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Nights at the Circus
Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake?
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.
295 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 1984
About the author
Angela Carter
188 books3,406 followersBorn Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,204 reviews
June 30, 2009
Angela Carter's world is, as always, a dirty, earthy, erotic, yet soaringly ethereal place to spend one's time. It is as hard to capture the essence of her tone and her outlook as it is to exactly pin down all of her insightful commentary, as wrapped up in velvet and hidden by veils of fairy dust as they can be. Her earthy, body based, yet highly intellectual feminism is my favorite. Carter makes me feel the pain of and rejoice in the awesomeness of being a woman all at once, and I really connect to her outlook on feminist identity, relations between the sexes, and what is and what is not nonsense when it comes to living up to what one is could be or is "supposed" to be. Her Circus is littered with beautiful references and quotations, pulled and shaped and and redone for her own purposes from Michelangelo, Dickens, Shakespeare (Hamlet's "what a piece of work is man" speech, in particular, is used over and over to gorgeous effect) and so many many more that I feel that I missed that coat the atmosphere with a kind of dreamy, half-sane brilliance that exists alongside sharp reminders of the layers of piss and dirt that it all rises up out of. And Carter seems to just glory in this dichotomy over and over again, to its bitter, ridiculous, painfully lovely end.
Yeah... I just adore Angela Carter. That is all.
Yeah... I just adore Angela Carter. That is all.
February 12, 2022
beautifully written and surprisingly life-affirming, while also being as strange, sly, and sexed-up as Carter usually tends to be. this story about an infamous woman with wings and the journalist who falls in love with her is delivered in 3 parts: the first, set in England, recounts her upbringing and the many misadventures of her young life; the second, in St. Petersburg, is mainly focused on the journalist's transformation as he joins a circus starring the object of his fascination, and also explores the lives of several of that circus' performers; the third, in Siberia, has the circus falling apart and somewhat coming together after the troupe is waylaid by a band of outcasts.
this is a slim book but per usual for the author, a dense one. as always, Carter's writing sings. it is a peculiar song, not for everyone. prose of the highest caliber, fantastical in subject matter and ornate in style with numerous scenes playing out as if directed by Fellini or de Sade, always playful even if the joke is a killing one, her stories delivered with a sardonic knowingness that can make the reader wonder if this is all some sort of put-on, and highly aware of how the intersections of gender and class impact all of humanity - especially women of the working class. above all things as an author, Angela Carter is a feminist.
I wonder what that phrase even means anymore to people, this label "feminist author" - is it an automatic turn-off? I know it is for some, as if being considered a feminist author equals a certain stridency, a demeaning of men, a dry and tunnel-visioned perspective devoid of warmth and unable to understand the multiplicity of realities that women and men live in. but the label is still one that does not have to mean any of those things, at least not automatically. a feminist author is a person who understands the challenges that women face in this world, who understands the roles that women are often forced into, who advocates for those women by revealing their challenges and by highlighting the strength of women who live in those roles - and outside of them. especially outside of them. Carter always celebrates the outsider, the malcontent, the women who push back on boundaries. she understands the separatist and she empathizes with the murderess.
there is such a modern sensibility to Carter's feminism. her heroine Sophie Fevvers is bold, brash, and brave, emphatically lower class in outlook and delivery, craving and dropping that money, and always looking out for, supporting, and advocating for other women. she is no great beauty and not one for pretenses, but she carries herself as if she were queen of the world. Carter's story ignores any traditional male-centered narrative device that may be expected: it is the hero who adjusts himself to the heroine's world; it is the heroine and her faithful mother-surrogate who must come to their own rescue, time and again. Carter's brand of feminism embraces both the maudlin and the morbid, sexuality in all of its forms, women in all of their forms, and she highlights all of the struggles and victories, no matter how large or how small. from the grandmother forever bent over a stove to the waif beaten by her lover to the woman who had enough and chopped up her husband to bits. these are all complicated heroines to her, worthy of their own stories. nor is she a misandrist: her men can often be monsters but they can also be caring, kindly, capable of change. Carter's feminism is one that sees the world of women and men from all directions, often through a highly critical lens. and yet, in this novel, she seeks to uplift and not to upbraid. Carter is a feminist who embraces potential.
I was so happy to see that uplift and that potential! she's one of my favorite authors, but her stories are often chilly and sometimes sadistic. they've wowed me with their brilliant prose, hallucinatory imagery, the challenging and norm-breaking ideas on display; they've also disturbed me with their often surreal visions of how brutalized, objectified, and commodified women can be. I was hesitant to dive into a book with an annhilating world view. fortunately, the book was a tonic. in his review, George mentions her story "Puss-in-Boots" from The Bloody Chamber and how excited it made him to read her novels. I was surprised by that story: it had such a light, sunny spirit that it felt like an outlier in her works. I'm so glad I was wrong about that... over time, Angela Carter clearly mellowed, understanding not just the evil in the world, but the kindness as well, the potential for change and for connection. this turned out to be just the book to read to raise the spirits.
this is a slim book but per usual for the author, a dense one. as always, Carter's writing sings. it is a peculiar song, not for everyone. prose of the highest caliber, fantastical in subject matter and ornate in style with numerous scenes playing out as if directed by Fellini or de Sade, always playful even if the joke is a killing one, her stories delivered with a sardonic knowingness that can make the reader wonder if this is all some sort of put-on, and highly aware of how the intersections of gender and class impact all of humanity - especially women of the working class. above all things as an author, Angela Carter is a feminist.
I wonder what that phrase even means anymore to people, this label "feminist author" - is it an automatic turn-off? I know it is for some, as if being considered a feminist author equals a certain stridency, a demeaning of men, a dry and tunnel-visioned perspective devoid of warmth and unable to understand the multiplicity of realities that women and men live in. but the label is still one that does not have to mean any of those things, at least not automatically. a feminist author is a person who understands the challenges that women face in this world, who understands the roles that women are often forced into, who advocates for those women by revealing their challenges and by highlighting the strength of women who live in those roles - and outside of them. especially outside of them. Carter always celebrates the outsider, the malcontent, the women who push back on boundaries. she understands the separatist and she empathizes with the murderess.
there is such a modern sensibility to Carter's feminism. her heroine Sophie Fevvers is bold, brash, and brave, emphatically lower class in outlook and delivery, craving and dropping that money, and always looking out for, supporting, and advocating for other women. she is no great beauty and not one for pretenses, but she carries herself as if she were queen of the world. Carter's story ignores any traditional male-centered narrative device that may be expected: it is the hero who adjusts himself to the heroine's world; it is the heroine and her faithful mother-surrogate who must come to their own rescue, time and again. Carter's brand of feminism embraces both the maudlin and the morbid, sexuality in all of its forms, women in all of their forms, and she highlights all of the struggles and victories, no matter how large or how small. from the grandmother forever bent over a stove to the waif beaten by her lover to the woman who had enough and chopped up her husband to bits. these are all complicated heroines to her, worthy of their own stories. nor is she a misandrist: her men can often be monsters but they can also be caring, kindly, capable of change. Carter's feminism is one that sees the world of women and men from all directions, often through a highly critical lens. and yet, in this novel, she seeks to uplift and not to upbraid. Carter is a feminist who embraces potential.
I was so happy to see that uplift and that potential! she's one of my favorite authors, but her stories are often chilly and sometimes sadistic. they've wowed me with their brilliant prose, hallucinatory imagery, the challenging and norm-breaking ideas on display; they've also disturbed me with their often surreal visions of how brutalized, objectified, and commodified women can be. I was hesitant to dive into a book with an annhilating world view. fortunately, the book was a tonic. in his review, George mentions her story "Puss-in-Boots" from The Bloody Chamber and how excited it made him to read her novels. I was surprised by that story: it had such a light, sunny spirit that it felt like an outlier in her works. I'm so glad I was wrong about that... over time, Angela Carter clearly mellowed, understanding not just the evil in the world, but the kindness as well, the potential for change and for connection. this turned out to be just the book to read to raise the spirits.
September 4, 2013
Book Circle Read 15
The Publisher Says: Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake?
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.
My Capsule Comment: *swoon*
My Review: Yes indeed, I still agree with myself here. In these fill-in reviews of the over 100 books my RL (or F2F, whichever) book circle has read since 1994 that I have never written reviews for, I'm finding that some opinions have changed significantly. Not here. *SWOON*
Whatever I tell you about the plot, which is unremarkable (boy meets girl-oid, etc.), is utterly overshadowed by one fact of the book: Fevvers.
She is an aerialiste, the best in the world, and it's all down to her unknown avian ancestry, she tells Jack, the newspaperman who's in love with her (as who isn't?). See, she was hatched from an egg, and spent her post-menarche years as a living cupid in a bordello foyer. Now she's a six-two, winged sensation with only a nodding acquaintance with reality, since she's always lived outside its dreary confines in the bordello, which she helped burn down, and then with Col. Kearney's circus, where she's the star attraction.
The novel takes us from London to Petersburg and points east at the tail end of the 19th century. We meet Lizzie, Fevvers' adopted mom (and probably a witch); the Princess of Abyssinia, a silent-through-trauma cat-tamer and lesbian lover of Mignon, the young lassie with the beautiful voice that drives a jealous spike between Fevvers and Jack; Christian the christian idiot who believes Fevvers is an angel fallen from Heaven and sets about sacrificing her to obtain immortality from god; and not least Col. Kearney himself, the profligate owner of the circus that's on tour, who is advised by his pig Sybil.
PG Wodehouse writes a Monty Python sketch in the style of Virginia Woolf. Enchanting. Scintillating. Close to perfect. A bottle of Veuve Cliquot served in a crystal flute while sitting in the shade of an ancient oak in a summery forest glade.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Publisher Says: Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan...or all fake?
Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.
My Capsule Comment: *swoon*
My Review: Yes indeed, I still agree with myself here. In these fill-in reviews of the over 100 books my RL (or F2F, whichever) book circle has read since 1994 that I have never written reviews for, I'm finding that some opinions have changed significantly. Not here. *SWOON*
Whatever I tell you about the plot, which is unremarkable (boy meets girl-oid, etc.), is utterly overshadowed by one fact of the book: Fevvers.
