by Carol Birch

This turned out to be a fascinating story, though it started out a little poetic and vague. It took a chapter or two to really get into what was going on, but once the background of the main character, Julia, started coming out, I definitely wanted to keep reading.

Julia was born 'different'. She has hair all over her face and body like fur, and the face itself appears ape-like. After her mother abandons her as a small child, she is taken care of in comfortable circumstances until the old woman who looks after her dies, then Julia sets out on her own and eventually joins a carnival freak show.

The variety of characters in the freak show provides some interesting personality quirks that come of growing up 'different'. Julia sometime bristles at the casual way in which the other 'freaks' refer to her anomaly, though her sensitivity goes largely unnoticed.

Julia is like many young women and wants the same things, like nice dresses, but she is aware of the effects of her appearance and is told she will never 'get a man'. She's also very talented and can sing and dance, which takes her beyond just being a freak into being a valued performer.

It wasn't until the end of the story that I learned that Julia was a real person, though the events of her life are fictionalized in the story. Wikipedia has an interesting entry about her. The story is well told and gives the reader some insight into what it must be like to grow up and live as someone who is visibly different and the treatment she gets as a result. Very poignant.

Juila Pastrana was real, and her search for love and the world's judgment on appearance are universal. These facts hold my attention throughout Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch. I want to know what happens to Julia, and I hope things work out for her. Without a spoiler, I will say that this ficiton story is so unbelievable that it could only be based on the truth. Julia Pastrana's story is one I will remember for along time.

Read my complete review at Memories From Books - Orphans of the Carnival.

Reviewed based on a publisher’s galley received through NetGalley.

[I received a copy of this novel through NetGalley.]

This novel is based on the story of Julia Pastrana, a perforrmer and "freak" who lived in the 19th century; more than the typical "woman with a beard", Julia was covered in hair, and had a facial condition that made her look like an ape. Throughout the story, we get to see here leave her hometown and the house where she had lived, to perform with a troupe, then with independent managers. More than a mere attraction, Julia sang and danced beautifully, something other characters find both fascinating and troubling: after all, is she really a human being, or merely an animal?

I found this attraction mixed with revulsion fascinating, for all the questions it raised. Most of the story is told from Julia's point of view, and there's no doubt she's a human being, period, with her own thoughts, feelings, dignity, and desires in life. She may appear as a little passive at first (her fellow performers have to remind her to get a contract, not just take everything her manager send her way, and she let herself be prodded by doctors and scientists), but she reveals herself quickly as full of willpower: leaving the people she's always known for the big unknown, and especially accepting her condition as something normal, something that's part of her, while making use of skills that, in about everybody, would certainly garner admiration (singing, dancing, playing the guitar, acting). There's some contradiction in her character, true; on the other hand, this is just part of the human condition—so many of us are creatures of contradiction.

But the world isn't so kind to her, and while a lot of people are ready to pay just to see her, or are her friends (Ezra, Friederike...), some others don't hesitate to criticise her, judge her as amoral, or as an abnormality that should be kept under lock and not shown to people. This definitely raises the matter of the "freaks" (Victorian period) and how they were perceived, not to mention what may easily be forgotten: that those people were, well, people first. In this way, the novel can be shocking—thus reflecting a very Victorian feeling, with "well-thinking people" judging those who're different, while at the same time never judging themselves for gawking. (Also, there's the matter of Theo's decision later.)

This highlighted the tragedy of Julia's life: people came to see her, but less for her skills than for her appearance. She was invited to social gatherings, but less for her personality than for others to "see the freak". People talked about her relationship, but less out of happiness for the couple than to whisper in their backs about "does he does it with -that-?" It was all very sad, all the more because Julia can never free herself from her appearance, which in turns is limiting (she can't go out without a veil, for instance, and in spite of travelling a lot, she doesn't get to really see that many places).

Theo, well... Theo was less interesting. Mostly his character was of a mercantile quality (and at least he's honest about that), and there was never any mystery about the part money/fame played in their relationship. Still, when things were told from his point of view, they never seemed as rich and interesting as when they were from Julia's.

Julia's story would have been a 3/4 stars. However, a few things prevented me from really enjoying it. First, Theo's voice (as said, not very enthralling, especially when it dealt with his ambiguous feelings for her); I kept thinking that I would've wanted to see this relationship told only through Julia's eyes, perhaps because there would've been more than a seed of wondering whether he truly loved her or just took advantage of the situation? Hard to tell. Also, the fact that Julia doesn't stay that long with other performers, and apart from a couple of encounters with Ezra, Berniece and Cato later, mostly everything revolves around Julia and Theo, therefore: not much potential for various interactions.

