Nights at The Circus by Angela Carter

There is a very insightful introduction to my copy of Nights at the Circus (Vintage edition) by Sarah Waters which helped set this strange, off-the-wall book in context. The novel is very well written but it takes you on a totally unbelievable journey. 

The central character is Fevvers, an orphan baby, abandonned outside a Victorian brothel who grows to develop wings. She is an object of curiosity and wonder so people pay to see her, but also an object of desire for a variety of rich men including, it is rumoured , the Prince of Wales. At the beginning of the novel an American reporter gains admitance to her dressing room at a theatre and she tells him the story of her early life. From here the story moves to a circus building in St Petersburg and finally into the frozen wilderness of Siberia. 

The book is peopled with many exotic characters, including chimps that can read, a pig that can spell and a concert pianist who perfoms in a cage full of tigers. Just as Fevvars can soar unaided up to a trapeze so the reader's feet are never on the ground for long. The world of this circus is definitley not of this world but is rich with Angela Carter's inventiveness. 

Sarah Waters writes, " it is a tribute to Carter's skill as a novelist that her characters can inhabit this gloriously artifical universe and yet remain so emotionally compelling and physically convincing."

If you like good writing, magical realism and the picaresque, then this is the book for you.

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The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

This is wonderfully written book and deservedly sits in the classic pantheon. Set at the tail end of the 19th century, the heroine is a beautiful New York socialite, Lily Bart, who has to make her way in the world of the rich, with very little money. She lives in luxury with her rich aunt who willingly funds her niece in the vast expenditure of her wardrobe but refuses to pay her gambling debts. The only way out for Lily is to marry a wealthy husband. There are plenty of men in the offing, some already married, but she rebels at the prospect of a stiffling life as a rich man’s possession.

The first possiblity is Percy Gryce:

“ She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce - the mere thought seemed to awaken an echo of his droning voice - but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance the he might do her the honour of boring her for life.  It was a hateful fate - but how to escape from it? What choice had she?”

In immaculate prose Edith Wharton chronicles the hollow, dog eat dog, world of the rich with its greed and shallow friendships, and plots the increasingly desperate life of Lily, as she moves from the centre of this bright, glittering world  out into the shadows. True friends remain but the reader senses the ghost of Hardy’s Tess hovering over the novel and tragedy looming.

The House of Mirth is beautifully written and my Penguin edition had an excellent afterword by Hermione Lee, but I was frustrated by Lily as a character, she was a victim of circumstance but also an agent of her own destruction?

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The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Set in the Sicily of the 19th century, at the time of Garibaldi and the civil war, The Leopard tells the story of Prince Fabrizio Salina, who through the pages of the story, slowly declines from womaniser, sportsman and bastion of the aristocracy, towards gentil poverty, inconsequence and death. He lavishes his favour on his nephew Tancredi, rather than on his own children, even promoting the marrige of Tancredi to the beautiful Angelica, daughter of an upstart mayor, in preference to his own daughter. As the Leopard loses his lustre, and his palaces become dusty, threadbare and empty so the world in which he was pre-emminent passes away.

Though in translation the book is written in exquisite prose, full of irony and gentle wit. It is a commentary on custom and tradition, the exhuberance of youth, the regrets of age, and the slow inevitability of life seeping away grain by grain like sand through an hour glass.

This book deservedly finds it's place in lists of a 100 best novels. It's a classic to savour, to keep and read again.

Here's a little taste:

“...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.”

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