Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti [Paperback]

There are fantasy novels I love, space operas I adore, and horror stories that will haunt me till my dying day; there are tomes of magic and myth and mystery I don't expect I'll ever forget. Long story short, I'm an undiscriminating reader of speculative fiction -- and that's a fact I take heart in.

But.

(You must have know there was a but coming...)

Among the many, one sub-genre - though perhaps I should rephrase, for I do not presume to have read of each and every one - one sub-genre among the many I've experience of, then, has left me cold on every occasion I've spent time with a book of its oeuvre. Perhaps I've just been reading the wrong books... perhaps it's as simple as that. Yet I began to suspect that I'd finally met my match: that steampunk and I were simply, sadly, never going to get on.

It wasn't that the idea of steampunk didn't do it for me, either. Quite the contrary: the notion of worlds and people remade according to anachronistic laws and technologies delighted me. The thought of pitching the irreversible crawl of progress via industry and enterprise in another direction entirely appealed on a level precious few premises tend to. That the idea of steampunk excites the reader in me I am not at all ashamed to admit, but in practice... alas. Till now, all the steampunk I'd given the time of day to felt more about the tech and the time than the tale or its texture; all cogs and wheels and divots where there should have been characters to care about, arcs to invest my interest in.

Then I read Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine, and all that changed.

The company has been travelling for what feels like forever. Perhaps it has been -- after all, "the circus makes an enemy of time." Led on a lazy circuit around a world of "children raised up on roots and scrounge-meat" where some far-distant day there may again be merit in a school - a vast continent of countless governments at war with one another and themselves - if the Circus Tresaulti and its machine/man/animals acts are not welcomed in every place they pitch their tents, then at least they are free to come and go with little outside interference, for "a circus always finds a home; everyone wants a show."

And theirs is a show like none other, such that the very "life of a city flickers and trembles when they are near." The circus' enigmatic ringmaster Boss - an ageless woman whose ability to breathe new life into tired old acts by way of leftover metals is both a gift and a curse - has made sure of that, embellishing those waifs and strays who come to Tresaulti to escape the forever war raging around them with such parts and roles as to make new people of them. "Their real names don't matter; no one in the circus is real any more," so they are Bird and Stenos and Elena and Ayar; the Grimaldi Brothers, Alto and Altissimo; the aerialists Ming and Penna and Ying; Big Tom and Big George, the living trapezes; and Little George - just George at the last - who tells the tale.

That is, Little George tells the tale insofar as any one character does. As it happens, Mechanique is a tale told in the first and the second and the third person, in tenses past, present and future. Stylistically, and so narratively, Genevieve Valentine's astonishing debut can be a challenging thing -- hard to get a handle on, especially at the outset, when spread all around the reader there is a staggering array of such sights and sounds as to practically overmaster one's imagination. But through it all, Little George is our foothold; chronological and largely uncomplicated, his is certainly the most traditional path of narrative through the events of Mechanique, though I do not know if it is the most powerful, for those fleeting glimpses we are allowed of Bird and Boss are haunting... breathtaking... beautiful in a way very few voices could capture.

In any event Valentine seems to have little interest in tradition, in the art of storytelling as we have been given - perhaps mistakenly - to understand it. She comes at things from a million angles, with an attitude wholeheartedly her own, and at a pace I expect some readers may take issue with. Mechanique will be their loss. It is true that Valentine takes her sweet time setting the scene and arranging the stage for the entertainments to come, but one's introductions to all and sundry in the company are a redoubtable delight, and the Circus Tresaulti a thing of blistering, black-blooded wonder.

Perhaps there's something to the fact that the Circus Tresaulti began its whistle-stop tour in several short stories published in Fantasy Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies (all of which you can read for free here). Assuredly the sense of the episodic carries through the first half of Mechanique and in some senses beyond, and so too does the self-containedness of many of the eighty-odd chapters speak to the abbreviated origins of this far grander narrative, but though Valentine communicates her debut's essential character in an unusual way, her weaving together of all these assorted strands is a supermassive success; her carefully-wrought words and workings so fine and precise as to guarantee it is not merely some happy accident that Mechanique works so very well.

Whether Mechanique is a collection of loosely connected episodes in the life and times of a travelling circus and its oddment of performers, or a single story with a fistful of distinct threads enmeshed together, I would argue it matters little. And there can be no disputing that the ringside seats Valentine arranges for us around this unforgettable parade of "clockwork coquettes" and strongman machines are a marvel. We are so close to the action as to scent the mingled stink of sweat and sawdust and sweet treats in the air; to hear "the sound of feathers singing" as every bone in the wings sewn to the spine of Alec the flying man arrives at an impossible harmony; to gape up at and around and through every last incredible act, as if we were ourselves a part of them.

