Nights at the Circus

Oh my God, what a ridiculous, bonkers, clever, funny, wonderful book.  YES, I loved it and it's definitely my book of the year so far. Angela Carter writes like a maniac on psychedelic drugs and often just reading her sentences is like tripping out in a linguistic circus.   But hey, I liked that and it didn't bother me that sometimes I didn't understand everything.   In fact the end is so crazy I don't think you are meant to understand it!
Reading this was great fun.  the characters are amazing and their adventures are outrageous.
A woman called  Fevvers  (feathers in cockney) tells a young American journalist about how she ended up being the greatest aerialist at the end of the 19th century.  She was born with wings, abandoned andbought up in a brothel, after this she was sold to a museum of curiosities run by a hideous skeletal woman. She finally ends up joining the circus and despite being more than 6 foot tall  and massive (with wings)  she becomes the sensation of the moment.
The journalist wants to get to the bottom of how she has 'conned' the nation but instead he ends up falling for her charms and becomes besotted with her.
Her circus is planning a tour across, Siberia and into Japan so the journalist gets a position incognito as a rather crap clown.  He secretly writes newspaper articles and lives in poverty with the other clowns and some peasants whilst Fevvers lives the high life in five star hotels. The book is full of totally crazy characters: Educated apes who can write and draw up plans of their evening shows. (They are also desperate to gain their freedom from the circus.)   A psychic pig  from Texas who can predict the future.  A mad Count who wants to entrap Fevvers and force her to live as a toy in his mansion. An evil female prison warden who has the most cruel and vile prison for female murderers ever imagined. Shamens and outlaws from the depths of Siberia, Italian suffragettes and of course manically depressed clowns.

I know that Angela Carter studied English for years and years  and was HUGELY 'clever' and 'literary' and that there are lots of supposed messages in this book but to be honest I didn't really get it on that level and read it as an enjoyable mad story.  The only bit that did confuse me was the end...but hey, maybe when I read it again I'll understand it!

What I loved the most about this book is her openness about human characters. She's harsh on both sexes and is honest about how good and also how cruel humans can be to each other. I got a great sense of how much she must have enjoyed writing this book.  It was a bit like reading an improved version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.