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 scaled contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren's.


Everyone says that Wise Children is Angela Carter's masterpiece, but I'm inclined to agree with Sarah Waters on this one - it's Nights at the Circus, the first novel I read by Carter, and still my favourite, that truly represents how great she is as a writer.

I don't think I could try to write about this novel objectively if I wanted to, so I'll be honest - I love this book. It gets better every time I re-read it, or so it seems. It's a joyous, dizzying novel with one of the best heroines in any work of literature that never fails to inspire me, and send me running off to the computer/my notebooks in order to write something of my own. All novels inspire me to write, to some extent, but no writer has quite the same effect on my imagination as Carter. I will never forget the impression Nights at the Circus first made on me when I discovered it, purely by accident, in the school library when I was fifteen. It was exactly the kind of book that I wanted to write, and I haven't found another writer who I find myself relating to (in terms of themes/imagination/shared interests) in quite the same way. When I read her work it's as if, in a parallel universe, I can imagine myself writing something very similar. It's hard to explain.

Nights at the Circus starts with an interview between an American journalist and the Cockney Venus in her London dressing-rooms in 1899, and ends in bleakest Siberia, having become increasingly detached from reality. It's something which must infuriate some readers, as although it's clearly a magic realist novel from the start, the sense of time and space, fact and fiction spirals out of control in the third part of the novel. I bet my grandmother, who enjoys novels by Hardy and Conrad and despises fantasy, would throw the book across the room in disgust, in much the same way as I was tempted to do with The Time Traveler's Wife. But personally, I like my magic realism, so the ambivalence about about Fevvers' wings (more on that later), the miraculous escape from the Grand Duke and the mystery of Walser's beard, amongst other things, don't bother me.

Fevvers is fabulous. Such a good character - beautiful in a gigantic, slightly freakish way, a fully physical being who eats, yawns, farts, and utterly overwhelms Walser, greedy, noisy, inelegant, full of confidence, occasionally spiteful but essentially warm-hearted...that sentence just deteriorated into some kind of random stream of consciousness rambling, but never mind. Fevvers awes the reader in the same that she awes Walser, when she grasps him between "thighs accustomed to gripping hold of the trapeze" causing the besotted journalist-turned-clown to suffer a "sudden access of erotic vertigo". She is fourteen stone, six foot two and is not remotely grateful, but at the same time she's a powerfully feminine character who remains utterly unpredictable to the end.

And is she fact or fiction? I think it's tempting to assume that the wings are fake on the basis of the final pages, where Fevvers, straddling Walser, laughs and says, "Gawd, I fooled you!", but there's other evidence that suggests the contrary throughout the book. Walser observes that she doesn't actually have a navel. She discusses the problem of her wings with Lizzie when they're alone together, when, presumably, she would have no need to lie as Lizzie would be in on the secret. When she's not performing, they seem to be a constant inconvenience for her. And even when Fevvers takes over the narration, there is, I think, some reference to her wings that treats them as if they are very much physical parts of her body. Of course, ultimately, it's futile trying to distinguish fact from ficton in a magic realist novel with an unreliable narrator, but it's an interesting point to consider.

The plot is thoroughly entertaining, making Nights at the Circus quite unputdownable (yes,I know that's not a real word), even though I've read it before, and know what happens at the end. Even the sub-plots are brilliant, which is unusual, because in so many novels I find myself losing interest as soon as the narrator goes off on a tangent. But the sub-plots are partly what makes it so much more enjoyable, and I've always found Mignon's story particularly touching, as it switches between the past and present. Call me sentimental, but the following passage, after the horror of her past has been revealed and Fevvers has set her up in the honeymoon suite with Walser in St Petersburg, gets me every time:

If Mignon's day had started badly, it was ending well. It was ending like a girlish dream come true in fact, especially when Walser backed off. And she could not get over those roses! She cooed to them, caressed them, made soft, loving passes at them, hovered and purred around them with such heart-breaking, unknowing grace that Walser, by no means an insensitive man, let out an almost sob of touched perplexity.

'Oh, Mignon, what am I to do with you?'

To be addressed directly in the English language struck some chord in that peculiar and selective organ, her memory. She pulled the towel off her head and her Gretchen yellow hair sprayed out in all directions. She smiled. This smile contained her entire history and was scarcely to be borne.

'God save the Queen,' she said.

Walser could stand no more and rushed from the room.

It's incredibly moving, but Nights at the Circus is full of comic scenes, too. Walser's treatment at the hands of the apes and everything involving the wonderful caricature that is Colonel Kearney, with his pet pig, are just a couple of examples.

Still, it's not just an entertaining romp with no depth. The question of identity, the nature of story-telling, and gender are all explored here. Walser's devlopment from young, naive and essentially incomplete man to a proper human being, and Fevvers' transformation into a rather more mature, less self-absorbed character are depicted with humour but sympathy, too, and you can't help but feel that Carter is rather attached to her characters (Fevvers especially) by the end.

My aunt, vaguely recalling reading The Bloody Chamber several years ago, was under the impression that the short stories presented women in a negative way. I've no idea how she ended up with that impression, seeing as Carter is commonly labelled as a feminist writer, not to mention the fact that the women often come out on top in The Bloody Chamber (Red Riding Hood seduces the wolf, the Beauty finds love, the heroine of the title story is rescued by her mother etc). Because Carter is so rarely mentioned without being described as a feminist, someone who hadn't read any of her work might assume, judging by the label and the plot summaries of her novels and short stories, that she's the kind of feminist who's constantly showing disdain for men while making sure the women are always beautiful, perfect, powerful etc etc. But thankfully, this isn't the case with her work, and certainly not in Nights at the Circus.

Women do triumph - Mignon and the Princess fall in love, Fevvers escapes the men who try to harm her, the prostitutes educate themselves and refuse to be beaten, while the convicts in the women's prison in Siberia communicate through menstrual blood and eventually find liberation. But while the men are often characters to be feared or ridiculed, the same rule applies to the female characters, and Lizzie, presumably reflecting Carter's own views, is scornful of the convicts' plans to create a female utopia:

"What'll they do with the boy babies? Feed 'em to the polar bears? To the female polar bears?' demanded Liz, who was in truculent mood and clearly thought herself back in Whitechapel at a meeting of the Godwin and Wollstonecraft Debating Society.


I think Nights at the Circus is the perfect balance of humour and seriousness, and magic and realism. Her writing is sharp and beautiful but accessible, and while some of her earlier novels (and a few of her short stories) often seem almost over-written, there's none of that in Nights at the Circus. The only thing I might criticise is the way in which a lot of her characters tend to suddenly become the voices of Carter herself (this frequently happens with Fevvers and Lizzie, although the inconsistencies and contradictions often have an interesting effect in their own way. Fevvers: "This is some kind of heretical possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie!"). It's the novel that rests comfortably between the completely mad The Passion of New Eve - which I also love, for different reasons - and Wise Children, which is, as I mentioned earlier, generally regarded as her best novel. Still, for me, Nights at the Circus, picaresque, tongue-in-cheek and magical, is the novel that demonstrates why Carter was such a good novelist, who deserves to be discovered and loved by a new generation of readers.