Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
I picked up this novel because of an article by Neil Gaiman on the importance of fairy tales in which he links it to Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist, both of which I'd recently read. (Or reread, in the case of Rossetti's poem.) A couple three years ago I was blown away by Carter's collection of reimagined fairty tales, The Bloody Chamber (1979), after seeing the movie The Company of Wolves (1984), which was based on a couple of them. I continue to be amazed by her writing. Nights at the Circus is a truly great novel, and a fitting companion to Lud-in-the-Mist, although it is a far different creature in many ways.
It's an old-fashioned romance of sorts, with a mysterious birth, foster parents, a complicated love story, and picaresque adventures amongst outlaws. The heroine, Sophia Fevvers, "the Cockney Venus," is a woman with wings. Found on a doorstep with fragments of egg around her, she is raised in a brothel comprised of many freakish women, and she graduates naturally to the circus after that. The first third of the book is about her life growing up in the brothel, told as a story to an American reporter backstage in London. The middle third is about the adventures of the circus in St Petersburg, where the reporter has joined the troupe as a clown and Fevvers is pursued by an amorous duke. In the final third, the circus heads across Siberia on the way to Seattle and is lost in the wilderness when the train derails. (Too bad they never made it here.) The reporter is initiated into a shamanistic tribe, while Fevvers and her old nurse, Liz, escape from bandits only to find an eccentric musician living in an isolated mansion near a frozen river.
What Carter is doing in this novel is not strictly fantasy in the manner of Lud-in-the-Mist. It is often described as magical realism, because the fairy tale elements reside squarely within a naturalistic world and thus have an absurd, surrealist aspect. There's no Fairyland or Elfland over the horizon or under the hill to explain Fevvers' incongruous wings. Even the magic of the shamans is explained in a naturalistic way. In fact, Fevvers' strange powers are an affront to commonsense, but then so are the adventures she undergoes. The novel presents a world of heightened drama and mystery. Beyond that, Carter delights in upending the narrative conventions of the fairy tale, commenting on it knowingly along the way.
'Marriage!' she exclaimed.
'The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon's lair is always forced to marry her, whether they've taken a liking to one another or not. That's the custom. And I don't doubt that custom will apply to the trapeze artiste who rescues the clown. The name of this custom is a "happy ending".'
'Marriage,' repeated Fevver, in a murmur of awed distaste. But, after a moment, she perked up.
'Oh, but Liz -- think of his malleable look. As if a girl could mould him any way she wanted. Surely he'll have the decency to give himself to me, when we meet again, not expect the vice versa. Let him hand himself over into my safekeeping, and I will transform him. You said yourself he was unhatched, Lizzie; very well -- I'll sit on him, I'll hatch him out, I'll make a new man of him. I'll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we'll march hand in hand into the New Century -- '
Lizzie detected a note of rising hysteria in the girl's voice.
'Perhaps so, perhaps not,' she said, putting a damper on things. 'Perhaps safer not to plan ahead.'
The deadpan sense of humor is magnificent, as is the sense of the thriving abundancy of life. The novel is loaded with sensuous details of the material world, yet remains playful about the precise nature of reality. Lyrical and sarcastic, savage and sweet, rich, deranged, and yet always sprightly, it often reminded me of Joanna Russ' prose style as well. (Russ is probably the writer I most wish I could write like.) Here we all are, New Men and New Women in a New Century (Nights at the Circus takes place at the end of the nineteenth), and I wonder who is writing like this now. What a talent was lost when Angela Carter died at the age of 52. I suppose it's time to dig out my copy of her non-fiction book, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Sounds like a doozy, eh?
It's an old-fashioned romance of sorts, with a mysterious birth, foster parents, a complicated love story, and picaresque adventures amongst outlaws. The heroine, Sophia Fevvers, "the Cockney Venus," is a woman with wings. Found on a doorstep with fragments of egg around her, she is raised in a brothel comprised of many freakish women, and she graduates naturally to the circus after that. The first third of the book is about her life growing up in the brothel, told as a story to an American reporter backstage in London. The middle third is about the adventures of the circus in St Petersburg, where the reporter has joined the troupe as a clown and Fevvers is pursued by an amorous duke. In the final third, the circus heads across Siberia on the way to Seattle and is lost in the wilderness when the train derails. (Too bad they never made it here.) The reporter is initiated into a shamanistic tribe, while Fevvers and her old nurse, Liz, escape from bandits only to find an eccentric musician living in an isolated mansion near a frozen river.
What Carter is doing in this novel is not strictly fantasy in the manner of Lud-in-the-Mist. It is often described as magical realism, because the fairy tale elements reside squarely within a naturalistic world and thus have an absurd, surrealist aspect. There's no Fairyland or Elfland over the horizon or under the hill to explain Fevvers' incongruous wings. Even the magic of the shamans is explained in a naturalistic way. In fact, Fevvers' strange powers are an affront to commonsense, but then so are the adventures she undergoes. The novel presents a world of heightened drama and mystery. Beyond that, Carter delights in upending the narrative conventions of the fairy tale, commenting on it knowingly along the way.
'Marriage!' she exclaimed.
'The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon's lair is always forced to marry her, whether they've taken a liking to one another or not. That's the custom. And I don't doubt that custom will apply to the trapeze artiste who rescues the clown. The name of this custom is a "happy ending".'
'Marriage,' repeated Fevver, in a murmur of awed distaste. But, after a moment, she perked up.
'Oh, but Liz -- think of his malleable look. As if a girl could mould him any way she wanted. Surely he'll have the decency to give himself to me, when we meet again, not expect the vice versa. Let him hand himself over into my safekeeping, and I will transform him. You said yourself he was unhatched, Lizzie; very well -- I'll sit on him, I'll hatch him out, I'll make a new man of him. I'll make him into the New Man, in fact, fitting mate for the New Woman, and onward we'll march hand in hand into the New Century -- '
Lizzie detected a note of rising hysteria in the girl's voice.
'Perhaps so, perhaps not,' she said, putting a damper on things. 'Perhaps safer not to plan ahead.'
The deadpan sense of humor is magnificent, as is the sense of the thriving abundancy of life. The novel is loaded with sensuous details of the material world, yet remains playful about the precise nature of reality. Lyrical and sarcastic, savage and sweet, rich, deranged, and yet always sprightly, it often reminded me of Joanna Russ' prose style as well. (Russ is probably the writer I most wish I could write like.) Here we all are, New Men and New Women in a New Century (Nights at the Circus takes place at the end of the nineteenth), and I wonder who is writing like this now. What a talent was lost when Angela Carter died at the age of 52. I suppose it's time to dig out my copy of her non-fiction book, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Sounds like a doozy, eh?