Of wings and bones and government men

Who’s got two thumbs and finally read a fiction book? This girl! And all it took was having a combined physical and emotional (and motor vehicle) breakdown, getting sick as a dog and way too cranky to do anything else.

 

While I was sitting in the car dealership on Monday, getting my car serviced after the battery died on the way out of MurderBooze, I dove into Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, a steampunk novel I’d picked up at a Readercon a few years ago. I figured it would be something fun and light to counteract the pile of nonfiction I’ve read since Labor Day.

 

Friends, Mechanique was not fun and light. It was, however, engrossing enough to distract me from how miserable I felt, which is the important thing. 

 

In a civilization collapsed by endless war, a woman known only as Boss runs a traveling circus. Some of the people in the circus are ordinary: The crew, the dancing girls, the young carnival barker known only as Little George. The rest of the acts, however, are not ordinary at all. They are all part mechanical, with hollow copper bones so that they can be lighter and more flexible, and some with other modifications, as well. 

 

When we have a viewpoint character — which we do not always; some sections of the book are in the second person — it is most commonly Little George the barker. He doesn’t always actually know what’s really going on with this circus, and in the beginning, we stay ignorant with him. But as the story progresses and George gets a clue and we spend more time in other people's heads, the demented magic at the heart of the Circus Tresaulti is slowly uncovered.

 

The core object at the plot of this book is a pair of mechanical wings, previously worn by a circus performer called Alan. Alan fell, one day, which wasn't supposed to happen. Since then, the wings have been unworn, but a pair of acrobats both want them. These two acrobats hate each other, since they're both after the same thing, but this doesn't stop them from doing an act together, not like they have much of a choice in the matter. 

 

The other main plot thread is that the government, such as it is, the newest one in a succession of unstable governments, might be interested in the magic/technology/whatever it is that Boss is using to, uh, enhance the performers. This is, for a variety of reasons, both a bad idea, and bad news for the circus should the government men catch them. 

 

One thing that really struck me about this book was the style. It is somehow very spare and understated, but also full of parentheticals. As an inveterate parenthesis-user myself, I am extremely impressed and wish to learn the trick of this, so that I don't have to give up all my parens to be readable. Although even if I do, it is unlikely I will ever achieve the sort of stylistic beautiful brutality that Valentine pulls off in this one. It gives the whole novel a feel of being in clips of old footage. The understated style also works really well with the subject matter, which is often very grim and bloody and doesn't require a lot of overwritten detail to start making your shins hurt in sympathy. 

 

This book probably isn't for everyone, since I'm sure a lot of people would want a book about a post-apocalyptic steampunk circus to be more lush and fun, and this is not that sort of book. But it is very good at being the sort of book that it is, which is a creepy weird one.