"Carnivalesque" by Neil Jordan

An only child, visiting a carnival, enters the Hall of Mirrors and somehow becomes detached from his reflection, which goes home with his parents while he is trapped in the mirror. And while he is released to join the carnies and the roustabouts who run the carnival, his doppelganger starts to disrupt family life (initially his mother puts it down to a difficult adolescence) and becomes a focus for evil happenings. 

A version of the changeling legend, in which we discover the magical powers of the carnies and their convoluted and sometimes mythical genesis and history, and we head towards a showdown with their arch-enemy who has somehow planned all this, the Dewman.

In many ways it is a tale of child abduction but the message seems to be that there are benefits to being 'snatched' from everyday life and made to grow up 'far too soon': "He was a perfect solution to what one could have called the Huckleberry urge." (Ch 19)

This novel is a fascinating and sustained flight of fantasy which mixes the very real traumas of growing-up with the magical world of the carnival. There are moments of achingly beautiful prose and piercing insights. There were times when the convolutions of the mythic history of the carnies seemed to be a step too far, but the threads are all pulled together in a literally gut-wrenching climax.

Selected Quotes:

• "The father noted the strange colourless inflection of his speech. As is his words were water that had been fed through a filter of some kind." (Ch 2)
• "If there was anything worse than being nothing but a reflection, he realised, it would be a reflection that couldn't be seen." (Ch 3)
• "There was something either very old, that should have died a long time ago, or something very new, that had not yet been born, about those hands." (Ch 4)
• "Everything, he found, every facet of the seemingly endless carnival, fitted into something smaller than itself, as if its instinct was to shrink and almost vanish." (Ch 5)
• "He felt giddily released from all of those only-child duties and hoped the one who had walked home with them would do a better job than he did at being the perfect son." (Ch 5)
• "Well, he thought. At least she isn't - And he didn't want to finish that thought, about all the things she wasn't." (Ch 6)
• "Cederick kept jealous and watchful suzerainty over the ghost train, a stance more understandable when one considered the fact that several of his siblings resided inside." (Ch 12)
• "She ... found herself among crowds of adolescents, a little older then him,but in their air of removal, abstraction, in their constant glances at the glowing screens of their telephones, just like him. It was a communal virus, she realised, that came upon beloved children suddenly, removed them from whatever emotional realm they had inhabited, with no hint that they might ever return. So she did what mothers all around her seemed to be doing: she bought him things." (Ch 17)
• "She was propelled upwards by some mysterious inner heat, the way a fragile piece of ash rose with its own displacement of the air around it." (Ch 18) This is doing what Muriel Spark said an author must do to make the supernatural acceptable, which is to integrate it with natural phenomena. 
• "The pink sugar that was already assembling itself around the candyfloss stick ... looked like the dyed hair of a girl who wanted to be seen to be a teenager, but didn't quite know how." (Ch 18)
• "There was the void before there were things to fill it, there was the gasp before the void and the gasp filled it." (Ch 20)
• "That muscled carapace that could be called the true carnie form was beginning to clad his own boyish limbs." (Ch 29)
• "The ghost wasn't being given up, was it? The ghost was what they were becoming." (Ch 31)
• "They had plied their trade along the pavements and cafes. with the whiff of poodle dogshit in their noses and the echoes of Strauss waltzes in their ears." (Ch 34) It is the 'poodle' that really makes this sentence, although the juxtaposition of dogshit and waltzes is also brilliant.
• "Burleigh howled as he saw the multiple images of himself approaching ... to make a cube around him first, then a pentahedron then a dextrahedron then a duodenalhedron ..." (Ch 48) I adore how this sentence starts off normally enough and then wanders off into the realm of imaginary words, just like the reality of the book surrenders to the fantasy of magic.

April 2024; 282 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God