The Circus of the Earth and the Air

Brooke Stevens

Describing The Circus of the Earth and the Air is a very tough thing to do. It's a novel not quite like anything else I've ever read. It's exceptionally ambitious for a first novel, hitting all the big themes and doing it in an interesting, original way; it doesn't quite pull everything off, but it's a fine attempt.

Alex and Iris are your typical married couple-- they're in love, but they have the same kinds of fights every married couple does. Until, that is, they see a circus while on vacation and decide, on impulse, to attend. Iris volunteers for the disappearing act... and never returns. In order to unocver the mystery behind his wife's disappearance, Alex must infiltrate the circus, a nightmarish, and yet absurd, world of existential horror and desperate joy.

If Jean-Paul Sartre-- or, perhaps, Jean-Paul Sartre's paperboy-- had been obsessed with circuses, he might have written this novel. Stevens' characters have that same sort of dreamlike two-dimensionality to them-- they're there for the purpose of advancing the story, and you know they're there for the purpose of advancing the story, but that doesn't make them, or the story, any less engaging. Stevens puts his characters into the oddest situations he can dream up, and has them shift emotion at the drop of a hat in order to accommodate these situations, and none of it ever seems contrived. (Okay, almost never.) The story's the thing here, though, and the story demands of both the author and the reader, "look at me! Pay attention to me! I'm what'[s important here!" It takes the strongest of stories to pull something like this off, and Stevens' story manages it-- almost. There's something missing, however small-- a gleam more emotion in the characters, or a bit more realism, perhaps a stretch or two where Stevens should have paused the action for characters to reflect a bit more. I don't know. But the skeleton shows through the skin a few times and pulls the reader away from the wonderfully phantasmagoric world which Stevens wants us to inhabit. Still, though, the potential is worth it, because when you finish this book, you will know Brooke Stevens is a talent you need to know more about.