Truly, madly, deeply, readers: this first full-length Tale of the Circus Tresaulti moved me immeasurably. Here's to many more where it came from -- which is to say, from the mind of one of the most promising new voices in all genre fiction. Not since discovering the work of Catherynne M. Valente have I been so excited about a second novel; that for her first Genevieve Valentine has conjured such a masterpiece of measure and imagination as this - the performance of a lifetime! - speaks volumes as to why I may finally have fallen for steampunk.

This is a slim novel, one that does not waste words. The story is told in the manner of a spotlight being shone, picking up those details that are important and significant, expertly guiding the audience's attention to where it needs to be. At first the storytelling is not linear, it tells of the circus folk, how they came to join the circus and the significant events in the life of the circus. The viewpoint is fluid and shifts from person to person, the writing making it clear whose eyes we are seeing through, and sometimes simply allowing us to witness. The closest thing to a narrative character is Little George, whose young life was shaped by Boss and the circus, but who is in many ways naive and innocent of the nature of his home and family.
The characters are well done, their personalities and motives conveyed through glances and brief words and occasional, yet significant action. Their strangeness is highlighted, although what little we see of -for want of a better word- normality in this world is a harsh, grey thing.
Technically I suppose this novel would count as steam punk, or some kind of 'punk. Metal is fused with human bodies to create the impossible performers. However there is nothing pulpy or gung-ho about this story; though there is action and bravery, peril and magic, there is an intimacy to the portrayal of the circus, the performers and their relations. The magic of the story remains an enigma, it is not meant to be closely examined. The rescue mission in the final third is exciting, but the change to status and relationships within circus hierarchy is in many ways the important part.

This book has a plot, it does, it surely does, but the presentation obscures the action almost to the point where it swallows it whole, for the tale is told in first, second and third person and also in the story's present and its past. Confusing? Yes.

Absorbing? Yes. Frustrating? Most certainly. Brilliant? Possibly. Flawed? I think so. Whether the flaws outweigh the brilliance is yes to be decided.

I bought this book for my Kindle because it's on the Nebula shortlist for best novel and I thought I should try to catch up with at least some of the listed books. The reviews I've read seem to think it's a masterpiece debut novel and - indeed - it is remarkable. But does it deserve to be Nebula's Best SF Novel of 2011? I don't think so.

The viewpoint switches are dizzying at first - maybe deliberately so in the way it spins you up into the air and then drops you suddenly as if you are actually a participant in the high-flying trapeze act that is this book. Little George is the first person narrator, but having settled into that idea, Valentine rips you out of your comfort zone and drops you immediately into third person. Unused to such confusing switches, it takes a while to realise that you are in someone else's head now. The head-hopping is something you just have to get used to because the whole book continues in like mode.

It's disorienting and disturbing. Do not read unless you actually like to be disturbed by your fiction.

And the plot? A bunch of magically and mechanically enhanced circus performers travel from place to place across a dystopian landscape, a land destroyed by war. Not quite post-apocalypse because the apocalypse is not yet over. Cities have been reduced to rubble, the people reduced to soldiers or citizens surviving on the soldiers' goodwill, and there isn't much goodwill around.

The circus exists out of time. The performers have died, some many times, but are not yet dead. Boss, herself created by tragedy, magically transforms bones and bodies with copper wire and bits of junk. This could be classed as steampunk, but it's not really. The disparate performers have all come to the circus as a refuge and despite themselves they have become a family, though dysfunctional in the extreme. Little George is the only one amongst them who is still human. When he walks out on brass mechanical legs to paste up the posters announcing the circus is in town they are a casing for his own human limbs. Not so Big George, whose metal arms have become a living trapeze for cruel Elena's troupe of aerialists.

When the Government Man sees the circus performers as a template for a new breed of soldier if only he can find out how they are made he takes Boss in for questioning and the dysfunctional family must decide whether to continue travelling as she has instructed or to stage a rescue.

Beneath this main story arc are numerous stories of how the performers came to submit to Boss' alterations from the musical director who is nothing more than a severed head on a mechanical orchestra, to Bird who came only for the wings - the wings that Boss once made for Alec, who chose to die for real rather than continue to wear the brass and bone feathers with the terrible secret.

There are many things to admire about this book, but it's neither a comfortable nor an easy read. It's confusing and frustrating, but does eventually reach a climax, though there were times when I wondered whether it was going to. It is, however very effective in creating an impression of this broken world full of broken people.