At the Freak Show by Candas Jane Dorsey

Reviewed by Robert Runté

Candas Jane Dorsey made her reputation as one of the foundational feminist SF writers pushing the limits of what was possible in speculative fiction. Then, she reinvented herself as a mystery writer with the Epitome Apartments series. Now, Dorsey has pushed past genre designations to reveal herself the master of literary fiction she has always been.

At the Freak Show is not a novel in the usual sense of the word; it is novel in the sense of presenting a series of fragments of . . . memory? Alternate history? Metaphor? . . . that build into a vivid whole. It’s like someone took a novel—or several novels—and cut out all the boring bits, all the bits between the blinding flashes of insight or immersive description, and just kept the scenes that resonate with you even though no part of those experiences overlap with your own, and sewed those together, so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

No one familiar with Dorsey’s earlier work will be surprised by the confident mixture of fragmented, interlocking stories that drive the narrative, creating context out of the implicit, the unspoken, and the ambiguous. The reader’s imagination is a full partner in the experience here, but in a way that personalizes encounters without requiring the reader to wallow in the character(s)’ pain. Much of the material in At the Freak Show is dark, but it never sinks into the dense, tedious, posturing prose of trauma porn. Instead, there is this underlying irreverence, cleverness, self-deprecating awareness that not only lightens the tone, but transmutes the whole into this must-read exploration of the social construction of gender, self, and meaning.

A quick random example:

“Magpie might see the shadow of all the ways it could turn out: good, bad and ugly. Because there are always choices, aren’t there, and turning points, and cats in boxes. Cats jump right into boxes: they volunteer."

Another writer might have stopped at “good, bad and ugly”, but Dorsey wanders off script to allude to Schoener’s cat, which carries all the baggage about the outcome being unknowable until observed, and the whole thing about the universe splitting at each major decision point into separate streams. Which is, after all, the explanation behind the contradictory fragments that make up At the Freak Show. And then, as if that allusion and story structure rationalization were not enough to sneak in, she blows the whole thing up by introducing cats! How can you not smile at the bit about cats? But also: how can you ever see a cat climbing into a box again and not think of that cat? It’s three lines a quarter of the way into the story but in context provides insight into the nature of chance and choice, into how two things can be true at once, and how, ultimately, the universe is ridiculous. That’s a lot to pack into a couple of random lines!

And it’s all like that. Not random at all, of course, but the most tightly crafted, interwoven work one is likely to encounter. CanLit as a genre sometimes gets so focused on beautiful writing that it loses story, but that never happens with Dorsey. The writing is almost invisible because Dorsey has always argued for, and demonstrated, that strong narrative can and must be the backbone of literary fiction. There is so much poetry here that doesn’t feel like poetry because it carries you along until a punchline erupts to drive home the point you were missing. “Grand gestures are all very well, but laundry costs money.” Oh, right! This section of blanking while trying to get feelings down on paper is not so much about the experience of writing but about how poverty limits opportunities for action and expression.

One of Dorsey’s themes here is that two or three things can be true at once, but that also applies to her writing: setting is character, character is action, action is meaning, meaning is chance, chance is setting. It is a masterclass in how to integrate the separate elements of story so that every word is doing several jobs at once.

Dorsey creates this paradox for the reader that At the Freak Show is both a page-turning narrative I could not put down, at the same instance that I was constantly putting it down to go think (feel!) about what I had just read. It is no beach read, because Dorsey insists on our experiencing and reflecting, but neither is it in any way heavy. There is a lot here to digest, but the perfectly crafted scenes make it easy to engage.

I can’t stop thinking about it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

At the Freak Show is published by University of Calgary Press.