NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS

exercising creative imagination

I have been reading Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus which was first published, by Chatto & Windus, in 1984. It is a fantastic story. 'Fantastic' being the operative word. Let me give you some idea of how that comes to pass.

Fevvers is an aerialiste, the star of the circus. The place is London. The time : the fin de siècle decadence of Victorian England. But Fevvers is no ordinary aerialiste. She claims to have been hatched rather than born. She is a true daughter of Leda. There is no need to specify her father. Her human body has grown a veritable pair of wings. That is sufficient testimony. She flies, elegant and graceful, from high wire to trapeze and then to wheresoever she chooses.
Into her life comes Jack Walser, a young reporter originally from California. His mission : to unmask her for the fraud she is. In pursuit of this mission, he joins the circus as a clown, an august in wet white, as it sets off for Petersburg. There he is caught up in more fantastic adventures. The tiger tamer plays on a grand piano, right there in the cage, while her young female partner dances with her chosen tiger. The clowns perform their time honoured routines. The vodka flows. Disastrously.
The circus sets out on the railroad across Siberia. In the depths of winter, the train is ambushed. Blown up.
For Fevvers there are sideshows with a women's collective jailbreak, a gang of forest-dwelling male outlaws, and shelter in a desolate conservatoire of music with but one professor and no students.
For Jack Walser there is unconsciousness, separation, amnesia and eventual lodging with a Shaman where he begins to experience more than one level of absolute reality. For him there is now 'no difference between fact and fiction'. Instead there is 'a sort of magic realism'.

And there we have it. Magic realism. Lo real maravilloso. A company of writers wherein is inscribed the name Angela Carter.
It would not surprise me to find readers who take up Nights at the Circus and enjoy it simply as a story too good to be true. An escapist fantasy. Something far beyond the bounds of reality. But here's the paradox. It really is a true story. A true and faithful record of something that actually happened. Something ready to be appreciated in its true light by anyone open to receive. Here are displayed characters plot and landscapes conjured up in a reality created by the author and set down by her in writings to weave the essence of her magical spell. A magical spell ready to be unwound by all those with eyes to see and ears to hear. A silent incantation which opens the way to realities beyond reality. The words are all there. Between two covers. We have only to take them up and begin at the beginning. We shall be buffeted by clowns as they cavort. We shall smell the stench from the tigers' cage. Stand on one side as the rails buckle and the train shatters. Move with the Shaman from one reality to another. Even pause with him in the spaces between realities.
It is magic. Real magic. The magic of creative reality. Such stuff as dreams are made of as we go once more a-roving so late into the night.

© francis cameron
oxford, 5 december 2008