She is an aerialiste, the best in the world, and it's all down to her unknown avian ancestry, she tells Jack, the newspaperman who's in love with her (as who isn't?). See, she was hatched from an egg, and spent her post-menarche years as a living cupid in a bordello foyer. Now she's a six-two, winged sensation with only a nodding acquaintance with reality, since she's always lived outside its dreary confines in the bordello, which she helped burn down, and then with Col. Kearney's circus, where she's the star attraction.
The novel takes us from London to Petersburg and points east at the tail end of the 19th century. We meet Lizzie, Fevvers' adopted mom (and probably a witch); the Princess of Abyssinia, a silent-through-trauma cat-tamer and lesbian lover of Mignon, the young lassie with the beautiful voice that drives a jealous spike between Fevvers and Jack; Christian the christian idiot who believes Fevvers is an angel fallen from Heaven and sets about sacrificing her to obtain immortality from god; and not least Col. Kearney himself, the profligate owner of the circus that's on tour, who is advised by his pig Sybil.
PG Wodehouse writes a Monty Python sketch in the style of Virginia Woolf. Enchanting. Scintillating. Close to perfect. A bottle of Veuve Cliquot served in a crystal flute while sitting in the shade of an ancient oak in a summery forest glade.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Read
February 10, 2017Reviewed in September 2012
There are many aspects of the bizarre world of this book that I admire even though it took me a while to get hooked by the story. I was ready to abandon it anytime during the first fifty pages until I came across a remark to the effect that for those who have never seen a match, striking one must seem like magic.
Then I understood something of what Carter was trying to do. She implies that since we don't know everything about the mysteries of the natural world, a lot of things are possibly possible. She sets out to examine some of these possibilities: a woman with wings, hatched from an egg; another who can stop time and conjure the weather with her handbag; chimpanzees that can read and write; a pig that can spell. These variations from the ‘normal’ serve to make Carter’s story more interesting and help her to make her points with a brilliant flourish.
She has no qualms either about borrowing phrases and images from the bible as well as from Shakespeare, Joyce, Yeats, Sendak and probably from many other sources that I failed to recognise. Basically, she disregards conventions and makes sure that her characters do likewise. And if the natural order must be upended, isn’t it fitting that it will be upended by women? So, all in all, reading Nights at the Circus turned out to be a satisfying and rewarding experience but I couldn’t help wondering if Lizzie’s famous handbag, with which she’d conjured many a mysterious feat, didn’t contain the iPhone 5....
................................................
Edit: I wrote this back in 2012 when the 'magical' iPhone 5 was still a...mystery.
There are many aspects of the bizarre world of this book that I admire even though it took me a while to get hooked by the story. I was ready to abandon it anytime during the first fifty pages until I came across a remark to the effect that for those who have never seen a match, striking one must seem like magic.
Then I understood something of what Carter was trying to do. She implies that since we don't know everything about the mysteries of the natural world, a lot of things are possibly possible. She sets out to examine some of these possibilities: a woman with wings, hatched from an egg; another who can stop time and conjure the weather with her handbag; chimpanzees that can read and write; a pig that can spell. These variations from the ‘normal’ serve to make Carter’s story more interesting and help her to make her points with a brilliant flourish.
She has no qualms either about borrowing phrases and images from the bible as well as from Shakespeare, Joyce, Yeats, Sendak and probably from many other sources that I failed to recognise. Basically, she disregards conventions and makes sure that her characters do likewise. And if the natural order must be upended, isn’t it fitting that it will be upended by women? So, all in all, reading Nights at the Circus turned out to be a satisfying and rewarding experience but I couldn’t help wondering if Lizzie’s famous handbag, with which she’d conjured many a mysterious feat, didn’t contain the iPhone 5....
................................................
Edit: I wrote this back in 2012 when the 'magical' iPhone 5 was still a...mystery.
November 5, 2020
(Spoilers, eh) In the same fantastical circuit as the 1001 Arabian Nights, it is set in a real palette of colors--it's like seeing a Toulouse Lautrec through tears. Carter's brand of magic realism swirled in with comical, cheerful anecdotes is by and large delightful. There is a woman trapeze artist that may be a swan, a tiger attack, and a train derailment. That's the plot. Also, I remember an atrociously charming story about a Thumbelina-like creature with eyes for nipples. Yup. Call it, an adult Lewis Carroll. And just like his fantasia, this one is one irrational mess that impresses but--perhaps like the nature of the circus acts themselves--doesn't remain with the spectator long after the show is all done.
February 10, 2011
Prose - 5 Awesome and fascinating. If only I actually cared about what she was saying.
Story - 3 Strangely less interesting than one would expect winged Victorian harlots to be.
Characters - 2 Em. Kudos for originality & development, but aside from me caring not a jot about them they had a strangely constructed feel.
Aside from being extremely impressed by Carter's writing I didn't care for the book, but I'm definitely willing to try something else of hers.
Story - 3 Strangely less interesting than one would expect winged Victorian harlots to be.
Characters - 2 Em. Kudos for originality & development, but aside from me caring not a jot about them they had a strangely constructed feel.
Aside from being extremely impressed by Carter's writing I didn't care for the book, but I'm definitely willing to try something else of hers.
June 30, 2020
Is this Angela Carter's epic? Quiet possibly. It's enormous, majestic, confounding even as fascinating, unwieldy with determination to fill in every backstory that would otherwise go overlooked, poised at the edge of the 20th century and so encompassing all of its bitter disillusion. The breadth of characters and otherwise passed-over stories-within-stories rivals Pynchon, as does the way in which both interrogate reality in earnest through application of elaborate systems of meaning in which everything and everyone burns clear as an icon of itself, though not necessarily with a reductive singularity and determinism of meanings.
Angela Carter's trajectory as a writer and thinker is to some extent a dialogue with the idea of myth and its symbolic power. I think that at some point she found myth to have a useful clarity, one she later became more interested in deconstructing and complicating. Much discourse on her work is hung up on writer as mythologist, and given her subjects, it's a seductive notion. But a very incomplete one. By the time Nights at the Circus was written, Carter described herself as a demythologizer, and her prime subject not fairy tales but social reality. (Of course, aren't these always in conversation to some extent? I believe that this explains the continuing utility that the apparatuses of myth held for her even as she broke them down.)
In any event, there's an urgent warmth to this the convoluted three-part storyline of this novel, though it is sometimes obscured by the act of telling (of story forms, and of voluptuously wrought sentences). Ultimately, for all its ersatz construction, this is a very human story. Other readers noted feeling a distance from the characters, but I was entirely won over by Fevvers, and her arc -- from object (of interview, and of public interest/speculation) to subject of her own essential narrative -- is what holds all of these otherwise meandering threads together for me. Of course, Fevvers is always her own creation; it is just the reader who cannot initially see this. There's a bit towards the end which seems to suggest that Fevvers requires a certain other-gaze to hold her identity together that may seem regressive, but it seems to me instead that Carter ultimately sees even pure self-creation as limiting without the more holistic opening-up of allowing oneself to truly touch and be touched by another, a mutual act that breaks through all veneers and constructed narrative, opening up the truly revolutionary possibility incipient within every human connection.
Like all epics, this is filled with digressions and asides not strictly essential to the prime trajectory, which might at times bog down, might seem to be unnecessary. But each has its place in Carter's elaborately developed mirror-world at the cusp of and bleeding into the modern era. I wouldn't cut a thing.
Angela Carter's trajectory as a writer and thinker is to some extent a dialogue with the idea of myth and its symbolic power. I think that at some point she found myth to have a useful clarity, one she later became more interested in deconstructing and complicating. Much discourse on her work is hung up on writer as mythologist, and given her subjects, it's a seductive notion. But a very incomplete one. By the time Nights at the Circus was written, Carter described herself as a demythologizer, and her prime subject not fairy tales but social reality. (Of course, aren't these always in conversation to some extent? I believe that this explains the continuing utility that the apparatuses of myth held for her even as she broke them down.)
In any event, there's an urgent warmth to this the convoluted three-part storyline of this novel, though it is sometimes obscured by the act of telling (of story forms, and of voluptuously wrought sentences). Ultimately, for all its ersatz construction, this is a very human story. Other readers noted feeling a distance from the characters, but I was entirely won over by Fevvers, and her arc -- from object (of interview, and of public interest/speculation) to subject of her own essential narrative -- is what holds all of these otherwise meandering threads together for me. Of course, Fevvers is always her own creation; it is just the reader who cannot initially see this. There's a bit towards the end which seems to suggest that Fevvers requires a certain other-gaze to hold her identity together that may seem regressive, but it seems to me instead that Carter ultimately sees even pure self-creation as limiting without the more holistic opening-up of allowing oneself to truly touch and be touched by another, a mutual act that breaks through all veneers and constructed narrative, opening up the truly revolutionary possibility incipient within every human connection.
Like all epics, this is filled with digressions and asides not strictly essential to the prime trajectory, which might at times bog down, might seem to be unnecessary. But each has its place in Carter's elaborately developed mirror-world at the cusp of and bleeding into the modern era. I wouldn't cut a thing.
July 29, 2015
Well this is probably as much fun as can be had reading, for me anyway. I surrender utterly to the allure of Fevvers; I believed every wonderful word of her story and every page of it yielded some new pleasure to my feminist consciousness. The portrayal of a group of sex-workers (and ridicule of their would-be self-appointed saviours) seemed particularly well-observed to me. On the level of the symbolic, fill yer boots. On the level of prose, this is as extravagantly creative and exuberant as it could possibly be. Carter's style echoes Fevvers' fetid dressing room, cluttered with nonchalently veiled and camouflaged magical amulets, almost animate animal-like lingerie intimidating to the timid male guest (snaky stockings seem to threaten and discomfort him), the debris of the star's ablutions and voracious consumption of decidedly local and humble refreshments such as eel pie and sugar-loaded tea: it is a divine, diabolical, vernacular, esoteric, ingenious, streetwise, starry-eyed, audaciously feminine mess. Take it as it comes or fuck off.
Once the protagonists leave London there is a certain wild abandon, even chaos, about the flow of the story. I couldn't really see how the section on the women's prison fit in to it all, except that Siberia was a good location for it, and perhaps that the frozen expanse existed to be open to creative possibilities, both for the author and for all women. In any case, I found this section absolutely brilliant, particularly in realising the character of Olga who killed her abusive husband and delivers the verdict of self-defense upon herself in the private court she shares with the author. However, though she is thus absolved, Carter does not forget to realise her suffering mother and traumatised son. The boy, Ivan, witness of so much violence, is appropriately drawn into the clan of clowns; their diabolical capering and their nihilistic philosophy. The scary clown trope is vividly, terrifyingly explored.
