Product Description

Haunted by Fevvers, child of a brothel, a journalist stumbles into a journey which takes him from London to Siberia via St Petersburg into an earthy, rich, turn-of-the-19th-century world which reeks of human and animal variety.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7575 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
'Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairy tale horror, and visions of the alienated wreckage of a future world. In "Nights at the Circus" she has invented a new, raunchy, raucous, Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, taking us back into a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety'. "The Times".

From the Publisher
'One of the century's finest writers' Sunday Times

About the Author
Angela Carter:
Angela Carter was born in 1940. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965. Her next book, The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize and the next, Several Perceptions, the Somerset Maugham Award. She died in February 1992.

Customer Reviews

Smart book, duff novel...
Carter is a devotee of feminist interpretations of Lacanian theory. 'Nights at the Circus' is duly littered with (metaphorical) mirrors, with phrases such as the 'freedom of the mask', and studded with paragraphs that explain how the 'eye of the beholder' affects the object it beholds. While I don't especially object to Lacan, I don't myself like novels that have a tendentious framework. The story arc (as distinct from the cooked-up elements of 'magical realism') offers few surprises and the observations are effectively censored by the guiding philosophy (which is itself a kind of Lacanian paradox). Many readers think otherwise, but I find Carter's prose style horribly 'purple'. The favoured characters are differentiated with idiomatic voices but tend to share their author's aspirational vocabulary - which last, frankly, smells of the thesaurus and is often unconvincing (there's a sentence where someone walks 'between the pediments of the doorway'). The book also progressively succumbs to dated 80's experimental effects: the second section concludes with a kind of 'pataphor' where the heroine escapes on a toy train that becomes real, while the third section mixes first and third person narratives (with, to my mind, no outstanding benefit). At one point in the book Carter describes how the world's shamans manage to retain their integrity despite using fraudulent deception to sustain people's belief; and in a sense, that's what she does herself. There's a very funny joke about the heroine's virginity at the end of the book which perhaps carries the point ("She laughed. She laughed. She laughed."). I hope I'm not simply being misogynistic: I admire 'The Golden Notebook' and think 'Good Morning Midnight' is simply breathtaking, but I AM a bloke and this is a book written with the conscious intent of compensating for the passive role given to women in most traditional fictions. Carter benefited by the metropolitan bias of the UK publishing industry, while her Lacanian credentials have sustained her presence on University reading lists; but with the possible exception of Calvino I find that the further 'magical realism' moves away from South America the less convincing it becomes. She is a writer who has evidently inspired a lot of adolescent girls to define their sense of independence and I wouldn't want to knock that; but as a novel I found her 'masterpiece' both dated and clumsy.

Wow who thought exams could be this good..?
What a fantastically rich and exciting book! An extract from this came up on my A level exam paper and after reading the 300 words given was determined to read more.
I am so glad that I did! Carter explores graphically the timeless treatment of women. It is hard to place this in one time frame as so much over laps, with so many modern yet subtle analogies that you loose track of the reality. Her language is outstanding and the surrealist world coats you in a drug like state as you absorb her rich and creative imagery.
Every page is a void of description so if you don't like in depth writing then this is one to steer clear of. I loved the escapist quality to this book and her convincing social metaphors.

A magical set of characters
Richly written, the joy of this book is in the characters that Carter describes (you get the feeling she enjoyed writing it just as much): from the winged trapeze artist & her maternal assistant to the performing apes and their Professor, this is a book that surprises throughout with its imagination and detail.

This is all done at the expense of any particularly tight plot - we begin with an 80-page life story as told to journalist John Walser, but it then becomes more picaresque as we follow the circus and get to know the stories of its staff, with strong female characters particularly making their presence felt. The journey takes us an unusual route to an unusual end.

This is a world you can escape into - beautifully realised in the best tradition of magic realism.