Nights at the Circus has won out as our reading group choice for this month. This is Angela Carter’s penultimate novel and it tells the extraordinary, peripatetic life of Sophie Fevvers, a winged circus performer. That’s right. She has wings. Or at least, she says she has. We’ll try to clear that one up later in the month …
Meanwhile, to help persuade you to read along with us, you should know that this novel not only won the James Tait Black memorial prize when it was first published in 1984, but also won the best of the James Tait Black prize in 2012.
The other important thing you should know is that people love this book. My wife’s treasured and battered copy of the novel (and in my experience, there is no other kind) has the following quotes on the back cover:
“Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairytale 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)
“Nights at the Circus is a glorious enchantment. But an enchantment which is rooted in an earthy, rich and powerful language … It is a spell-binding achievement.” (Literary Review)
“A glorious piece of work, a set-piece studded with set-pieces. The narrative has a splendid ripe momentum, and each descriptive touch contributes a pang of vividness. By doing possible things impossibly well, the book achieves a major enchantment.” (Times Literary Supplement)
“A mistress-piece of sustained and weirdly wonderful gothic that’s both intensely amusing and also provocatively serious. This is a big, superlatively imagined novel.” (Observer)
Here at the Guardian, meanwhile, Robert Nye called the book: “Without doubt her finest achievement so far, and a remarkable book by any standards.”
Nights at the Circus should also provide fertile territory for discussion this month, with its powerful (and sometimes controversial) feminist messages, with its formal daring and idiosyncratic postmodernism and magical realism, and with its rich, fascinating allusions. It nods to (among others) Herman Hesse, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll and of course fairytales. Angela Carter sure knew her stuff.
Most of all, I hope this book will provide us with serious reading pleasure. Get used to supremely over-the-top Cockney, dazzling images and cheeky surprises. Here’s the first paragraph as a sampler:
‘Lor’ love you, sir!’ Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why, I first saw the light of day right here in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed the “Cockney Venus” for nothing, sir, though they could just as well ‘ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I came ashore – for I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched.’
That’s right: “Hatched.” We’ll get to that, too. All other suggestions for discussion will be warmly welcomed, as usual. One more inducement. We have five copies of Nights at the Circus to give away to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive question, in the comments section below.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Lucy Poulden with your address (lucy.poulden@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