I was amused and impressed by Carter's treatment of the black characters, Madame Schreck's servant Toussaint and 'the Princess'. Carter seems to be humorously castigating the poor representation of black people in white literature, since she exaggerates their silencing to the point of absurdity - Toussaint has been 'born without a mouth'! Even so, he manages to be elegant and eloquent in writing, so much so that it is several times remarked on, thus, I think, mocking the 'well spoken' cliche used as a 'respectability' marker to help distinguish between people of colour who are acceptable to white supremacy and those who are not. The Princess voluntarily refuses to speak, since black women cannot trust white women (ie Carter, the author) to represent them. The inclusion of these characters as distanced from the text by their silence makes them (especially 'the Princess') critical witnesses, marking whiteness, including that of the author.
Writing of female minor characters is lovingly thorough. Perhaps the most developed, ubiquitous theme here is mutual support and care between women, and, apart from that between Fevvers and her informally adoptive mother Liz, the relationship between abuse-survivor Mignon and 'the Princess' is the most touching for me. Brian pointed out to me in discussion how carefully written Mignon's story was. The only subplot that I struggled with was Walser's amnesia-driven sojourn with the shaman. Here I felt Carter was projecting some ideas about mysticism onto uncolonised people in a potentially exploitative way.
On the other hand, I generally loved Carter's treatment of animal characters - the intellectual apes especially. The elephants constantly rattling their chains were rightfully disturbing, and mirrored other unresolved agitations that Carter sets up to highlight other aspects of as-yet unachieved liberation.
I cannot resist drawing a parallel between Nights at the Circus and Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Readers who enjoyed the latter as (pre)teens like me will probably find their sensibilities well attuned to this hearty and heartily satisfying feminist romp. Spread your wings, women.
Once the protagonists leave London there is a certain wild abandon, even chaos, about the flow of the story. I couldn't really see how the section on the women's prison fit in to it all, except that Siberia was a good location for it, and perhaps that the frozen expanse existed to be open to creative possibilities, both for the author and for all women. In any case, I found this section absolutely brilliant, particularly in realising the character of Olga who killed her abusive husband and delivers the verdict of self-defense upon herself in the private court she shares with the author. However, though she is thus absolved, Carter does not forget to realise her suffering mother and traumatised son. The boy, Ivan, witness of so much violence, is appropriately drawn into the clan of clowns; their diabolical capering and their nihilistic philosophy. The scary clown trope is vividly, terrifyingly explored.
I was amused and impressed by Carter's treatment of the black characters, Madame Schreck's servant Toussaint and 'the Princess'. Carter seems to be humorously castigating the poor representation of black people in white literature, since she exaggerates their silencing to the point of absurdity - Toussaint has been 'born without a mouth'! Even so, he manages to be elegant and eloquent in writing, so much so that it is several times remarked on, thus, I think, mocking the 'well spoken' cliche used as a 'respectability' marker to help distinguish between people of colour who are acceptable to white supremacy and those who are not. The Princess voluntarily refuses to speak, since black women cannot trust white women (ie Carter, the author) to represent them. The inclusion of these characters as distanced from the text by their silence makes them (especially 'the Princess') critical witnesses, marking whiteness, including that of the author.
Writing of female minor characters is lovingly thorough. Perhaps the most developed, ubiquitous theme here is mutual support and care between women, and, apart from that between Fevvers and her informally adoptive mother Liz, the relationship between abuse-survivor Mignon and 'the Princess' is the most touching for me. Brian pointed out to me in discussion how carefully written Mignon's story was. The only subplot that I struggled with was Walser's amnesia-driven sojourn with the shaman. Here I felt Carter was projecting some ideas about mysticism onto uncolonised people in a potentially exploitative way.
On the other hand, I generally loved Carter's treatment of animal characters - the intellectual apes especially. The elephants constantly rattling their chains were rightfully disturbing, and mirrored other unresolved agitations that Carter sets up to highlight other aspects of as-yet unachieved liberation.
I cannot resist drawing a parallel between Nights at the Circus and Terry Pratchett's Discworld. Readers who enjoyed the latter as (pre)teens like me will probably find their sensibilities well attuned to this hearty and heartily satisfying feminist romp. Spread your wings, women.
October 22, 2021
CRITIQUE:
The Cockney Venus Becomes a Cockney Rebel
Although my favourite Carter novel is "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", this novel is at once her most ambitious and most fully realised work.
(Sophie) Fevvers (Cockney for "feathers") is a famous six feet two inches peroxide blonde aerialiste on the cusp between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
She's a big girl, billed as the Cockney Venus, though she could equally be called "Helen of the High Wire" or "l'Ange Anglaise"/"the English Angel" ("not English, but an angel").
She's a mixture of Cockney working class and mythological patrician, though she doesn't shy away from her Cockney origins, especially in her speech [she had "a voice like clanging dustbins and a face as broad and oval as a meat dish." (1)].
We learn in the first paragraph that she was not so much born (gestated in utero) as laid and hatched from an egg:
She would soon grow polychromatic six feet wide wings on her back, which, in addition to her arms, propped up her career:
Is she a girl or a bird? Is she both? A "fabulous bird-woman"? Which begs the question asked by Angela Carter: "Is she fact or fiction?" Is she a "physiological anomaly in which Miss Fevvers [or Angela Carter] is asking us to suspend disbelief?" Regardless, is she a legend or an allegory? She's no conformist, but is she a rebel? Perhaps a Cockney Rebel?
Wapping Old Stairs
"You've Done It All, You've Broken Every Code"
Sophie Fevvers is physically different from other women, but she also had a different upbringing. She never knew her parents, never knew whether she had any, or even one. She was abandoned by persons unknown on the Wapping Old Stairs in East London. Her foster-mother, Lizzie, found her and took her in to Ma Nelson's brothel where she worked. The other girls noticed the yellow fluff on her shoulder blades and exclaimed, "Looks like the little thing's going to sprout Fevvers!"
She was "reared by these kind women as if [she] was the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers...
Sophie is spared work as a prostitute as she grows older (she is known as the "Virgin Whore"), but she progresses to other equally unconventional, carnivalesque forms of entertainment, like Madame Schreck's museum of female monsters (a chamber of imaginary horrors), Christian Rosencreutz' freak show, and Colonel Kearney's travelling circus:
"You've Pulled the Rebel to the Floor"
No matter who or what she was, her role was to be observed or gazed at, particularly by men ("I existed only as an object in men's eyes...") (who would fruitlessly fantasise about her "erotic possibilities"). For women and children, she was a source of wonder. Yet, she also had her doubters:
In contrast, Lizzie says of Sophie, "I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground." The answer, my friend, is waiting in the wings. She becomes the Winged Victory of womanhood.
Baby elephant in the (Siberian?) snow
"Resist, Resist"
Sophie's wings represent her identity, her being, her existence. She's not on a quest for an identity. She already has one, she's just trying to resist the expectations of others, of men, who would seek to pigeonhole her. Now she must simply realise her existing identity, her own possibilities - by flying.
Sophie becomes aware that "I only knew my body was the abode of limitless freedom."
She vows, "If I have wings, then I must fly!"
"It's Just a Test, a Game for Us to Play"
The novel is broken into three parts, each set in a different part of the world: London, (St) Petersburg, and Siberia (where the circus train crashes in the snow, complete with elephants, tigers, chimpanzees and other circus animals).
The London section is narrated from the third person omniscient point of view. However, it purports to be the story of Fevvers and Lizzie as told to the American journalist, Jack Walser, as if in an interview.
The Petersburg section abandons the pretence of an interview, adding a third person perspective on Walser, while "in the sugar-syrup of nostalgia, acquiring the elaboration of artifice. I am inventing an imaginary city as I go along."
The Siberian section is a strange brew of both first and third person perspectives, the first being that of Fevvers herself. For the first time, in this section, the novel becomes subjective - as well as feminist. Female subjectivity grows organically out of the bedrock of the novel.
"Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)"
At first, this structure seems to be a playful Ludic Game (like Colonel Kearney's circus itself). However, on reflection, it appears to be a narrative maze, a gilded cage that traps Fevvers in someone else's perspective (e.g., a male gaze), until she finally breaks free and becomes (and narrates) her own identity, at which point she asserts the right to smile (and laugh) - happy ending or not:
FOOTNOTES:
(1) Fevvers reminds me of a taller version of Michael Moorcock's Mrs Cornelius, also a Cockney Venus, as well as a beautiful, if not sophisticated, Cockney-speaking femme fatale.
SOUNDTRACK:
The Cockney Venus Becomes a Cockney Rebel
Although my favourite Carter novel is "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", this novel is at once her most ambitious and most fully realised work.
(Sophie) Fevvers (Cockney for "feathers") is a famous six feet two inches peroxide blonde aerialiste on the cusp between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
She's a big girl, billed as the Cockney Venus, though she could equally be called "Helen of the High Wire" or "l'Ange Anglaise"/"the English Angel" ("not English, but an angel").
She's a mixture of Cockney working class and mythological patrician, though she doesn't shy away from her Cockney origins, especially in her speech [she had "a voice like clanging dustbins and a face as broad and oval as a meat dish." (1)].
We learn in the first paragraph that she was not so much born (gestated in utero) as laid and hatched from an egg:
"Hatched out of a bloody great egg while Bow Bells rang, as ever is!"
She would soon grow polychromatic six feet wide wings on her back, which, in addition to her arms, propped up her career:
"Now, wings without arms is one impossible thing: but wings with arms is the impossible made doubly unlikely - the impossible squared."
Is she a girl or a bird? Is she both? A "fabulous bird-woman"? Which begs the question asked by Angela Carter: "Is she fact or fiction?" Is she a "physiological anomaly in which Miss Fevvers [or Angela Carter] is asking us to suspend disbelief?" Regardless, is she a legend or an allegory? She's no conformist, but is she a rebel? Perhaps a Cockney Rebel?
