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.
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