Books: On the Wings of a New Age Nights At the Circus

• Share

(2 of 2)

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.