Wapping Old Stairs
"You've Done It All, You've Broken Every Code"
Sophie Fevvers is physically different from other women, but she also had a different upbringing. She never knew her parents, never knew whether she had any, or even one. She was abandoned by persons unknown on the Wapping Old Stairs in East London. Her foster-mother, Lizzie, found her and took her in to Ma Nelson's brothel where she worked. The other girls noticed the yellow fluff on her shoulder blades and exclaimed, "Looks like the little thing's going to sprout Fevvers!"
She was "reared by these kind women as if [she] was the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers...
"In a brothel bred, sir and proud of it, if it comes to the point, for never a bad word nor an unkindness did I have from my mothers but I was given the best of everything..."
Sophie is spared work as a prostitute as she grows older (she is known as the "Virgin Whore"), but she progresses to other equally unconventional, carnivalesque forms of entertainment, like Madame Schreck's museum of female monsters (a chamber of imaginary horrors), Christian Rosencreutz' freak show, and Colonel Kearney's travelling circus:
"Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, don't touch.
"She was twice as large as life and as succinctly finite as any object that is intended to be seen , not handled. Look! Hands off!"
"You've Pulled the Rebel to the Floor"
No matter who or what she was, her role was to be observed or gazed at, particularly by men ("I existed only as an object in men's eyes...") (who would fruitlessly fantasise about her "erotic possibilities"). For women and children, she was a source of wonder. Yet, she also had her doubters:
"In order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman - in the implausible event that such a thing existed - have to pretend she was an artificial one?
"...in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world."
In contrast, Lizzie says of Sophie, "I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground." The answer, my friend, is waiting in the wings. She becomes the Winged Victory of womanhood.
Baby elephant in the (Siberian?) snow
"Resist, Resist"
Sophie's wings represent her identity, her being, her existence. She's not on a quest for an identity. She already has one, she's just trying to resist the expectations of others, of men, who would seek to pigeonhole her. Now she must simply realise her existing identity, her own possibilities - by flying.
Sophie becomes aware that "I only knew my body was the abode of limitless freedom."
She vows, "If I have wings, then I must fly!"
"It's Just a Test, a Game for Us to Play"
The novel is broken into three parts, each set in a different part of the world: London, (St) Petersburg, and Siberia (where the circus train crashes in the snow, complete with elephants, tigers, chimpanzees and other circus animals).
The London section is narrated from the third person omniscient point of view. However, it purports to be the story of Fevvers and Lizzie as told to the American journalist, Jack Walser, as if in an interview.
The Petersburg section abandons the pretence of an interview, adding a third person perspective on Walser, while "in the sugar-syrup of nostalgia, acquiring the elaboration of artifice. I am inventing an imaginary city as I go along."
The Siberian section is a strange brew of both first and third person perspectives, the first being that of Fevvers herself. For the first time, in this section, the novel becomes subjective - as well as feminist. Female subjectivity grows organically out of the bedrock of the novel.
"Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)"
At first, this structure seems to be a playful Ludic Game (like Colonel Kearney's circus itself). However, on reflection, it appears to be a narrative maze, a gilded cage that traps Fevvers in someone else's perspective (e.g., a male gaze), until she finally breaks free and becomes (and narrates) her own identity, at which point she asserts the right to smile (and laugh) - happy ending or not:
"She put on a brilliant, artificial smile, extending her arms as if to enfold all present in a vast embrace...
"The spiralling tornado of Fevver's laughter began to twist and shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived and breathed, everywhere, was laughing."
FOOTNOTES:
(1) Fevvers reminds me of a taller version of Michael Moorcock's Mrs Cornelius, also a Cockney Venus, as well as a beautiful, if not sophisticated, Cockney-speaking femme fatale.
SOUNDTRACK:
February 12, 2017
Fabulous!
I'd been expecting good things from this book, as everyone always tells me how wonderful Angela Carter is, and it certainly delivered!
It's a surreal, earthy kind of book, divided into three distinct parts, which largely focus on the introduction of Fevvers (the fabulous cockney winged woman), the days at the circus, and the wilds of Siberia. Hey, I did warn you it was surreal!
In this book, the reader encounters intelligent pigs (I LOVED Sybil!), brothel madams who like dressing up as Nelson, depressed clowns and more. It's a weird, wonderful world that Carter conjures up, but a joy to immerse yourself in!
It's also great to read an author who is simultaneously so elegant with her language, and so brutally down-to-earth. This echoes the main character in a way, who has the potential to soar to the sea or crash to the ground.
Definitely a must-read...I've no doubt I'll be revisiting this book in the future!
I'd been expecting good things from this book, as everyone always tells me how wonderful Angela Carter is, and it certainly delivered!
It's a surreal, earthy kind of book, divided into three distinct parts, which largely focus on the introduction of Fevvers (the fabulous cockney winged woman), the days at the circus, and the wilds of Siberia. Hey, I did warn you it was surreal!
In this book, the reader encounters intelligent pigs (I LOVED Sybil!), brothel madams who like dressing up as Nelson, depressed clowns and more. It's a weird, wonderful world that Carter conjures up, but a joy to immerse yourself in!
It's also great to read an author who is simultaneously so elegant with her language, and so brutally down-to-earth. This echoes the main character in a way, who has the potential to soar to the sea or crash to the ground.
Definitely a must-read...I've no doubt I'll be revisiting this book in the future!
August 23, 2013
Verdict: Three rings of fractured fairy tales, barely believable characters and fables fallen through the looking glass. ‘Night’s at the Circus’ is too clever by half, too bad it knows it.
‘Nights at the Circus’ came to me immediately recommended, which is to say the girl at Waterstones gushed over when I brought it to the counter. Generally I do not care for it when shop staff accost me with unsolicited conversation because I am, to use the medical terminology, “painfully awkward.” I don’t mind so much at bookstores through, because with super heroes and video games long gone mainstream, paperbacks are the last refuge of the true nerd and thus I felt kinship. I paid heed to Waterstones girl and dutifully saved ‘Nights at the Circus’ as a reward for completing less fun classics. After ‘The Bell Jar’ I knew that time had come.
‘Nights at the Circus’ is about Fevvers (as in ‘Feathers’ spelled cockney), a statuesque grotesque of a woman whose literal claim to fame rests in the functional wings growing out of her back. The book begins with American reporter Jack interviewing Fevvers and her cohort Lizzie for his series on great big humbugs. Fevvers has just completed a triumphant circuit of Europe and now, after returning to home sweet London, she plan to set out with a circus run by Colonel Kearney, an OTT allegory of the capitalist dream who will no doubt go in to star in many a North Korean propaganda poster. First through, she and Lizzie, for the benefit of a captivated Jack, relate her life story thus far. It is action packed, reference jammed, titillating, eerie and delightful.
In Part II the action has shifted to St. Petersburg, stage one of the trans-Siberian circus. Jack has come along as a clown because he is now in love, apparently. We meet the moribund clowns, the cowardly strong man, her highness the tiger-tamer, the chimpanzees of superior intellect and the deceptively interesting chimp man’s wife. Also Colonel Kearney’s psychic pig. It is all good fun for a while but then things begin to go wrong and I begin to wonder where we are going with all of this.
The answer comes in Part III and it is Siberia. Disaster strikes the circus. Lesbian relationships multiply at alarming rates. Jack and Fevvers are separated and everyone goes through a spiritual awakening before coming back together for a happy ending. It’s not as interesting as it sounds.
I wrestled with my feelings on this book for a long time. I found my opinion locked up in a sort of logical conundrum. ‘Nights at the Circus’ clearly falls smack dab into the definition of magic realism and magic realism is (personally) undeniably superior to realism in the same way that a chocolate covered raisin is superior to a nude shrivelled grape. We’re still dealing in the real world with real issues and real feelings etc but with the inclusion of literate primates and mirror-dwelling tigers to liven things up. This chain of reasoning made sense to me and yet I could not swallow it. It took some time to build to this, but I’m just going to have to admit it; I did not like this book very much.
I ought to. It ticked my boxes. I would have recommended it to myself. It just never sat right with me. I still feel guilt for feeling these feelings so I’m going to sell ‘Nights at the Circus’ a bit more before revealing my qualms. It is an exciting book. The story is more along the lines of vignettes strung together, little or short stories if you will, or maybe a collection of fairy tales is closer the mark. Your attention is constantly being caught and re-caught by new narrative threads and aptly circus-like imagery surrounding Wonderland parables.
I liked the idea of Fevvers. Scratching 6 foot myself I like to see a big girl get the boy. Also it never got too vulgar or loose with life though the opportunities abounded. I hold my literature to a high moral standard and, though accommodating of necessary nastiness, I frown on gratuitousity for it’s own sake. I had no cause for frown here. Certainly high marks all around for originality. I can’t bear to put you off this book too much. If you stumble across it, give it a try. If nothing else it passes the time like a dream.
And yet it was not for me. On a surface level I wasn’t crazy for the progression of the book. It started strong, the middle was ripe for a splendid climax and conclusion but instead it all sort of petered out with a rather staid zen-like finding of self. And the root of the matter though, was that this novel spent too much time winking at me and this made it impossible to simply enjoy. This is a smart book, Carter is a smart lady and by golly you are going to be reminded of it. Thinly veiled allegories abound which would be fine if they didn’t all have signs on them saying ‘thinly veiled allegory’. I’m not saying that you are babied through the symbolism, it’s more a fact of being constantly jarred out of the narrative by characters proclaiming themselves to be unreliable narrators etc.
As you read you are plainly told to examine the relationship between listener, teller and tale. A parade of literary devices are marched in front of you while Fevver’s gleefully discusses each one in Latin. Maybe this appeals to you, all the better, but for me it was exhausting and worse, it made me self conscious. “I am not just a book!” proclaims ‘Nights at the Circus,’ “I am a discourse between author and reader!” This is too much pressure for me. It is audience participation and I cannot relax and enjoy the show if I’m worried about whether I’m enjoying it right. When I finished, the effect was that ‘Nights at the Circus’ left on me an impression of disingenuousness. Meticulously engineered and too clever by half it never let me enter into it no questions asked. For all the lights and colours and plots and characters it remains cold and distant. Like a snooty Discworld.
And there you have it. I’m not sure if feeling distained by a novel is a rational reason for giving it 2 stars out of five but I’ve been comfortably irrational for years now so it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I’d assign it if I ever taught high school literature. Knock those smart-alec kids down a peg or two.
