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|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Madera Ranchos Library (Madera Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Shelves | JORDAN NE Carniva | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Northeast Branch Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC JORDAN NEI | Searching... Unknown |
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Searching... Sanger Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | JORDAN NE Carniva | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn't... It had its own little backstreets, its alleyways of hanging bulbs and ghost trains and Punch and Judy stands ... And at the end of one he saw the Hall of Mirrors. There were looping strings of carnival lights leading towards it, and a large sign in mirrored glass reading 'Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors' and the sign reflected the lights in all sorts of magically distorted ways. To Andy and his parents, it looks like any other carnival: creaking ghost train, rusty rollercoaster and circus performers. But of course it isn't.Drawn to the hall of mirrors, Andy enters and is hypnotised by the many selves staring back at him. Sometime later, one of those selves walks out rejoins his parents - leaving Andy trapped inside the glass, snatched from the tensions of his suburban home and transported to a world where the laws of gravity are meaningless and time performs acrobatic tricks.And now an identical stranger inhabits Andy's life, unsettling his mother with a curious blankness, as mysterious events start unfolding in their Irish coastal town...
Author Notes
Neil Jordan was born in 1950 in Sligo. His first book of stories, Night in Tunisia , won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, and his subsequent critically acclaimed novels include The Past , Sunrise with Sea Monster , Shade and, most recently, The Drowned Detective . The films he has written and directed have won multiple awards, including an Academy Award ( The Crying Game ), a Golden Bear at Venice ( Michael Collins ), a Silver Bear at Berlin ( The Butcher Boy ) and several BAFTAS ( Mona Lisa and The End of the Affair ). He lives in Dublin.neiljordan.com
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
Strongmen, trapeze artists, changelings ... a young boy is transported to a realm without reason in this colourful story about belonging Neil Jordan's early collaboration with Angela Carter on the film adaptation of her short story, "The Company of Wolves", suggested a deep imaginative engagement with her fictional realm of dark presences and disturbing transformations. In his latest novel he revisits that territory, with an unmistakable nod to Carter's 1984 classic, Nights at the Circus. When Andy slips away from his parents at the carnival and steps into Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors, he discovers the entrance to another world. And since the novel warns us that this is a story of losing as well as finding, it's not surprising that he also loses his way, together with his sense of himself as an integrated personality. Confused by the multiplicity of distorted reflections confronting him, and caught up in forces of which, as yet, he knows nothing, he is drawn into -- and trapped in -- one of the mirrors. Meanwhile a simulacrum emerges from the hall to be swept up in his mother's arms and taken home. Andy (or Dany as he comes to be known) is released from the mirror by Mona, an ageless trapeze artist, who then introduces him to the realm of carnival. It's a world dominated by the carnies, a motley assortment of acrobats and stunt riders, strongmen and roustabouts, changelings and fairy folk; a world of nonlinear time and collapsible space in which the rules of logic are violated and the law of gravity defied. Mona's flamboyant performances are less dangerous than they appear: when Dany, pressed into service as her hauler, pulls her up to the trapeze bars it strikes him that the real purpose of the rope is to keep her earthbound. It's one of many marvels and oddities he learns to accommodate. As his education -- or, more accurately, re-education -- proceeds, Dany learns about carnie history, the origins and decline of a race of beings radically different from the mortals among whom they live. Once a cohesive group, their otherwordliness captured in myth and folktale, they were scattered after the Irish famine of the 1840s and forced to conceal themselves in the world of carnival -- in places where "wonders, monstrosities of height and girth, death-defying balancing acts, feats of inhuman strength and contortion would be seen to be the norm. The gravitationless ones had to pretend to be earthbound." Dany has to contend not only with the knowledge that such beings exist, but also with the possibility that he is one of them and so can never again find a place in his parents' home. The book is a pageant, a whirl of colourful characters and vividly realised events to be enjoyed rather than analysed There is a poignant passage in which, longing for his mother and his own bedroom, he tries to return, only to find his bed occupied by the simulacrum his parents have taken for their son. He turns and runs back to the carnival, which, if not exactly home, is undoubtedly where he belongs. In a later episode, Dany wrestles with the Dewman, a monstrous presence who both is and is not his father. These two scenes might suggest that Carnivalesque is a coming-of-age novel, an allegorical account of an adolescent's struggle to find his place and true identity in a world at once richer and more alarming than his parents have acknowledged. The interpretation holds good up to a point, but this narrative strand is far too complex and varied to be simplified in this way. Complex, varied and not entirely coherent, Carnivalesqu e will challenge readers who value order and internal consistency in their fantasy worlds. But the novel's unruliness is part of its strength: inescapably possessed by the spirit it describes, it must to some extent mirror the discourse of the carnies, who deal in "evasions, diversions", in stories where "the enchantment took over and the point, if point there was, was never arrived at, let alone explained". When Walter, an earnest student of carnie lore, attempts to codify his flawed understandings, he simply misses the point: as Mona sees it, there's something fundamentally wrong with his approach -- "his niggling questions, his windy explanations, his inability to accept that carnie things just were". The self-defence so neatly embedded by Jordan in his own narrative may not disarm all criticism, but it sets out the terms on which the novel must be understood. It's an entertainment, a pageant, a whirl of colourful characters and vividly realised events, to be enjoyed rather than analysed. When Dany attempts to establish his role in Mona's performance and, by extension, his place in the carnival world, his questions are brusquely dismissed by Mona's fellow performer, Virginie. "There's no why," she says, "there is no because; there is just the show." - Jem Poster.
Library Journal Review
In the summer of 2016, 14-year-old Dubliner Andy Rackard enters Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors at a traveling carnival. Upon his exit, a different Andy emerges, a sullen reflection of the boy who entered, now trapped in a fun house mirror. The ethereal carnie Mona rescues him and, over time, initiates the rechristened Dany into the mysteries of the Carnies' lore and life. With each revelation about the carnival and its people, Dany more deeply intuits his identity and crucial role in the ancient war between the Carnies and the Dewmen. Ultimately, Dany faces the horrific Captain Mildew, the traitorous Burleigh, and his twin to save the Carnies and his human mother, Eileen, bereft of the beloved boy who disappeared months ago in a hall of mirrors. VERDICT This new work from director/author Jordan is a house of mirrors, reflecting and distorting Celtic fairy tales to reveal new dimensions to timeless stories. Jordan's seductive narratives are unmatched in modern literature, although many will recognize parallels to Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman.-John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.