Reviewed by Mahvesh Murad 

THE first time Genevieve Valentine described what was to become her debut novel to an agent, she said it was “10,000 words of a mechanical circus book that I think is too weird for anyone to ever publish.” Not just did Valentine go on to sell the book, she was also nominated for multiple awards and in 2011 Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti became one of the most talked about speculative fiction works around. That it is, in fact, a steampunk novel, may have added to the interest it generated — steampunk has always been popular with a certain audience but it has had a recent renewal of sorts with a larger, slightly more mainstream audience, partly thanks to Hollywood, Robert Downey Jr and the new Sherlock Holmes movies.

The Circus Tresaulti is run by a woman known only as Boss who has the ability to enhance her performers’ skills by adding mechanics to their bodies from pieces of metal found and salvaged. She sometimes gives them skeletons of hollow pipe, at times uses human bones to create magnificent, mechanical post-human beings who bring to the circus something never seen before. The circus performers range from human jugglers with an occasional false leg (“but these days there are so may bombs and so many people to remake; one shiny leg is no surprise”), to Panadrome, the “true marvel... the mechanised band”, to the Winged Man, “so beautifully married to machine” that members of the audience routinely faint when they see him. The circus travels from broken, fallen city to city, where “most people don’t live long enough to see the circus twice. These are ragged days”, writes Valentine, creating the background of dystopia that does not need to be more detailed than suggestions of war, bombs, radiation and the “makeshift walls of sudden city-states.”

Against this backdrop, Circus Tresaulti is a place of safety for its performers, most of whom have been saved or ‘fixed’ by Boss. But while they live and work together as a sort of clockwork carnival family, there is a constant shadow over them and over Valentine’s narrative. The ageless Boss has an old, mystical magic that she harnesses to build the bodies that will survive with the circus, and as ringmaster.

She holds everything together until the death of the Winged Man Alec, whose wings were “proof that the world had not abandoned beauty”. These wings are the desire of others in the circus, causing strange tensions between couples whose livelihood depends on one another. Lurking around is also a “government man” who wants Boss to use her abilities to fulfill his own plans of violence and domination. There are constant power dynamics at play here, which are perfect for holding the narrative fraught, as with any good story with such a large cast of characters. Valentine often uses the performers’ art to define their relationships: “It is two acrobats performing. No, it is two acrobats dancing. No, it is two dancers fighting. No, it is two animals fighting.”

Valentine’s greatest strength is perhaps her ability to create many complex characters with great brevity — Mechanique runs to just over 300 pages, and much of the intrigue lies successfully in what has not been explained directly. This may not work for every writer, but Valentine maintains a steady narrative, spread as widely as it is. There are many changes in tense as well as changes in perspective from first person to second and third. Mechanique jumps along the timeline, filling in bits and pieces in unorthodox ways with plenty of parenthetical references. All this combined could create a confusing, uninteresting narrative and yet it does not. Mechanique is lyrical without being gushing, mysterious without feeling forced; the prose is lapidary, dark, sad and strong.

For those thrown off by the classification of this novel as steampunk, it should be made clear that Mechanique is not the sort of steampunk that defines the genre — there are no goggles, no zeppelins or locomotives here. There are complicated mechanics, gears, iron plates, copper petals, clockwork lungs, cogs, wheels and pistons yes, but they are all parts of the human body, always poignant and poetic. This is an elegant little novel, one that may yet yield many more interesting stories to come. n

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

(NOVEL)

By Genevieve Valentine

Prime Books, US

ISBN 1607012537

320pp. $14