‘Nights at the Circus’ came to me immediately recommended, which is to say the girl at Waterstones gushed over when I brought it to the counter. Generally I do not care for it when shop staff accost me with unsolicited conversation because I am, to use the medical terminology, “painfully awkward.” I don’t mind so much at bookstores through, because with super heroes and video games long gone mainstream, paperbacks are the last refuge of the true nerd and thus I felt kinship. I paid heed to Waterstones girl and dutifully saved ‘Nights at the Circus’ as a reward for completing less fun classics. After ‘The Bell Jar’ I knew that time had come.
‘Nights at the Circus’ is about Fevvers (as in ‘Feathers’ spelled cockney), a statuesque grotesque of a woman whose literal claim to fame rests in the functional wings growing out of her back. The book begins with American reporter Jack interviewing Fevvers and her cohort Lizzie for his series on great big humbugs. Fevvers has just completed a triumphant circuit of Europe and now, after returning to home sweet London, she plan to set out with a circus run by Colonel Kearney, an OTT allegory of the capitalist dream who will no doubt go in to star in many a North Korean propaganda poster. First through, she and Lizzie, for the benefit of a captivated Jack, relate her life story thus far. It is action packed, reference jammed, titillating, eerie and delightful.
In Part II the action has shifted to St. Petersburg, stage one of the trans-Siberian circus. Jack has come along as a clown because he is now in love, apparently. We meet the moribund clowns, the cowardly strong man, her highness the tiger-tamer, the chimpanzees of superior intellect and the deceptively interesting chimp man’s wife. Also Colonel Kearney’s psychic pig. It is all good fun for a while but then things begin to go wrong and I begin to wonder where we are going with all of this.
The answer comes in Part III and it is Siberia. Disaster strikes the circus. Lesbian relationships multiply at alarming rates. Jack and Fevvers are separated and everyone goes through a spiritual awakening before coming back together for a happy ending. It’s not as interesting as it sounds.
I wrestled with my feelings on this book for a long time. I found my opinion locked up in a sort of logical conundrum. ‘Nights at the Circus’ clearly falls smack dab into the definition of magic realism and magic realism is (personally) undeniably superior to realism in the same way that a chocolate covered raisin is superior to a nude shrivelled grape. We’re still dealing in the real world with real issues and real feelings etc but with the inclusion of literate primates and mirror-dwelling tigers to liven things up. This chain of reasoning made sense to me and yet I could not swallow it. It took some time to build to this, but I’m just going to have to admit it; I did not like this book very much.
I ought to. It ticked my boxes. I would have recommended it to myself. It just never sat right with me. I still feel guilt for feeling these feelings so I’m going to sell ‘Nights at the Circus’ a bit more before revealing my qualms. It is an exciting book. The story is more along the lines of vignettes strung together, little or short stories if you will, or maybe a collection of fairy tales is closer the mark. Your attention is constantly being caught and re-caught by new narrative threads and aptly circus-like imagery surrounding Wonderland parables.
I liked the idea of Fevvers. Scratching 6 foot myself I like to see a big girl get the boy. Also it never got too vulgar or loose with life though the opportunities abounded. I hold my literature to a high moral standard and, though accommodating of necessary nastiness, I frown on gratuitousity for it’s own sake. I had no cause for frown here. Certainly high marks all around for originality. I can’t bear to put you off this book too much. If you stumble across it, give it a try. If nothing else it passes the time like a dream.
And yet it was not for me. On a surface level I wasn’t crazy for the progression of the book. It started strong, the middle was ripe for a splendid climax and conclusion but instead it all sort of petered out with a rather staid zen-like finding of self. And the root of the matter though, was that this novel spent too much time winking at me and this made it impossible to simply enjoy. This is a smart book, Carter is a smart lady and by golly you are going to be reminded of it. Thinly veiled allegories abound which would be fine if they didn’t all have signs on them saying ‘thinly veiled allegory’. I’m not saying that you are babied through the symbolism, it’s more a fact of being constantly jarred out of the narrative by characters proclaiming themselves to be unreliable narrators etc.
As you read you are plainly told to examine the relationship between listener, teller and tale. A parade of literary devices are marched in front of you while Fevver’s gleefully discusses each one in Latin. Maybe this appeals to you, all the better, but for me it was exhausting and worse, it made me self conscious. “I am not just a book!” proclaims ‘Nights at the Circus,’ “I am a discourse between author and reader!” This is too much pressure for me. It is audience participation and I cannot relax and enjoy the show if I’m worried about whether I’m enjoying it right. When I finished, the effect was that ‘Nights at the Circus’ left on me an impression of disingenuousness. Meticulously engineered and too clever by half it never let me enter into it no questions asked. For all the lights and colours and plots and characters it remains cold and distant. Like a snooty Discworld.
And there you have it. I’m not sure if feeling distained by a novel is a rational reason for giving it 2 stars out of five but I’ve been comfortably irrational for years now so it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I’d assign it if I ever taught high school literature. Knock those smart-alec kids down a peg or two.
November 16, 2022
Cheeky Angela Carter in the height of her powers.
This Carter is more relaxed with her metaphors, even pocking fun at the decoding of the imagery. And in Fevvers we get a giant farting belching larger than life bird-woman who you just can't help but fall for. She's enjoying life, it's contagious!
I loved the first half of the book immensely. Unfortunately, this book overstayed its welcome in the second part for me. I'm of the opinion that Angela works best in the shorter form or she tends to lose focus.
But yeah, still highly enjoyable, crazy that it took me three attempts to finally get into this book.
This Carter is more relaxed with her metaphors, even pocking fun at the decoding of the imagery. And in Fevvers we get a giant farting belching larger than life bird-woman who you just can't help but fall for. She's enjoying life, it's contagious!
I loved the first half of the book immensely. Unfortunately, this book overstayed its welcome in the second part for me. I'm of the opinion that Angela works best in the shorter form or she tends to lose focus.
But yeah, still highly enjoyable, crazy that it took me three attempts to finally get into this book.
December 5, 2018
My God. What a breathtaking journey.
Does Angela Carter write fantasy or magical realism? It's very difficult to say. It starts off in a mundane enough setting, in the dressing room of a famous aerialiste (or trapeze artist, in common English), Sophie Fevvers, where she, in the company of her foster mother Lizzie, is being interviewed by the young journalist Jack Walser, in the waning days of the nineteenth century. There is nothing remarkable about Sophie other than the fact that she sports a pair of wings in addition to arms - a sort of human-bird hybrid. Walser is sure that this is a fraud, and he is determined to prove it; that is one of the reasons for the exclusive interview he has obtained with the girl. However, as the evening progresses and time stands still (literally) in the tiny dressing room, Fevvers narrates a story that gets increasingly bizarre. Starting from her appearance at a brothel as a newly hatched foundling, through her incarceration in a house of freaks, and ultimate escape from the clutches of a fatally lecherous gentleman, the story holds the young journalist spellbound: so much so that he decides to follow Sophie on her tour with a circus, in Russia and Japan, as a clown.
The second part of the book is about the circus and its performance in St. Petersburg, in a Russia standing practically at the door of revolution. Now we see things getting seriously weird. The circus, run by "Colonel" Kearney and his pet pig Sybil (endowed with the gift of prophecy), is a surrealist's delight, like something imagined by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel while tripping seriously on acid. We have the mute princess of Abyssinia and her dancing tigers; the Ape-Man and his team of intelligent apes; the troupe of clowns led by the Great Buffo with routines resembling a schizophrenic's dream... and of course, the feathered flying artist Fevvers. In this section, the author treats us to surreal vignettes one after the other. Reality, which was present at least as a backdrop in the previous section, takes a backseat as the circus rumbles on to its disastrous last performance; and Sophie escapes from yet another lecher by the skin of her teeth.
The third part takes place in Siberia, in a trans-Siberian express taking the circus across to Japan - it being the colonel's dream to do something which no one has so far succeeded in doing: transport elephants across the Urals. However, the journey comes to grief with the train being held up by brigands and all the members of the circus being kidnapped. In the frozen wastes, the narrative takes dizzying turns until the denouement at the turn of the twentieth century.
***
Angela Carter writes lush prose, and her characters are all symbols for something which she tries to say - the only thing is, we are never able to put our finger on it, quite. The myth of Leda and the Swan seems to be an enduring theme with her (we encounter it in The Magic Toyshop also), as Sophie Fevvers is an obvious metaphor for a swan maiden. However, Carter demythifies her, making her a coarse cockney who does not mind openly belching and farting, and whose dressing room is something of a pig-sty with unwashed clothes and refuse strewn all around and a chamber-pot concealed behind a screen. The lady herself is no ethereal beauty:
This inversion of the fairy tale, bringing the celestial princess down to sordid earth, is the author’s way of imposing the enchanted on the mundane and vice versa: we are having our heads among the stars, but our feet are firmly planted in the soil.
The circus, with its surreal vignettes, again unravels the vision of a world where the sacred shares a wafer-thin boundary with the profane (or rather, the vulgar). I was especially impressed by the sequence where the intelligent apes undress Walser while the strong man copulates with the ape-trainer’s wife nearby, the whole thing interrupted by the tigress’s entrance; also the bacchanalia of the clowns under Buffo, slowly increasing in weirdness leading to its explosive climax. We are on the verge of creative madness here; the bubble of storytelling sanity can break any time and fall into incoherent babble.
Because the world is on a cusp here: as suggested in the quote above, one century is moulting into another. Nothing is going to be the same anymore. The journey into the trackless wastes of Siberia, with its brigands, convicts and aboriginal shamans is a journey into the collective unconscious of a human race about to die and be born again, like the phoenix.
Yes indeed. And we are lucky to be there along with Angela Carter and her motley crew.
Does Angela Carter write fantasy or magical realism? It's very difficult to say. It starts off in a mundane enough setting, in the dressing room of a famous aerialiste (or trapeze artist, in common English), Sophie Fevvers, where she, in the company of her foster mother Lizzie, is being interviewed by the young journalist Jack Walser, in the waning days of the nineteenth century. There is nothing remarkable about Sophie other than the fact that she sports a pair of wings in addition to arms - a sort of human-bird hybrid. Walser is sure that this is a fraud, and he is determined to prove it; that is one of the reasons for the exclusive interview he has obtained with the girl. However, as the evening progresses and time stands still (literally) in the tiny dressing room, Fevvers narrates a story that gets increasingly bizarre. Starting from her appearance at a brothel as a newly hatched foundling, through her incarceration in a house of freaks, and ultimate escape from the clutches of a fatally lecherous gentleman, the story holds the young journalist spellbound: so much so that he decides to follow Sophie on her tour with a circus, in Russia and Japan, as a clown.
