Circ from Pigeon Park Press (Review)

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]uch like its own subject matter, the novel Circ is more of a spectacle than a story. The brainchild of Pigeon Park Press, a small publishing house in Birmingham, Circ was devised as an authorial experiment to see if the principles of reality television could work as well in fiction writing.

The premise is simple, a kind of literary version of The X Factor. Ten authors (Simon Fairbanks, Maria Mankin, Yasmin Ali, Jason Holloway, Livia Akstein Vioto, Luke Beddow, Danielle Rose Bentley, William Thirsk-Gaskill, Sue Barsby, and Giselle Thompson) collaborate to produce one cohesive novel, each championing a particular character and writing from their point of view. There would be ten public sharing stages, and at each stage the author that got the least Likes for their passage on Facebook would be voted out of the writing process, and their character killed or otherwise removed in-story.

If this sounds a little gimmicky to you: it is

In my opinion the story that emerges isn’t the best one that could have been told, and the quality of plot and writing are weakened because the story had to conform to the restrictions laid out by this set-up. However, I don’t think the book is necessarily bad, and it’s certainly worth investigating.

As you’d expect of a story written by ten people, the tone is a little inconsistent and the pacing can be tricky. The arc for Gracie and her interactions with Popescu are probably the best-handled, with the interweaving of Popescu’s fairy tales with Gracie’s perception of her life adding real magic to the story. I also liked Anastasia the artist who, though central to the plot, seems to float through her own world blithely oblivious to the murders around her until they rudely interrupt her quest to extract a skeleton from a dead bird. But some of the writing, whilst entertaining, can be patchy. Examples include Mungo’s bald musings on his father’s abusive behaviour as prompted by that most subtle of analogies, a Punch and Judy show, and Bobby the face-eating gangster taking a moment to reflect sadly on the evils of gambling.

For such a character-based work, I didn’t always find the characters that original either, and thought some of them were downright clichés. Tim, the teenager caring for his drunk mother, is someone we’ve seen before. We’ve also met Bobby the violent thug and even the more popular creations like Mungo the sad clown. I was surprised Valerie, the silly self-absorbed actress, lasted as long as she did, not because she was poorly written (though her dialogue was pretty irritating) but she was given almost nothing to do in the plot. As she sneaks around and gathers intel on the other characters, you get the sense that there are cogs whirring under those curls, and that there’s more to her than meets the eye, but she lost the vote relatively early and is run down by an ice cream van in Chapter Four. We never see what nefarious schemes she might have enacted, and that’s a nice microcosm of one of the book’s major problems.

When interviewed, top-five author Yasmin Ali said of the project “I find the fact that one writer is voted out each month a distraction. It can push the balance too much towards competition when what is needed is cooperation.” It seems she was probably right. The exoduses of the characters as they are one-by-one voted out of the novel is one of the big plot drivers of the book, and it makes the story awkward and unwieldy at times. The sudden removal of Gracie, the character who in my opinion had been the absolute heart of the novel, was a genuine blow to me and came so out of left field as to seem nonsensical. That said, I think the writers made an excellent fist of the plot which came after. Gracie had subtly become the novel’s sole representation of childhood innocence, and the loss of this character is the point at which the tension breaks and hell is unleashed. The stakes triple, no one is holding back any more and the previously clunky plot glides towards its satisfying conclusion.

The book is necessarily flabby at the beginning, though the plot does knit together nicely once you get down to the final five characters. Even so, there are a lot of dangling plot threads in this novel. Why was Harry so over-invested in Gracie’s welfare, and why does she not remember anything about her former life at Haven House? We never find out. Flic, the first character to be voted out of the novel, is just never mentioned again, and nor is Tim, who is neatly tidied away into the school environment he has been avoiding for years and largely forgotten, having had little to do with the plot to that point. These are some of the inevitable casualties of the book’s writing process, and you should expect them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel like bad writing when you read them for the first time.

That said, Circ is a curiosity as much as a novel, and I think that’s what it must be viewed as to maximise the enjoyment of its reader

Circ is too hamstrung by the constraints of its authorial arrangement ever to work seamlessly as a novel, but functions much better as an experimental spectacle, and as a testament to the ability of writers to collaborate on large-scale creative projects. You can enjoy the book much more as a display of teamwork and authorial design skills, thinking about what must have happened behind the scenes to move the characters in the direction they did. The way the characters play off each other is quite impressive when you keep in mind they were all designed by separate people whose plans had to change as soon as a new character was voted out.

Like any circus, the draw is in the spectacle, and the multitude of different performances means there’s probably something in there you’ll like. Even if they don’t knit together as well as they should, you might want to check it out, just to admire the stunt work.

Image Credits: Header (pigeonparkpress.blogspot.co.uk), Image 1 (pigeonparkpress.blogspot.co.uk), Image 2 (pigeonparkpress.blogspot.co.uk).