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jacey
A literary fantasy set in the final years of the nineteenth century, ostensibly about a mysterious and wonderful circus which appears suddenly and is only open from dusk to dawn. But the circus - a collection of sideshows rather than the three-ring variety - is only half the story. The underlying story is a contest between two magicians, played out through their students acting as the protagonists. The reason the circus has been created is as a venue for the ongoing contest, a somewhat confusing affair in which neither the students nor the reader knows the rules.The contest is basically a nature versus nurture contest. One student is the genetic daughter of Prospero an actual magician masquerading as a popular stage magician. His bastard daughter, Celia Bowen, is dumped on his doorstep when her mother commits suicide and Prospero quickly binds her (magically) into a lifelong competition with his rival's protegee, Marco, an orphan picked up off the street.
SPOILERS AHEAD: The circus, weird and wonderful, is the venue for their contest which (we learn later) will only end when one of them dies. In the meantime, though both are told of the contest neither is given a list of rules. Marco goes to work for Chandresh Lefevre, the rich impresario who owns the circus (and believes it to be his own idea, not realising how much he is being manipulated). Marco works on creating magical illusions from the outside. Celia, in the meantime, becomes the circus illusionist, travelling with the circus and working from the inside. Marco knows who Celia is, but it's many years before Celia discovers who her opponent is.
Despite this being a contest to the death, there's no sense of urgency, little dramatic tension and the whole thing in more like a collaboration than a competition. The story unfolds at a leisurely pace with sumptuous descriptions of the magical circus attractions, side-forays into the team of people Chandresh draws about him to create mechanical marvels and elegant costumes, (resulting in around fifteen point of view characters which dilutes any focus you might expect the novel to have). There's a sub-plot about American farm-boy Bailey and his growing relationship with the circus-born twins, Poppet and Widget which eventually ties into the solution to the contest.
The viewpoint shifts between omniscient and all these (15) characters. The tense shifts queasily between present and past. At times reading this book is like walking on quicksand while wearing a pair of sparkling magical fairy slippers.
Did I enjoy it? In a way. I enjoyed the imagination, but the playing out of the actual storyline was slow. Marco and Celia fall in love (eventually) and there is a resolution but there's no triumph or tragedy and the sociopathic magicians who started the whole process get neither a real result nor a comeuppance.
