Flying circus

Lewis Jones

Nights at the Circus Angela Carter

(Hogarth/Chatto £8.95)

T ike Thomas Bowdler before her, LAngela Carter has a mission: to reform the stories of the past, to make them fit for the modern drawing-room. She is an evangelist, so she is naturally interested in the hard cases, the reprobates; in her time she has wrestled with the likes of Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard and the Marquis de Sade. Her performance in these bouts left a strong impression on the fancy.

Her new novel, Nights at the Circus, is set 'at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar- butt, of a nineteenth century which is just about ground out in the ashtray of history'. It glances at the Sleeping Beauty, Lady Godiva and others, but its chief character is roughly based on Helen of Troy: 'Fev- vers, the most famous aerialiste of the day; her slogan, "Is she fact or is she fiction?" ' Fevvers owes her name, metier, fame and slogan to the wings that apparently sprout from her shoulders.

The novel is a version of the genre's masculine prototype, the picaresque, with a shape that recalls that of Tom Jones Home, the Road and wildly improbable Reconciliation. It begins in London, where Fevvers is wowing.them at the Alhambra. In her dressing-room, 'a mistresspiece of feminine squalor', Fevvers is giving the story of her life to a young American journalist called Walser. Her conception and birth are a mystery, but she was apparently 'hatched' and left in a 'basket of broken shells and straw in Whitechapel at the door of a certain house'.

The whores of that house had golden hearts, cultivated minds and progressive political opinions Call suffragists in that house); they very decently adopted the chick. When she was seven, her wings began to bud and she became the mascot of the place ('Why, here's our very own Cupid in the living flesh!'); at puberty they burst forth, and she was instructed in flight by Lizzie, the Marxist housekeeper.

The idyll ended with the death of Ma Nelson, the kindly madame. The house was closed by her brother, a dissenting cleric, and Fevvers went to stay with Lizzie and her family in Battersea. To save them all from starvation she joined a sexual freakshow, where she met such mythical types as the Human Eel and the Sleeping Beauty. She was kidnapped by Christian Rosencreutz, a lecherous and mysogynist mystic, but managed to escape and found fame and fortune on the high wire. She tells Walser that she has just joined a grand American circus and is about to tour the world with it; he is by now quite besotted by her and decides to join it himself, enlisting as a clown.

The second part of the novel follows them to St Petersburg and deals in detail with the life of the circus, which, like the brothel and the freakshow, offers a crude model of modern society. The proprietor is Colonel Kearney, who smokes cigars and has a waistcoat in the pattern of the Stars and Stripes and a belt buckle in the shape of a dollar sign — 'the living image of the entrepreneur'. Lower down are the clowns, who live by humiliation; at the bottom are the animals — the Educated Apes, for example. The enterprise is rotten with sexism, of course: 'From the monkey house, echoing on the night air, came a rhythmic thud as the Ape-Man beat his wife as though she were a carpet.: Roll up, every one a victim! After various crises the apes, being educated, become socialists and depart; Fevvers has a narrow escape from an aristocratic aesthete — the circus sets off by rail for Japan.

If the first two parts of the novel are outlandishly didactic, the third is positively Shavian. As the circus passes through Siberia, its train is sabotaged by comic- opera bandits who have been outlawed for their habit of murdering rapists; thanks to the Colonel's publicity, they believe that Fevvers is to marry the Prince of Wales and they hope to gain her influence with the English court. Meanwhile, in another part of the tundra, there is a private prison for women who have murdered their husbands — 'There are many reasons, most of them good ones, why a woman should want to murder her husband.' The women liberate themselves by the power of mass tribad- ism. Wandering at large, they come upon the wreckage of the train, finding among it a broken statue of Old Father Time; one of their number, Vera, makes a policy deci- sion:

'Wherever we go, we'll need no more fathers,' she pronounced. So they threw it away.

Following on from this motion, Vera implored her friend to forbear from the use of the patronymic when she addressed her . .

The story grows increasingly loopy and slapdash, and involves earnest debate 011 subjects like Artificial Insemination.

Walser is introduced to hallucinogenic drugs and discovers true love. Fevvers becomes apocalyptic: 'And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I.'

In a recent interview, Ms Carter ex- plained her position as a writer. 'It seems obvious,' she said, 'to an impartial obser- ver, that Western European civilisation as we know it has just about run its course . Its literature is 'a vast repository of outmoded lies', which can nevertheless be employed today in the service of truth: one can use 'fictional forms inherited from the colonial period to create a critique of that period's consequences'. The contemptuous

philistinism of this attitude becomes fully apparent (to an impartial observer) when she considers particular works: the novels of Jane Austen, for example, 'are basically fictionalised etiquette lessons'; and it is this attitude which disfigures her work. Her breezy anachronisms betray a contempt for history, her mawkish hectoring a contempt for the imagination. Despite the energy and colour of much of the writing, Nights at the Circus is a vast repository of modish lies. 'Is she fact or is she fiction?' The answer is that she is neither: she is a travesty (defined by Chambers as a 'dis- guise, esp. of a man as a woman or vice versa: burlesque: ridiculously inadequate representation').