The second part of the book is about the circus and its performance in St. Petersburg, in a Russia standing practically at the door of revolution. Now we see things getting seriously weird. The circus, run by "Colonel" Kearney and his pet pig Sybil (endowed with the gift of prophecy), is a surrealist's delight, like something imagined by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel while tripping seriously on acid. We have the mute princess of Abyssinia and her dancing tigers; the Ape-Man and his team of intelligent apes; the troupe of clowns led by the Great Buffo with routines resembling a schizophrenic's dream... and of course, the feathered flying artist Fevvers. In this section, the author treats us to surreal vignettes one after the other. Reality, which was present at least as a backdrop in the previous section, takes a backseat as the circus rumbles on to its disastrous last performance; and Sophie escapes from yet another lecher by the skin of her teeth.
The third part takes place in Siberia, in a trans-Siberian express taking the circus across to Japan - it being the colonel's dream to do something which no one has so far succeeded in doing: transport elephants across the Urals. However, the journey comes to grief with the train being held up by brigands and all the members of the circus being kidnapped. In the frozen wastes, the narrative takes dizzying turns until the denouement at the turn of the twentieth century.
***
Angela Carter writes lush prose, and her characters are all symbols for something which she tries to say - the only thing is, we are never able to put our finger on it, quite. The myth of Leda and the Swan seems to be an enduring theme with her (we encounter it in The Magic Toyshop also), as Sophie Fevvers is an obvious metaphor for a swan maiden. However, Carter demythifies her, making her a coarse cockney who does not mind openly belching and farting, and whose dressing room is something of a pig-sty with unwashed clothes and refuse strewn all around and a chamber-pot concealed behind a screen. The lady herself is no ethereal beauty:
At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an angel. At six feet two in her stockings, she would have to give Walser a couple of inches in order to match him and, though they said she was ‘divinely tall’, there was, off-stage, not much of divine about her unless there were gin palaces in heaven where she might preside behind the bar. Her face, broad and oval as a meat dish, had been thrown on a common wheel out of coarse clay; nothing subtle about her appeal, which was just as well if she were to function as the democratically elected divinity of the imminent century of the Common Man.
This inversion of the fairy tale, bringing the celestial princess down to sordid earth, is the author’s way of imposing the enchanted on the mundane and vice versa: we are having our heads among the stars, but our feet are firmly planted in the soil.
The circus, with its surreal vignettes, again unravels the vision of a world where the sacred shares a wafer-thin boundary with the profane (or rather, the vulgar). I was especially impressed by the sequence where the intelligent apes undress Walser while the strong man copulates with the ape-trainer’s wife nearby, the whole thing interrupted by the tigress’s entrance; also the bacchanalia of the clowns under Buffo, slowly increasing in weirdness leading to its explosive climax. We are on the verge of creative madness here; the bubble of storytelling sanity can break any time and fall into incoherent babble.
Because the world is on a cusp here: as suggested in the quote above, one century is moulting into another. Nothing is going to be the same anymore. The journey into the trackless wastes of Siberia, with its brigands, convicts and aboriginal shamans is a journey into the collective unconscious of a human race about to die and be born again, like the phoenix.
For we are at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about to be ground out in the ashtray of history.
Yes indeed. And we are lucky to be there along with Angela Carter and her motley crew.
September 9, 2013
I'm surprised that I took no notes while reading this book. I have a feeling it was because I came so en-rapt in Sophie's tale I forgot all else. Isn't that the point of a good book? Did I say this book is good? Well I will now. This book is good!
From the start you wonder if her story really is true when she claims to have been hatched but soon you realize there is something strange going on. Like the reporter, Jack Walser you could swear that you've been listening all night until the clock strikes twelve and you're glad that you have all night to hear more although you swear more time has passed.
Once real time seems to catch up you're hooked and ready to go off and join the circus just like Jack and then the story begins in earnest. A lot of it seeming mundane till you really start falling for the star and seeing her as what she claims. A giant of a woman with real wings she uses on her trapeze act. You suddenly cant blame those that wanted to possess her as she is magnificent in body and in mind. Then the rest of the circus unfurls as a magical being in itself.
I could go on but don't worry I won't. I leave you to listen to Ms Fevvers story for yourself. See if you don't lose track of time as well.
From the start you wonder if her story really is true when she claims to have been hatched but soon you realize there is something strange going on. Like the reporter, Jack Walser you could swear that you've been listening all night until the clock strikes twelve and you're glad that you have all night to hear more although you swear more time has passed.
Once real time seems to catch up you're hooked and ready to go off and join the circus just like Jack and then the story begins in earnest. A lot of it seeming mundane till you really start falling for the star and seeing her as what she claims. A giant of a woman with real wings she uses on her trapeze act. You suddenly cant blame those that wanted to possess her as she is magnificent in body and in mind. Then the rest of the circus unfurls as a magical being in itself.
I could go on but don't worry I won't. I leave you to listen to Ms Fevvers story for yourself. See if you don't lose track of time as well.
Read
July 4, 2018"You've just finished Noći u cirkusu. What's next?", pita me Goodreads. Evo ne znam - da li boca rakije ili psihijatar.
Ovo je najgore prevedena knjiga koju sam ikad čitala. A čitala sam svakakvog smeća. U principu, pošto se ne bavim jezikom i nisam filolog, lingvista, itd. pitanje je preko koliko sam loših prevoda pretrčala, a da nisam ni primetila da nešto nije u redu. Uprkos tome, valjda imam elementarno poznavanje sopstvenog, maternjeg jezika, da mogu da vidim da je ovde neko debelo zasrao.
Rečenice u kojima subjekat ili objekat menjaju broj i rod, složene rečenice koje su ostavljene nezavršenima, bukvalno prevedeni idiomi i fraze svojstvene engleskom jeziku ("ukruti gornju usnu", "ja špijuniram"), pa čak i nezgrapan odabir da se glavna junakinja Fevvers (Kokni za Feathers) prevede kao Fivers, što više asocira, jelte, na temperaturu, pa i groznicu, buncanje (na šta liči poslednja trećina knjige, just sayin')... Otprilike, sve je kao kad Atheist Rap sastavljaju fudbalski tim pa kažu "onaj mali što radi na strugu, on će bit bek!". E, tako su i ovde prevodilac i lektor otišli na vinjak, a posao je završio onaj mali, što radi u knjigoveznici, jer mu je bilo žao da knjiga ostane nedovršena.
Knjiga kao knjiga, ne znam šta da kažem, budući da nisam naročiti fan magijskog realizma, a.k.a. uštogljenog mlađeg brata prostodušne fantastike, ali recimo da je poslednja trećina romana, koja se odvija u Sibiru, negde izletela sa šina baš kao i voz kojim se cirkuska družina vozila Транссиб-om. Mada, nakon ovakvog silovanja jezika, upitno je da li vredi iznositi bilo kakve utiske.
Zaobiđite ovo izdanje.
Ovo je najgore prevedena knjiga koju sam ikad čitala. A čitala sam svakakvog smeća. U principu, pošto se ne bavim jezikom i nisam filolog, lingvista, itd. pitanje je preko koliko sam loših prevoda pretrčala, a da nisam ni primetila da nešto nije u redu. Uprkos tome, valjda imam elementarno poznavanje sopstvenog, maternjeg jezika, da mogu da vidim da je ovde neko debelo zasrao.
Rečenice u kojima subjekat ili objekat menjaju broj i rod, složene rečenice koje su ostavljene nezavršenima, bukvalno prevedeni idiomi i fraze svojstvene engleskom jeziku ("ukruti gornju usnu", "ja špijuniram"), pa čak i nezgrapan odabir da se glavna junakinja Fevvers (Kokni za Feathers) prevede kao Fivers, što više asocira, jelte, na temperaturu, pa i groznicu, buncanje (na šta liči poslednja trećina knjige, just sayin')... Otprilike, sve je kao kad Atheist Rap sastavljaju fudbalski tim pa kažu "onaj mali što radi na strugu, on će bit bek!". E, tako su i ovde prevodilac i lektor otišli na vinjak, a posao je završio onaj mali, što radi u knjigoveznici, jer mu je bilo žao da knjiga ostane nedovršena.
Knjiga kao knjiga, ne znam šta da kažem, budući da nisam naročiti fan magijskog realizma, a.k.a. uštogljenog mlađeg brata prostodušne fantastike, ali recimo da je poslednja trećina romana, koja se odvija u Sibiru, negde izletela sa šina baš kao i voz kojim se cirkuska družina vozila Транссиб-om. Mada, nakon ovakvog silovanja jezika, upitno je da li vredi iznositi bilo kakve utiske.
Zaobiđite ovo izdanje.
September 16, 2017
Update - A story about stories and illusion.
Magic and reading have something in common. It’s that thin wedge that question of what is real and what is fantasy. We know that the magician is doing some trick, but we just can’t get it, can’t figure it out. With books, good ones at least, the trick is the writing taking you someplace else. Books aren’t the only thing that can do this – a good movie, painting, music.
It’s this line between reality and fantasy that Carter explores in this novel about a circus performer who may actually have real wings. At first glance it seems as if Fevvers is the only character with this problem, but every character in the book comes into contact with this question. Even the tigers, which may or may not really be jealous lovers.
In many ways, this is the human condition, the search for ourselves. Is our work face our real face? It might not be the wings that Fevvers has, but the question of reality and fantasy is one we change and fight in some way every day.
Magic and reading have something in common. It’s that thin wedge that question of what is real and what is fantasy. We know that the magician is doing some trick, but we just can’t get it, can’t figure it out. With books, good ones at least, the trick is the writing taking you someplace else. Books aren’t the only thing that can do this – a good movie, painting, music.
It’s this line between reality and fantasy that Carter explores in this novel about a circus performer who may actually have real wings. At first glance it seems as if Fevvers is the only character with this problem, but every character in the book comes into contact with this question. Even the tigers, which may or may not really be jealous lovers.