Finally, the Rose narrative: I disliked that one, none of the characters were particularly appealing, and that story was only connected by a lose thread to Julia's. I had expected something more... intense? More closely related? The way it was, it brought nothing to Julia's story, and in the end my only feeling was "why did I bother reading those parts?"

Conclusion: 2.5 stars. Julia's narrative didn't need to be bogged down by Rose's.

Carol Birch’s novel, Orphans of the Carnival, follows the short, strange life of nineteenth century performer, Julia Pastrana. Pastrana sang and danced on stages from New Orleans to St. Petersburg, Russia, but she was most known for her appearance: Pastrana had hypertrichosis and gingival hyperplasia (diagnosed in the twentieth century). Birch puts us into the head of this lonely woman, showing us how alienated her appearance might have made her feel from the rest of humanity. This is an affecting but strange read...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Canongate book for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Although I’ve never been to a circus I’ve always been interested in stories, books, films and artworks about the circus. And I’ve never forgotten the movie Freaks (1932) directed by Tod Browning, that is as beautiful and touching as it is horrifying (not because of the ‘freaks’ of the story, but because of the way they were exhibited and exploited) , since I first saw it many years back. Human beings have always been fascinated by the unknown and by those who are similar but different to us (not only from a different country and race, but sometimes truly different, something that Freud tried to explain when he defined the ‘uncanny’ as something that is familiar and strange at once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny) and can cause attraction and repulsion at the same time.

This is the first novel by Carol Birch that I read, and although I was interested in her literary career, what made me pick it up was the subject matter. The author writes about Julia Pastrana, a woman born in Mexico in 1834 with two severe genetic malformations that resulted in her body being covered in hair and in her having a protruding mouth and lips with two rows of teeth. There circulated strange stories about her origin (still available nowadays), and she was spotted in a Mexican house by somebody in showbiz and ended up in the circus and carnival circuits, first in the US and then throughout most of Europe. The novel tells her re-imagined story, although, as the writer explains at the end, she used the basic known facts of her life as scaffolding that allowed her to fill in the gaps and create a fictionalised account of her short but intense life.

Julia’s story is interspersed in the novel with some chapters about Rose, a woman of our time (or thereabouts) who lives in a small apartment in London and who is could be defined as a hoarder. But more than a hoarder, she seems to feel an affinity for the objects she finds, no matter how broken and tatty, as if their stories called to her and she feels she has to rescue them and give them a home. When she finds a strange and half-destroyed doll at the beginning of the novel we don’t know yet what the link with Julia is. We don’t find that out until the very end (or close enough, although I missed one of the clues, so intent I was on following Julia’s story at that point) and it’s sad but somehow it offers a sense of closure. The mention of the island of the Dolls that also exist in reality adds another layer of strangeness and creepiness (or enchantment, it depends on one’s point of view) to the story.

The book is written in the third person from the various main characters’ points of view. The historical account is mostly from Julia’s point of view (and giving her a voice, after so many years of being the object of the gaze is a great decision), although later when she meets Lent the points of view alternate between the two and I feel that the author makes a good job of trying to get into the mind of her husband, a man difficult to empathise with or understand, especially from a modern point of view (although I’m sure people at the time wouldn’t have been comfortable with his behaviour either, at least the most enlightened ones). Rose’s chapters, although far less numerous, are told from her point of view and later from Adams’s, a neighbour, friend and lover. The novel is beautifully written; it does not only manage to create a sense of place and of the historical period, but it also succeeds at building up a psychologically consistent portrayal of both Julia and her husband. I felt there was far less detail about the contemporary parts of the story and although I did appreciate the eventual confluence of plots (so to speak, but I’ll avoid giving away any spoilers), I’m not sure that the two parts fit perfectly well, enhance each other rather than distract from one another, or that we get to know or understand the contemporary characters other than superficially. To be fair to the author, I can’t imagine many fictional stories that could compete with Julia’s real life (and afterlife).

This is a book where those who are deemed less than human run rings around the self-professed echelons of society, and I’m sure I’ll keep thinking about this story that touches on colonialism, misogyny, exploitation, issues of race, disability, diversity… Yes, I felt compelled to check the story of Julia Pastrana and other than some discrepancy about the date of her marriage, the novel is accurate regarding the facts, proving the adage that reality is stranger than fiction. And history for sure.

This is a book that will interest people who enjoy Victoriana and historical fiction of the era, and anybody who likes to read a well-written novel with great characters. It is a sad story (and I cried more than once) but it deserves to be told and read. Perhaps we don’t have carnivals or shows of the style described in the book any longer, but we shouldn’t be complacent because we are not as enlightened as we might like to think. A fascinating novel about a fascinating human being and the society of her time.