find mysterious, whereas Ore's view of the streets and colleges of my alma mater had the underlying familiarity which allowed it to convert what I know into something uncanny. what has a rambling guest house with too many rooms to do with me, after all, but student dorms cut incongruously into a wall hung heavy with a sepulchral air... that I can be chilled by. With my attention thus grabbed, I found the last third of the book, back in the Silver House near Dover, flowed more easily, and Ore's romantic investment in Miranda gave me more cause to fear for her inevitable doom.

I'm not convinced that the modern Gothic is my natural home (which may be the point, of course,) but while White is for Witching did not grip me as it has some, I certainly don't regret the experience. As an aside on medium, I found it more than usually frustrating to read on a Kindle, because there were many occasions when I wanted to flick back and check my recollection of some small thing, and that is hard to do on a Kindle. I am also sad that this one wasn't available as an audiobook, as I think that, well read and ideally by multiple readers, it could be something very special.

(1) Online reviews seem evenly divided on whether this juncture was when the book came alive or got bogged down.

Reading Roundup - February 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

This month I have hit my two book target, reading Nights at the Circus and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although this still leaves me a book behind going into March, and I haven't done more than flip through The Rose that Grew from Concrete. It turns out that I suck at reading poetry in any systematic manner.

Rogues is not so much a book that I read/listened to this month as one that I finished. It's a collection of short stories curated by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozoir. The stories are written by a wide array of successful and highly-acclaimed authors working in a variety of genres, including contemporary thriller, western, horror, historical, SF and fantasy, united by the common theme of roguery. As is the way of anthologies, it's a mixed bag, with some excellent entries, some less successful, and a few that I can't honestly recall after a few months, although none of them were truly dire. Particular highlights include: Joe Abercrombie's 'Tough Times All Over', a fantasy tale following the path of a package which is repeatedly stolen from a succession of carriers; Scott Lynch's 'A Year and a Day in Old Theradane', in which a team of retired thieves are tasked with stealing a street; Neil Gaiman's 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back'(1); and 'Now Showing' by Connie Willis, a caper of conspicuous consumption set in a near future where a corrupt cinema industry screens non-existent films in vast consumer centres. It's been a useful standby between full novels, and I may look at getting another of Martin and Dozoir's cross-genre collections some time, although for now I think I'll fill that hole with the short stories in the new Definitive Sherlock Holmes.

As the third book in the Last Dragonslayer series, Jasper Fforde's The Eye of Zoltar fails in only one respect; that of actually finishing the story. It turns out that the series is a tetralogy, not a trilogy, although Fforde's website does not have a due date for the book currently titled Jennifer and the Wizard (formerly The Great Troll War.) The book itself follows orphan heroine Jennifer Strange as she is dispatched to the precipitous terrain and treacherous politics of the Cambrian Empire to retrieve the titular jewel, with the aid of newly-minted sorcerer Perkins and pre-teen jeopardy tour guide Addy Powell, while at the same time unmasking a conspiracy and educating the impossibly spoiled Princess Shazeen in the fine art of not being a complete brat. As with the last book, there are a few niggles with continuity, not least that the trolls previously seen to be relatively sophisticated beings who consider humans as a cute but annoying invasive species have apparently reverted to being brutal, corpse-displaying savages. The stakes of the novel end up significantly greater than in the previous books, and it ends on an as yet unresolved cliffhanger, which is a bit of a bugger really.

Jane Collingwood once more provides a fine reading, with a wide array of voices and accents; some better than others. 

Finally for the month, I gave up on Viking epic West of the Moon on the grounds that if I'm going to tell my daughter she ought to change library books she isn't reading, I ought to do the same myself, and instead picked up Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon, on which the film is based. It is a completely different beast, far more interested in joke names about bodily functions than father-son bonding, and featuring a culture in which dragons are ubiquitous in the place of hawks and hounds, but less so as horses. It's not a bad book, and a quick read besides, although I'm in no hurry to plough through the next eighteen of the buggers. I confess, I am probably biased in that I saw the film first and loved it, and enjoyed the second one (although it has its problems, some of which I think I overlooked in considering the films as part of the wider world created in the accompanying TV series,) but in this case I definitely prefer the film.

(1) Although in all honestly I am baffled by the reader, Roy Dotrice's decision to give the Marquis a French accent. Name notwithstanding, I've always considered the Marquis to be a London boy.

