With the re-release of this novel in the UK (at long last!) as part of the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, we thought that it was worth resurrecting our review from June 2011.
(The review was originally for the edition published by Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press. It has been slightly edited for context. These additions are generally in italics.)
First published in 1935, The Circus of Dr. Lao is a marvel: or as John Marco so rightly puts it in his introduction to the Bison Press edition, ‘an obscure classic’. (page xvii) (Later edit: the Gollancz edition has a four-and-a-bit pages introduction by Michael Dirda.)
Though Charles Finney published other novels and stories, this (his first) is perhaps his most famous, though today even this is not all that well known. Like many others, I suspect, I know it personally through The 7 Faces of Doctor Lao, the George Pal movie of 1964 starring Tony Randall in the titular multitude of roles, though even that is quite hard to get hold of these days.
However, despite its relative brevity, the book itself is a richer and more complex experience.
It tells of a visit to the small town of Abalone in Arizona by a circus. A circus that appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and promises spectacles that are unparalleled by any other touring extravaganza.
The book begins in what we would now see as a small-town USA / Stephen King kind of way, as the town’s inhabitants read of the circus through an advertisement placed mysteriously in the town’s newspaper. The book shows us the effects of the circus on various members of the Abalone community, amongst them the newspaper printer and copy editor, a local schoolteacher, the children of Abelone and a down-and-out (this was the time of the Great Depression) recently discharged from the Army, amongst others.
Promising wonders never before seen, the circus actually reveals to the townspeople the mythical made real, their future, and their hopes and fears realised before disappearing again. There is a sea serpent, a roc, a Medusa, a werewolf, and even an ancient God.
Whilst holding up a mirror to the good and bad that 1930’s society can bring, it is also moralistic, with an ending that matches the eeriness of the main plot.
Some of the language is Bradbury-poetic, lyrical and obscure. It’s not every day that you read the word ‘pulchritude’, even less so on the first page of the novel. It is also deliberately ambiguous in its plot, a book that doesn’t explain everything and doesn’t finish with an ending that ties everything up, though it is apt. It even poses some questions at the end not answered in the book!
Frankly, in terms of plot, well, it’s rather nebulous. You could cut it to ‘weird circus arrives, people see the exhibits, then circus leaves’, but there’s so much more than that. What we have is a series of experiences that the inhabitants are affected by. It is a book that, though short, is worth savouring and then re-reading.
It is also much more adult than I remember the film being. There are comments on pornography and the erotic, which are perhaps more explicit, though tame by today’s standards.
There are other elements that have dated less well: for example, Dr Lao is often referred to as ‘a Chink’, a racial reference which may settle uneasily on today’s more sophisticated reader. Nevertheless, as an indicator of the time, and language used then, if not now, I was able to work with it, feeling that the term reflected the small-town mentality exhibited in the book.
Unlike other more recent editions, the Bison Edition has been published with its original first volume illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff, which are odd, but totally in tune with the surreal aspects of the book. (Later Edit: The Gollancz edition, sadly, does not have these illustrations.)
There are no chapters but appropriate gaps in the text where necessary. It is something you can – and perhaps should – read in one sitting. Bizarrely, the last twenty-five pages or so are called ‘The Catalogue’ – a dictionary list of the humans, the animals the icons, the foodstuffs and the places visited in the Circus. Totally unnecessary, yet somehow suitable for the book in its oddity.
Weird, unusual and sadly affecting, this book gave me that Bradbury-esque feeling of wonder, that sense of innocence, a sense of un-reality and the fact that just ‘to believe’ is sometimes enough. Partly religious allegory, perhaps, partly satire, it is a book most definitely worth reading. I found it more than I was expecting – imaginative, bizarre, creepy, amusing, charming, quaint, and oddly unsettling.
Later edit: Michael Dirda, in his Introduction to the Gollancz edition says, “Though consistently fun to read, The Circus of Dr Lao tends to strike most readers as a bit unsatisfying, partly, as I’ve tried to suggest, because it blurs genres, being simultaneously a fantasy, an anatomy of small-town mindedness, a comic bit of drollery, and a metaphysical experiment.” For me, this is actually why I liked it.
If you think of Fantasy as being predominantly Sword and Sorcery or Tolkien-esque, then this might broaden your perspective. For a book out on the limits, even seventy-five years on, and if you want to push your sense of what is Fantasy reading, then this is a must.
160 pages (Bison); 156 pages (Gollancz)
ISBN: 978 0 8032 349 4 9 (Bison Edition); 978 1 473 21367 8 (Gollancz Edition)
Review by Mark Yon, June 2011/revised January 2016.
