On the Wings of a New Age Nights At the Circus

By Paul Gray

The year is 1899, and something eerie is happening. Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who has already taken the Continent by storm, now holds London in thrall. Her act is indeed worth catching. For Fevvers, who stands 6 ft. 2 in. tall, also boasts a pair of wings that, when spread, span 6 ft. She does not hurtle; she soars. Attracted by the publicity, an American journalist named Jack Walser thinks he may have found another subject for a series he is planning on "Great Humbugs of the World." He interviews the famed "Cockney Venus" in her dressing room after a performance. On the wall hangs a poster of the aerialiste drawn, as the subject coarsely confides, by "some Frog dwarf "; it is signed "Toujours, Toulouse." Fevvers plies the reporter with champagne and assures him, "I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched."

The union of Leda and the swan (a.k.a. Zeus) once caused mankind some problems, including the Trojan War. If Fevvers is truly a second coming, what upheavals lie in wait for the imminent 20th century? Author Angela Carter, 44, keeps this question twirling throughout Nights at the Circus, her eighth novel. Answers dangle out of reach. But Carter's brand of fanciful and * sometimes kinky feminism, already heralded in her native England and gaining admirers in the U.S., has never been more thoroughly or entertainingly on display.

The autobiography that Fevvers tells to the skeptical Walser is, except for the business about the wings, standard 19th century melodrama. It begins with the heroine abandoned in a basket on the steps of a London brothel. A Cockney prostitute, noticing the downy lumps on the infant's shoulders, accidentally gives the foundling a surname: "Looks like the little thing's going to sprout Fevvers." Years pass, and the child earns her innocent keep about the house by posing as Cupid in the drawing room, while commercial sex flourishes around her. Then comes puberty and the improbable onset of pinions. With the help of Lizzie, a retired whore and her adopted mother, Fevvers learns to extend her new appendages and fly. The one-eyed madam, who is nicknamed Nelson and wears the full uniform of an admiral of the fleet, witnesses the maiden voyage and exclaims: "Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground."

Walser does not quite believe Fevvers' confession, and rightly so. Most of its details are incredible. Buffeted by cruel fate, the bird-girl sinks to enforced servitude in the establishment of one Madame Schreck, who runs a particularly nasty pornographic peep show. Fevvers, by now known throughout the London demimonde as the Virgin Whore, plays the Angel of Death in erotic tableaux. Hearing that her mistress has sold her services for a trifle, the rara avis explodes: "What, 50 rotten guineas for the only fully feathered intacta in the entire history of the world? Call yourself a procuress?"

Determined to expose Fevvers for the sham she must be, Walser resolves to follow in the wake of her newfound renown. That means somehow joining the circus of Colonel Kearney, a bizarre Kentuckian who has hired Fevvers to join a historic round-the-world tour: the American plans to outstrip Hannibal, taking a full troupe of performers and animals ("tuskers across the tundra!") from St. Petersburg to Japan, by way of Siberia, and thence on to Seattle. Walser is hired as a clown.

At this point, Carter's florid, energetic style begins turning an already complicated narrative into a three-ring extravaganza. As if the local color of Imperial Russia and a weird group of invading performers were not enough, obscure allusions begin clamoring for attention. One of the star acts in Colonel Kearney's circus is "Lamarck's Educated Apes." This Monsieur Lamarck is a wife beater and a drunk; he also bears the name of the French naturalist whose theory of evolution through the transmission of acquired learning was overturned by Darwinism. So the new Lamarck's chimps get smart enough to dump him and demand a new, better contract. Before the possible significance of this liberating but unscientific development can be absorbed, other diverting calamities ensue.

The final performance during the St. Petersburg engagement turns into a fiasco: a clown goes mad, an enraged tigress must be shot. Offstage, Fevvers nearly surrenders her putative virtue to a Russian grand duke. The trip on the Great Siberian Railway brings worse tidings: sabotage, derailment, kidnaping outlaws. Walser loses himself and his memory in the vast tundra, while Fevvers realizes that the vanished reporter has stolen a piece of her heart.

Hidden beneath this hubbub is a new-fashioned love story, set in a remote place and 85 years ago: boy meets girl; boy, girl and events all conspire to prove that boy is a fool. Still, the message of Nights at the Circus seems the least of its attractions. Carter punctuates her story with arresting images. There is the carriage horse in London that blows "a plume of oats over the nosebag." A box of fin-de-siecle chocolates bears a top layer of "chirruping papers." What becomes of Fevvers and Walser, star-crossed lovers at the hinge of the modern era, fades in interest. The turbulent life that Carter recaptures survives, in these pages, undiminished by age.