2017 Reading Challenge - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Book 3 (February, Gothic)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Reason for Reading: This one was a recommendation on my original classics challenge. I realised I was very low on female authors (and in fact on American authors,) and my sister suggested that I add We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my Gothic selection. In a way, that was the start of the transformation of the challenge into a way of stretching, albeit only slightly, my cultural horizons.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a short novel, recounted in the first person by Mary Katherine 'Merricat' Blackwood, the younger of two sisters living in splendid isolation with their crippled uncle in their grand old family house. It emerges throughout the story that, six years prior, the rest of the family was murdered when arsenic was mixed with the sugar. Merricat had been sent to bed without supper as a punishment, Uncle Julian took only a little sugar and Constance took none, which resulted in her being tried – and acquitted – of the murders. As a result of these events, Julian was crippled, Constance reduced to an agoraphobic shut-in and Merricat became a half-feral creature, practicing home-cooked sympathetic magic to transform their home into a mystical fortress, into which outsiders intrude only briefly before being driven away by the fear which the Blackwoods purposely cultivate. Then Charles Blackwood arrives, a cousin intent on 'helping', and Merricat's world begins to unravel.

The novel is perhaps most notable for the perspective of its thoroughly unreliable narrator, Merricat, whose fantasies of life on the Moon and the mystical duel in which she engages with Charles to purge his influence from the house border on hallucination. For her, the world is a mystical place, governed by invisible forces that she manipulates through self-created rituals. She views everyone outside her immediate circle with poisonous distain, frequently picturing those around her dead, and shelters Constance even when Constance herself tries to push at the boundaries of their circumscribed world. Hers is a simple, unsophisticated voice, but powerful enough that I barely began to challenge many of her assertions until I had finished the audiobook.

Merricat is eighteen, but acts as if she is still twelve, while Constance is some ten years older, but acts like an ingénue thanks to their near-total isolation from social influences. The narrative depicts Charles as a grasping, conniving bastard, but in his last appearance there is just a shade of doubt to cast doubt on whether this is because he was an irredeemable gold-digger, or because Merricat could see no good – indeed, no humanity – in him. Similarly, the villagers act in a truly monstrous fashion towards the family, seeming to justify Merricat's view of them as subhuman brutes, but when the 'friends' of the Blackwoods insist that they misunderstood events, there is no counterpoint to tell us if Merricat viewed some lesser offence through her own skewed lens, or if rather, after the fact, the other 'good' families of the area simply do not wish to confront the possibility that they live among people capable of harbouring such hatred.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an odd, dark little novel, with a deceptive and lingering power in its simple prose style and a morbidly compelling central character. There is a film adaptation in post-production, and I am honestly fascinated to see how they bring this to the screen, and sceptical of the ability of the visual medium to do the story justice.

2017 Reading Challenge - Nights at the Circus

Book 2 (January, Magic Realism(1))

Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter

Reason for Reading: Angela Carter is one of the primary exponents of magic realism in the western world, and one of my mother's favourite authors. Her work is not entirely new to me, having read The Bloody Chamber a time or two since first seeing Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and I had heard bits of Nights at the Circus on BBC7 as was, but never all of it.

Nights at the Circus is a novel in three parts. In the first, an aerialiste known as Fevvers recounts her life history to an American journalist named Walsher in the closing years of the 19th century. Fevvers performs with a magnificent pair of wings spreading from her shoulders, and claims to be a genuine winged woman. Hatched from an egg, raised by honest prostitutes and briefly ensnared by the rich and venal for their own reasons, hers is the story of a unique being, a freak of nature, and its truth or falsehood remains uncertain.

In the second part, Fevvers, with her companion and foster-mother Lizzie, sets out on a grand tour with an American circus, to St Petersburg and thence across Siberia to sail to America, and Walsher follows, taking up the role of junior clown. Even as the Petersburg performances take them to the heights of stardom, jealousy and madness tear at the circus, and Fevvers is stalked by a wealthy but sinister admirer. In the third part, Fevvers' internal monologue becomes accessible to us as she begins to lose her magical nature. The circus is hijacked in Siberia and the performers cast adrift in a world becoming more magic and less real by the moment.

Nights at the Circus is an extraordinary novel just on a linguistic level. No sentence is functional or throwaway, every one is crafted, whether for soaring poetry or crude vernacular (of which there is plenty.) The book weaves a strange and magical world out of mostly ordinary things; Lizzie manipulates time with a clock, while Fevvers' virtue is defended with a toy sword the loss of which diminishes her. Fevvers herself is a wondrous grotesque; a towering, graceful glutton who gives forth high philosophy in the language of the London street. The other characters in the play are no less fantastical, their circus roles imbuing them with a potent, archetypal magic of their own. Even Walsher, the putative everyman, is eventually disabused of his skepticism through a magic of his own, first as a clown and then as a shaman.

This is an extraordinary, dizzying fantasy of greed and magnificence, envy and liberation, spirituality and carnality. Once more, I have no regrets over choosing this one, although I do wish that Audible had the Kirstie MacColl reading I remember (but which Google appears in ignorance of.)

(1) In one passage of the book, the very world it is set in is described in exactly these terms.