In many ways, this is the human condition, the search for ourselves. Is our work face our real face? It might not be the wings that Fevvers has, but the question of reality and fantasy is one we change and fight in some way every day.
May 1, 2011
In typical Angela Carter fashion, "Nights at the Circus" appeals to our baser human instincts by attempting to shock us with freaks, incest, cannibalism, and excrement. The whole time I was reading it, I called it my albatross. Since I had gotten past page 50 (every book gets a 50 page chance from me) due to the book's, at times, lyrical and surreal beauty, I felt violated by so much ugliness in the book's second half. But by then, I had to finish it. It took me an entire month to read this novel because of its pretentious, self-reflexive moments that reminded me of the intellectual masturbation of a writer in the midst of graduate school. I know because I was once there, but I am grateful to have since recovered. Sometimes I wish Angela Carter wouldn't subject her readers to passages like this one: "Third place, how will you recognize "perfection" when you see it? You can only define the future perfect by the present imperfect, and the present, in which, inevitably, we all live, always seems imperfect to somebody" (239). The quality of the book was uneven. At times it was full of hauntingly beautiful imagery and lyricism, but at other times it was just poorly written. I am generously giving it two stars because I was able to finish it--no small feat.
September 19, 2021
This is one of the books that have been one my mental TBR for the longest time. I think from around 2016. Don't often buy books new library's, second hand and flea market is more my strategy for getting books. But after I've learned I could request books at my library this was one of the first books I just got to read. I love Angela Carter's way of writing stories. They are a bit weird but in a different beautiful as well. And this was no different from that. I found her stories to be rather uniqe and a fun reading experience even though it can sometimes get a bit odd. I'm intruiged to look for more books by her to request but I think I've only got short stories collections of her left
March 16, 2017
"«Pensar que te intrujei mesmo, a sério!,» deleitou-se. «Isto só serve para provar que não há nada como a confiança.»"
Uma trapezista alada com quase dois metros de altura;
um jornalista a fazer de palhaço;
uma prostituta com ideias revolucionárias;
uma porca pequenina que adivinha o futuro;
uma domadora de tigres que se apaixona por uma cantora que valsa com tigres;
um homem sem boca;
um macaco professor.
Uma assassina que aprisiona outras mulheres que, como ela, mataram os maridos.
E mais umas quantas personagens excêntricas, protagonistas de fantásticas peripécias circenses.
Uma trapezista alada com quase dois metros de altura;
um jornalista a fazer de palhaço;
uma prostituta com ideias revolucionárias;
uma porca pequenina que adivinha o futuro;
uma domadora de tigres que se apaixona por uma cantora que valsa com tigres;
um homem sem boca;
um macaco professor.
Uma assassina que aprisiona outras mulheres que, como ela, mataram os maridos.
E mais umas quantas personagens excêntricas, protagonistas de fantásticas peripécias circenses.
August 11, 2016
'“The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.”'In 2012, the 'Best of James Tait Black' culled together its tributes from the past near-century, and declared Angela Carter's novel, Nights at the Circus, the best fiction novel out of its history of winners - and therefore, as the novel of the century. Wonderfully fitting for a novel which masks itself on the chaotic cusp of the twentieth-century, where time begins to fall into a state of gaudy entropy; thus Nights at the Circus reworks that elemental energy into prose that is richly dark, both sweeping like velvet and luxuriously dirty. The reader's experience is pure until he [or she] first reads Angela Carter and is tainted for the better. In Carter's trademark rococo excess, there are so many things to be said about this gothic, exuberant novel, and yet nothing would be able to encompass the sheer vitality of the primal tug of the story which Carter enchants with. Right from the first line when we are introduced to Fevvers, the fin de siecle Cockney Venus, 'aerialiste extraordinare' and extraordinarily part swan and part woman [or is she?], with her 'voice that clanged like dustbin lids', the novel promises a journey of Rabelaisian carnivalesque proportions, of traipsing through the wild nights of London, St Petersburg and Siberia. Taking centre stage then is the twice as large as life Fevvers, Carter's earthly and gloriously fleshly heroine; she is the embodiment of a post-feminist construction: sexually ambiguous, devastatingly womanly and a vessel for all that is excess, finite and sensory. Her great pair of wings are symbols of the age of the New Woman, but equally the novel - in typical postmodern unreliability - plays at this distance between fiction and fact, the animal and the human. Is Fevvers an elaborate hoax, made of Indian rubber and automaton parts? Or is she an authentic miracle pretending to be a human fraud?
'Her voice. It was as if Walser had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dripping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s'.The point is that Carter never pins onto Fevvers any one fantasised identity which might cloud her individualism. Instead in Fevver's various incarnations, told via the novel's cacophony of voices, the novel's layers begin to peel back like Russian dolls to reveal a character far more complex. Nights at the Circus treats us to a banquet of stories intricately dyed in the unmistakable quality of Carter's startling prose; her descriptions point to an author who sees the world through a unique filter, but equally is able to, and unafraid to dive into the depths of precise truths and mingle it with art, history and myth. In another review of Angela Carter, I mention her as quintessentially English, and Nights at the Circus utilises her erudite understanding of the English canon so that the novel is laced with a refreshing esotericism that is hard to come by in contemporary fiction. Reading Carter is masochistically realising your own inadequacy. All of the various myths in Nights at the Circus seem ancient: Fevvers as an orphan hatches out of an egg, and becomes the Winged Victory tableau vivant for a Victorian whorehouse; later, she becomes an exhibit in Madame Schreck's perverse Museum of Woman Monsters, sold as the Angel to Christian Roseuncreutz who plans to sacrifice her in exchange for immortality; until finally she finds fame working in the Le Cirque d'Hiver.
'Fevvers, nestling under a Venetian chandelier in the Hotel de l’Europe, has seen nothing of the city in which Walser lodges. She has seen swans of ice with a thick encrustation of caviare between the wings; she has seen cut-glass and diamonds; she has seen all the luxurious, bright, transparent things, that make her blue eyes cross with greed.'But Nights at the Circus straddles a myriad of secondary stories too, each as philosophical and fantastical as the next. Many border on hilarity but often tinges of tragedy are overlaid on these luminous characters. Unforgettable is the Sleeping Beauty in Madame Schreck's museum: a girl who upon her first menstruation begins to fall into a deathly sleep, with each day's wakefulness shortening until she begins to waste away only able to open her tired eyes for a few seconds each time. Or the circus' mysterious group of abject clowns, led by the homicidal Buffo the Great; together they parody the martyred Jesus and his disciples, whilst their Bacchanal dances are violent to the point of disintegrating the very fabric of reality around them.
'[The tiger] came out of the corridor like orange quicksilver, or a rarer liquid metal, a quickgold. It did not so much run as flow, a questing sluice of brown and yellow, a hot and molten death.'Although the novel has an infinite capacity for mining the themes so crucial to Carter's writings, one prominent sphere is the elucidation between animal and human nature. With intricate skill Carter reimagines the grotesque circus into a surreal panoply of creatures: such as the Princess of Abyssinia and her army of dancing and jealous tigers; or Monsieur Lamarck's Educated Apes, who seem to defy conventional evolution; whilst Sybil the prophetic pig is joined with other anthropomorphised elephants and dogs. In fact, if anything Nights at the Circus pits the fetishised commodification of outcast women with the inherent animalistic, carnal desires of their oppressors. There are few freedoms to be found in the cage-like tent of the circus. Such glamorous incarcerations are merely another metaphor for entrapment, not dissimilar to the Grand Duke and his fabulously sinister collection of Fabergé eggs which hold terrible yet beautiful secrets. The scene with the Duke's ever slowly melting to-size statue of Fevvers standing atop a pool of caviar, with a diamond chocker around her neck produces one of the most haunting scenes in the novel.
'Underneath his make-up, that face like a beloved face known long ago, and lost, and now returned, although I never knew him before, although he is a stranger, still that face which I have always loved before I ever saw it so that to see him is to remember, although I do not know who it is I then remember, except it might be the vague imaginary face of desire.'Stylishly devilish, Nights at the Circus is an elegant - but always emotionally piquing - romp focused around a group of characters who defy realism and rationality; one must suspend disbelief but because Carter never lets go in style nor action, the novel is propelling to the point of recklessness. The book is noticeably longer than many of Carter's other works, and in that sustaining of the vital literary force, the novel slips in a few places with regards to pacing. Nights at the Circus is not without its own flaws, and to place it on Carter's body of work as the head ignores the strength and greater complexity of some of her earlier work and stories. However, here Carter creates a grand, narrative myth built out of the unheard female voice - a large task, but one that is accomplished with great insight and confidence. Take away the embellishments, the polyphonic structure of the novel, and therein lies a simpler message and goal, which as Fevvers metafictionally remarks herself, this story - her story - is one which must be told: Nights at the Circus is a dedication to 'all those whose tales we've yet to tell ... the histories of those woman who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten, erased from history as if they had never been.' Hear, hear!
June 29, 2012
When I read Angela Carter, I imagine her as the literary grandmother to someone like Kelly Link. There's an eccentric tone of fantasy, an unabashed outlandishness and roguish word-play; there's a thread of challenge running through the narrative, sometimes cleverly concealed and sometimes out in front like so much gaudy embroidery. Carter is a master storyteller with a remarkable gift for language and a willingness to take risks on any front.
But all of the above I already knew from my introduction to Carter, her short story "The Loves of Lady Purple" (check it out in Wayward Girls and Wicked Women ).
Nights at the Circus goes beyond the expectations set by "The Loves of Lady Purple". It is more fantastic, more surreal, more political, more challenging, more graphic, and though more forceful also much more subtle. The traveling circus of Colonel Kearney provides such a splendid backdrop for Angela Carter's handiwork that I would not be at all surprised if this is her finest novel {†}. The notion of the circus opens up every possibility for her—literate monkeys taking over their own care and negotiating their own compensation, a fortune-telling pig, abject and sociopathic alcoholic clowns {††}... And most of that (despite providing its own commentary) seems on the surface to primarily help provide color to a narrative that focuses on a struggle to reconcile independence/individuality with the desire to mate and bond with others. Carter cleverly leads the reader along her characters' paths via totems and proxies, and accelerates us through their worlds in crisis when those totems become threatened and lost.
