Nights at the Circus

[sawyl]

Whilst it might appear otherwise, it's not strictly the case that I've done nothing today other than sit around and read novels, for I ventured into town to visit the bookstore and browse the shelves of the library. But other than that, I have spent the vast bulk of my day reading my way through a few old favourites. Here, then, are a few jottings on another old friend, Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter.

Jack Walser, a young American journalist, is writing a series of articles on great humbugs of the world. Thus is only natural that he should seek an interview with the winged Victorian aerialiste, Sophia Fevvers. As he interviews the Cockney Venus in her dressing room after a performance, he learns how she was hatched out of an egg, how she spent her early days as mascot in a Ma Nelson's brothel and how, after her wings first sprouted, she learnt how to fly.

When the madam of the brothel is suddenly taken from them, "slipping on some foreign matter, skin of a fruit or dog turd, as she was crossing Whitechapel High Street", Fevvers finds herself joining Madam Schreck's museum of women monsters. Needless to say, Mme Schreck caters to the rather more perverse end of the market than Ma Nelson and Fevvers quickly finds herself in hot water, offered up by a mystic who hopes to regain his youth through her angelic blood. Not being one to put up with this sort of treatment, the Cockney Venus returns to the museum, liberates her fellow freaks and takes to the stage.

Following her interview with Walser, Fevvers has been prevailed upon to join Colonel Kearney's Circus on its tour of Russia. Walser, smitten with the great aerialiste, has also taken up with the circus as a lowly clown. But circus life does not really agree with Walser. Attempting to save the life of Mignon, the wife and assistant to M. Lamarck and his Educated Apes, he manages to get himself winged by a tiger in such a way that he can no longer type and ceases to be a proper journalist. When Mignon throws herself on Walser's mercy, he brings her to Fevvers, who recognises the abused young woman's brilliant singing voice and persuades her to join up with the Princess of Abyssinia and her performing great cats.

As the St Petersburg run continues, there are series of strange adventures and mishaps. The role and authority of M. Lamarck are usurped by the Professor, the head chimp and by far the canniest member of the circus, after he make a bargin with the Colonel. Walser gets beaten up by the strongman, gets caught up in the Princesses' act, learns to waltz with one of the tigers, and has a narrow escape when Buffo the head clown goes mad halfway through a routine and attempts to murder him. Even Fevvers finds herself embroiled in a situation with the Grand Duke and has to use all her ingenuity to get to the station in time to catch the train to Siberia.

Weeks out of Petersburg, the train across Siberia is attacked by a group of bandits and the circus members, with the exception of Walser, are taken prisoner. The outlaws, having heard a rumour that Fevvers is intimate terms with the Prince of Wales, hope to petition the aerialiste to write a letter to Queen Victoria asking Her Britannic Majesty to speak to the Tsar on behalf of dispossessed Russian peasants. Upon learning that that she has no such connections, they fall into a gloom which is only relieved when the remaining clowns lay on a performance so great that a snowstorm reduces the camp to nothing.

Walser, meanwhile, has been found by a group of women prisoners, lately escaped from a panopticon. He is alive, intact and completely amnesiac. The women decide to leave him for the authorities, but he has other ideas and runs off into the forest where he runs smack dab into a shaman on a vision quest. Impressed by the near-naked journalist's incoherent ramblings, the shaman decides to take him on as an apprentice.

Leaving the forlorn remains of the bandit camp, the few remaining members of the circus are surprised to find a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, a small sign on the front declaring it to be the Conservatoire of Transbaikalia. Inside, they find a piano and a crazed old man who can only be soothed by Mignon's rendition of Der Leiermann from Winterreise. With the piano is return, the playing of the Princess and the singing of Mignon are sufficient to charm the creatures from the forest — the house ends up covered in listening tigers — and to guide quest of the shaman's new apprentice.

Espying her inamorato in the crowd of locals, Fevvers tries to fly to him but, hampered by a wing broken in the train crash, she misses him. Determined not to let Walser escape, Fevvers and the ever constant Lizzy set out in pursuit on foot. As they go, Fevvers mulls over the ending of the story, deciding that there is no way that she can marry Walser, despite her love for him, because, "My being, my me-ness, is unique and indivisible. To sell the use of myself for the enjoyment of another is one thing; I might even offer freely, out of gratitude or the expectation of pleasure — and pleasure alone is my expectation of the young American. But the essence of myself may not be given or taken, or what would there be left of me?" Rather, she decides to hatch out Walser's unformed character, like a hen on an egg, and mould him into a New Man, just as she is the New Woman, ready for the new century. After a final brief confusion, the two lovers are united, just as the year 1899 ends and 1900 begins.

How to describe Nights at the Circus without simply describing it as a masterpiece of 20th century literature and leaving things at that?

Perhaps it might be possible to speak about the bravura opening narrative, the way that it captures absolutely Fevvers' overwhelming and unique personality which threatens to engulf the reader in the same way that her perfume and face powder threatens to overwhelm poor Jack Walser. Or might it be best to describe the brilliant brushwork in the portrait of the circus in St Petersburg, with its myriad of characters, each with their own fascinating little story to tell — it is demonstration of Carter's powers that she manages to colour in the backgrounds of all the characters with just a few elegant strokes of the pen, never allowing the stories to overstay their welcome but at the same time ensuring that never a drop of drama goes to waste. Then there are the picaresque joys of the section in Siberia with its sapphic escapees from a great panopticon run by a crazed countess in which everyone, the prisoners, the guards, the governess, even the dead, are prisoners forever; it's political prisoners; it's fervently monarchist bandits who are so naive as to believe anything they read in the newspapers; it's visionaries and bears; its birthing huts and old brass bedsteads.

Maybe it is best to discuss the ideas that underly the narrative, for Nights at the Circus is nothing if it isn't a novel of ideas. It raises a number of questions about identity and self discovery similar to some of those raised in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. For example, the abused Mignon goes from orphaned victim to brilliant musician to, at our last sight of her, a strong woman with a growing gift for composition. Likewise Sampson, the circus strongman who starts off as a simple bully interested in nothing more than fucking and carrying heavy objects, grows in sensitively and, like a caterpillar, finally hatches out as a fully fledged human being. Walser too, is nothing less than a man transformed, for he starts the story as flat and uncomplicated as Fevvers is strong and fully formed, but after his humiliations in the circus, his complete mental and reconstruction at the hands of the shaman, he finds himself ready to take on a new identity, fully realised as Fevvers' New Man.

Then there are the questions about truth and meaning. Walser wants Fevvers to be a hoax. Unlike the patrons of the hideous Madame Schreck, he doesn't want his beloved to be a freak of nature but rather a humbug of the highwire. Is it any wonder that his views change fundamentally when confronted with the pragmatic shaman and his distinctly post-modern ontology? Are we to take the moments of narrative magic seriously? What about the dazzling narrative jump when Fevvers escapes the clutches of the Grand Duke — ok, technically, he's in her clutches, but he's the still the one trying to imprison her — by boarding a model train. Or what about when the escaped tigers vanish into the mirrors of the destroyed railway car? And then there are the feminist aspects of the plot, the way that Fevvers seeks to become a New Woman, the way that she breaks free from patriarchal society, her concerns with not giving over herself to Walser but remaining a being in her own right.

In short, then, Nights at the Circus is a tour de force; the novel that has it all. It's every bit as smart as The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, but because of its structure and the way that the ideas are worked into the plot, it's an easier read (although I'll admit, I had to look up a few things in the dictionary — steatopygia, anyone?) and the whole thing is carried out with a wonderful spirit of fun.