Tag: outsiders

The fun of the fair

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Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter

This is one of those modern classics that keeps popping up in discussions on Radio 4, with nothing but praise directed its way, so I thought it was about time I gave it a go.

It is a beautiful, crazy book. Right from the start, Carter keeps us guessing: is anyone telling the truth? Is this the part fantasy/fairy tale that it seems to be or is it a story about some rather clever, even fantastic, people in “real” life?

The story switches between three narrators, sometimes third person, sometimes first, but always appearing to be one of their perspectives. First there’s Jack Walser, an American investigative journalist who, at the start of the novel, is in London to interview a woman who he thinks must be pulling some kind of trick on the British public. That woman is our second narrator, Sophie Fevvers, a six foot plus blonde with wings – yes, wings – who takes advantage of this strange growth by performing as a trapeze artist. She gladly tells Walser her story, or a version of it, with help from her rather less welcoming foster mother Lizzie, who seems to have tricks up her sleeve, has a way with words that belies her coarse cockney accent and is our third narrator/perspective.

Walser quickly falls for Fevvers, as she prefers to be known, to the extent that he signs himself up to join the circus that she is about to go on tour with; and so begins a cacophony of adventure and misadventure.

The story is set in 1899 so the circus is that old-fashioned kind that combined freak show, performing animals, and heavy superstition and tradition. This sometimes got hard to stomach. I have in my time campaigned for circuses to be animal-free and, frankly, this novel offers strong evidence in that campaign’s favour. However, it’s all part of the surreal menagerie that now includes Fevvers – part woman, part swan. And the chimps are completely brilliant.

Carter toys with her readers throughout, mixing reality with lore and perception so that it is never clear what the characters believe to be true and what actually is true:

“[They] did not live alone. There was a bear, a black one, not yet a year old, still almost a cub. This bear was part pet, part familiar; he was both a real, furry and beloved bear and, at the same time, a transcendental kind of meta-bear, a minor deity and also a partial ancestor because the forest-dwellers extended considerable procreational generosity towards the other species of the woods and there were bears in plenty on the male side of the tribal line.”

For all its rollicking, good humoured, wonderfully written storytelling, it did take me a while to get through this book. Mostly I think that was the language. This isn’t simple, accessible language. This is complex, crafted, allusion-heavy prose, with borrowings from the folklore and mythology of several European countries. I thought it was magnificent, but there was no rushing through it.

I also – and I hate to admit that this made a difference – took a while to warm to any of the main characters. Fevvers and Lizzie deliberately keep themselves at a distance, though they can talk for hours on end (and do so), so you’re always aware that they’re holding something back, even without the big mystery of Fevvers’ wings. And Walser starts out as a pure journalist, not letting his own character or history get anywhere near the story that he is unravelling, so it is a long time before his personality begins to show through.

In all, this is a magical, funny, adventure-filled read encompassing all sorts of colourful outsiders – prostitutes, freaks, clowns, murderers and more besides. The story travels from London to Siberia and evocatively captures each location as well as the daily lives of its huge cast of characters. Carter created something extraordinary here and I will definitely have to read more of her work.

First published 1984.
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

One from my desk drawer

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For Esmé – with Love and Squalor and other stories
by J D Salinger

I have been dipping in and out of this short story collection for a long long time, which means that I can really only say anything useful about the second half. But I’m reasonably sure I liked all of it, if that helps.

Anyone who’s read Catcher in the Rye will recognise the dry, not-one-of-the-crowd narrative voice of all these stories. Quite a few are also young male narrators, adding weight to the comparison but also to the possibility that a little of Salinger’s own life is being told here. The title story hints at this most strongly. It’s a letter to a woman on her wedding day, apologising for not being able to attend and detailing how they met (presumably for the benefit of wedding guests who might have this note read out to them?). It’s a simple, touching story of an American GI dining alone in a British cafe and being approached by a young girl who asks if she can write to him. The GI is quiet, bordering on non-communicative, possibly already struggling with the stress of war. The girl is precocious and demanding. But the pairing works brilliantly and the conversation is both believable and interesting.

Most of the stories are like this, inasmuch as they’re snapshots of ordinary lives and the not-so-ordinary personalities who are stuck living them. A couple have clear story arcs but most are more snatched, seeming to fade in and then fade out of the scene or situation being described.

First published in the USA as Nine Stories by Little, Brown and Company 1953
Published (in edited form) in Great Britain under the present title by Hamish Hamilton 1953
This edition, reproducing the original American text, published by Penguin 1994

A different normality

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Non-fiction
by Chuck Palahniuk

A few years back I considered myself a big fan of Palahniuk’s novels. Then either they got worse or my reading tastes changed. Either way, this collection of his essays, many of them previously published in newspapers and magazines, lay around unread until I had an urge to read more non-fiction and this seemed to fit the description well!

While I may have gone off his fiction, I still love Palahniuk’s writing style. His short punchy sentences, repetition and colloquial phrasing break all sorts of rules about writing and grammar but they work. He can be very critical of the world but he can also be very sweet in his genuine interest in people, often people no-one else is interested in. He’s led an odd life, some of which he talks about in these essays, and that has no doubt coloured his view of the world. I don’t admire him for doing strange, sometimes dangerous things, but I do admire him for working with dying people, for telling stories that deserve to be told, for openly analysing his reasons for writing what he does.

If you’ve read any of Palahniuk’s fiction these essays will make sense to you. He collects facts and stories about real people and files them away for later use in a novel. Literally, it turns out. He has a wall of filing cabinets full of this stuff. The essays range from moments in his own life, to people he’s met casually, to people he has deliberately researched. There’s the crew of a US navy submarine, three men who built their own castles, a woman who trained her dog in search and rescue, professional wrestlers. There’s Palahniuk’s experiences of having his novel turned into a Hollywood film, of having an annoying faux psychic woman genuinely unearth a troubling childhood memory, of dealing with his father’s murder.

My favourite pieces were the more positive ones, which were mostly about writing. Palahniuk’s career took off when he attended a creative writing class and he writes movingly about the greatness of his mentors and some of his favourite writers. His cynicism is still there but it’s aimed at himself and not the subject.

I didn’t enjoy every essay. Palahniuk does his research thoroughly and in some cases that meant trawling through paragraph after paragraph on a subject I don’t care about, like wrestling or demolition derbies, but the essay as a whole is always worth reading because somewhere in there will be a gem of a portrait or observation, a really real person saying or doing something that makes you stop and think.

These essays don’t get as dark as his novels do, possibly because they’re mostly written for the wider audiences of magazines with editors who don’t want to publish Palahniuk’s darkest thoughts. But they’re clearly written from the perspective of a person who has dark thoughts, who questions the acceptance of any “normality”, who has frankly been through some shit. It’s interesting stuff.

Published 2004 by Jonathan Cape.