This is one novel that is as brilliant as it is lyrical.
---
† = Again, as of this writing, I've only read this novel and one short story. Though I may perhaps be biased by the strength of the recommendation that J.M. made when suggesting the werk in the first place.
†† = Not to mention the thorough deconstruction of clowning.
---
See also:
• Graham Joyce's top 10 fairy fictions
But all of the above I already knew from my introduction to Carter, her short story "The Loves of Lady Purple" (check it out in Wayward Girls and Wicked Women ).
Nights at the Circus goes beyond the expectations set by "The Loves of Lady Purple". It is more fantastic, more surreal, more political, more challenging, more graphic, and though more forceful also much more subtle. The traveling circus of Colonel Kearney provides such a splendid backdrop for Angela Carter's handiwork that I would not be at all surprised if this is her finest novel {†}. The notion of the circus opens up every possibility for her—literate monkeys taking over their own care and negotiating their own compensation, a fortune-telling pig, abject and sociopathic alcoholic clowns {††}... And most of that (despite providing its own commentary) seems on the surface to primarily help provide color to a narrative that focuses on a struggle to reconcile independence/individuality with the desire to mate and bond with others. Carter cleverly leads the reader along her characters' paths via totems and proxies, and accelerates us through their worlds in crisis when those totems become threatened and lost.
This is one novel that is as brilliant as it is lyrical.
---
† = Again, as of this writing, I've only read this novel and one short story. Though I may perhaps be biased by the strength of the recommendation that J.M. made when suggesting the werk in the first place.
†† = Not to mention the thorough deconstruction of clowning.
---
See also:
• Graham Joyce's top 10 fairy fictions
December 29, 2021
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is apparently a classic. It has many spectacular scenes and Carter's usual surrealism. It plays itself out like a fabulous carnival.
I've enjoyed other works of Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Burning Your Boats. Maybe I can't imaginatively sustain Carter's wild surrealism for a full-length novel. But despite some wonderful moments in the story of Sophie Fevvers' trapeze fame as a woman with full-size wings and the question of whether she is a miracle or a fraud, the picaresque adventures of Sophie along with undercover reporter Jack Walsser that take the reader on a wild ride through the bordellos of London, the theaters of Europe and ultimately (and strangely) the wilds of Siberia, trying to discover the truth of what Sophie is, I frequently lost all interest. In my own truth, I didn't really care and although there may be many more substantial meanings that lie beneath the surface theatricality of the story (as to patriarchy, the sale of women, the very nature of reality vs. illusion), I was unable to become emotionally or intellectually connected to the story.
I can admire the craftsmanship and artifice of the book and respect the intellect underneath. I wish I could say I had enjoyed it as well.
I've enjoyed other works of Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Burning Your Boats. Maybe I can't imaginatively sustain Carter's wild surrealism for a full-length novel. But despite some wonderful moments in the story of Sophie Fevvers' trapeze fame as a woman with full-size wings and the question of whether she is a miracle or a fraud, the picaresque adventures of Sophie along with undercover reporter Jack Walsser that take the reader on a wild ride through the bordellos of London, the theaters of Europe and ultimately (and strangely) the wilds of Siberia, trying to discover the truth of what Sophie is, I frequently lost all interest. In my own truth, I didn't really care and although there may be many more substantial meanings that lie beneath the surface theatricality of the story (as to patriarchy, the sale of women, the very nature of reality vs. illusion), I was unable to become emotionally or intellectually connected to the story.
I can admire the craftsmanship and artifice of the book and respect the intellect underneath. I wish I could say I had enjoyed it as well.
February 20, 2011
excellent fable of humanity mixing feminism with picaresque adventure. Memorable characters, excellent use of language, humor, adventure, philosophy, militancy, kindness, grotesque tableaux vivants, introspection and ultimately love.
Strongly recommended
Strongly recommended
Read
February 12, 2022Not for me. Sad...
February 9, 2023
Magical realist feminist fable about a Sophie Fevvers, a woman with large purple feathered wings, who performs as an aerialist in a circus. The circus travels from London to St. Petersburg to Siberia. It is an unusual, lyrically written, creative story comprised of vignettes. Characters move in and out of the narrative, perform their (often outlandish) acts, and vanish. It is a meandering tale with no discernable plotline. It contains several scenes that are surrealistic in nature, several involving clowns. I have to admire the creativity, but I did not find it all that engaging. It is an odd combination of philosophical musings, storytelling, and women’s issues.
December 4, 2022
My first Angela Carter novel. It’s brilliant but not for everyone. The first long long chunk is a bizarre bawdy monologue by a winged circus performer / philosopher. And then it gets weird.
July 28, 2012
I was delightfully surprised that I liked this gothic, magical realism type of novel where the principal protagonist is a tall, long-haired, round-faced woman WITH WINGS. Usually, plots like this, including those in science fiction, would be too heavy a task for me to appreciate because I have this little devil inside my ear who, as I read, continuously whispers to me not true, invented, can't ever happen, just pulling your leg, you're wasting your time, better read others, etc.
Add to these is the fact that this novel has no heroes, only this winged 'aerialiste' and her coterie of equally memorable and heroic female characters. The men here are either just weak victims, freaks or ridiculous villains obviously doomed to fail.
Angela Carter, however, was a great writer. For only great writers could describe an improbable creature, a 6-foot-2 woman with wings, who can hover at short diatances, and make me believe, despite the whispering devil in my ears, that she's describing something she had actually seen and not merely conjured. Even this floating girl's name, "Fevvers," is a credible progeny of a seemingly actual event: unwanted baby left at the doorsteps, future foster mother sees it, saw it later sprouts some small feathery protuberances, feathers, fevvers.Then, of course, Carter's unbelievably fresh and unforgettable images, metaphors and similes. I recall having a brief intake of air when, describing a character, she writes something like that the character "is as sad as a continent" (or "has the sadness of a continent"?). Until then, I have never seen, or thought it possible, sadness being equated with a continent. Then I realized why not, indeed. A continent is huge and some sadness can feel like a giant smothering the life in you; or that a continent had existed, almost inert, for millions of years, forced to watch the comings and goings of centuries, seeing and remembering men and the great creatures of the world live, die and disappear forever.
There's humor (Fevvers giving a loud fart then mischievously turning her head to check the reaction of the journalist interviewing her), pathos (the unforgettable Mignon, poor girl, abused like the worst of all the downtrodden Dickens could conceive, with her box of chocolates) and rollicking adventure (they ended up in Siberia, of all places).
Very nice.
Add to these is the fact that this novel has no heroes, only this winged 'aerialiste' and her coterie of equally memorable and heroic female characters. The men here are either just weak victims, freaks or ridiculous villains obviously doomed to fail.
Angela Carter, however, was a great writer. For only great writers could describe an improbable creature, a 6-foot-2 woman with wings, who can hover at short diatances, and make me believe, despite the whispering devil in my ears, that she's describing something she had actually seen and not merely conjured. Even this floating girl's name, "Fevvers," is a credible progeny of a seemingly actual event: unwanted baby left at the doorsteps, future foster mother sees it, saw it later sprouts some small feathery protuberances, feathers, fevvers.Then, of course, Carter's unbelievably fresh and unforgettable images, metaphors and similes. I recall having a brief intake of air when, describing a character, she writes something like that the character "is as sad as a continent" (or "has the sadness of a continent"?). Until then, I have never seen, or thought it possible, sadness being equated with a continent. Then I realized why not, indeed. A continent is huge and some sadness can feel like a giant smothering the life in you; or that a continent had existed, almost inert, for millions of years, forced to watch the comings and goings of centuries, seeing and remembering men and the great creatures of the world live, die and disappear forever.
There's humor (Fevvers giving a loud fart then mischievously turning her head to check the reaction of the journalist interviewing her), pathos (the unforgettable Mignon, poor girl, abused like the worst of all the downtrodden Dickens could conceive, with her box of chocolates) and rollicking adventure (they ended up in Siberia, of all places).
Very nice.
November 18, 2007
i don't get it! :(
I mean, the tale is fantastic, in all senses of the word. The premise of a winged amazon-like girl, brought up by a house of whores, who ends up an aerialiste in a circus, already requires a suspension of belief. The hapless Jack Walser, a journalist who interviews Fevvers (as in Feathers, you dig?) and falls in love with her, who then does everyone's childhood dream of running away to join the circus, goes through many trials and tribulations, heck, as does Fevvers and her foster-mother/chaperone Lizzie. And all the sub-plots are excellent, rich with detail, fantastical sure, but totally in line with everything else of the tale.
And then, at the end, at the last page, where Fevvers roars with laughter at a question by Jack and essentially says "haha, fooled you!", I feel like I missed something.
And I'm not going back to reread the book to figure it out.
So I'm left, let down, mildly disappointed, and what a way to finish an otherwise delightfully imaginative tale.
Bummer.
I mean, the tale is fantastic, in all senses of the word. The premise of a winged amazon-like girl, brought up by a house of whores, who ends up an aerialiste in a circus, already requires a suspension of belief. The hapless Jack Walser, a journalist who interviews Fevvers (as in Feathers, you dig?) and falls in love with her, who then does everyone's childhood dream of running away to join the circus, goes through many trials and tribulations, heck, as does Fevvers and her foster-mother/chaperone Lizzie. And all the sub-plots are excellent, rich with detail, fantastical sure, but totally in line with everything else of the tale.
And then, at the end, at the last page, where Fevvers roars with laughter at a question by Jack and essentially says "haha, fooled you!", I feel like I missed something.
And I'm not going back to reread the book to figure it out.
So I'm left, let down, mildly disappointed, and what a way to finish an otherwise delightfully imaginative tale.
Bummer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 12, 2018
This was just stunning. Take the bawdiness and vocabulary of Music Hall, add a dash of Classics, a soupcon of feminism, give it a good shake and season with a touch of je ne sais quoi and you have "Nights at the Circus". Truly a folk tale for grown-ups, the character of Fevvers will linger for a long time after you have finished turning the pages. She is strong, clever, funny, outrageous and truly wonderful. We never find out the veracity of her claims, but it doesn't matter. And I, for one, would rather believe. Fabulous. And now I feel that I need to read everything that Carter ever wrote.
July 28, 2022
Madcap, weird, fantastic and I loved it!
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