Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevieve Valentine

THE MECHANICAL CIRCUS TRESAULTI
FINEST SPECTACLE ANYWHERE
MECHANICAL MEN beyond IMAGINATION
Astounding feats of ACROBATICS
The Finest HUMAN CURIOSITIES
the World has ever SEEN
STRONGMEN, DANCING GIRLS
& LIVING ENGINES
FLYING GIRLS, LIGHTER than AIR
MUSIC from the HUMAN ORCHESTRA
BARGAIN ENTERTAINMENT for ONE and ALL
~ No Weapons Allowed ~

As the story opens, you find yourself in a circus, with the lights, the ticket decorated with a golden griffin in your hand.  The show is on, and the world outside is drifting away.  As you read on, you begin to realize that for the performers in this novel, the outside world is a vague place, a world where boundaries go unseen and where things beyond the confines of the traveling Circus Tresaulti have no meaning and no reality; it is a world of sliding time-spaces; as a reader, you are always certain where you are, but that location is constantly changing.  The story runs like a long passageway, with rooms off it that we explore, as we wander down its length, and can take place at any time during the history of the Circus Tresaulti.  The combination of these two qualities  balance out: the claustrophobia of the close-knit community of the circus, the delicate balance of the social structure -- and sometimes sanity -- of its members are weighed against the looseness, the cobweb lightness of the narrative's billowing timeline and the cloudiness of the surrounding environments through which the circus travels. 

The center of the narrative, the string which we follow past all the sideshows of the many small histories, is Little George, rescued from a war-torn world when he was only a child so that he could run all the small jobs of the circus: the poster-pasting, the ticket-taking, the message-running.  At the heart of Circus Tresaulti, on the other hand, is Boss, the woman who sculpted each of its members from broken, or even dying, people; with her copper pipes for bones, her clockwork mechanisms to replace muscles, lungs and even a heart or two, the members of the circus are able to fly higher, perform more brightly and, in the end, become more than human.  But there is a price: they become detached from the rest of the warring world, existing only within and for the circus, devoting their lives to it.  Once changed, they cannot leave; they are tied to it, and to Boss, and to each other, forever. 

There are power struggles in the world beyond the walls of tents and trailers, however, and someone is bound, eventually, to notice them as something more than performers; when the safety of one of their members is threatened, the rest of them have to decide whether to come out into the world in a rescue -- and become something different, something more connected -- or to see the circus broken apart and, possibly, meet their own eventual ends.  Along the way, the loose cobweb of a narrative narrows and focuses, drawing itself ever tighter and more steely -- like the ribs of a cage, or of the metallic performers -- until you find yourself stuck to the book, gripped by the net of the story, uncaring of the hour.

The only things which even slightly interrupted my slide down the smooth slope of the narrative were a few things were left unsaid.  It is clear that the performers have strong needs and emotions, but it is not always clear what they are feeling, or why.  I found myself rebuffed from the glowering embers of Stenos' hatred, or the gleam of Bird's madness, merely because so many of their interactions were wordless exchanges of unreadable emotion.  But this is a small thing, easily forgiven in the flow of story.

Here are some things I find surprising in this book: 

That the world outside is nothing but a series of endless wars, leader followed by dictator followed by junta, endlessly destructive, endlessly violent, and all alike, blurring into a single, continuous centuries-long event.

That Ms. Valentine so seamlessly blends flesh and machine, mechanics and magic, life and death in a way that never once falls into trope.  The changed performers, while no longer exactly human, became neither godlike nor zombielike, but instead, more interdependent -- and, in an odd way, more vulnerable.

That she captures, so quickly and carefully, the personalities, conflicts, aches and desires of the people in a circus troupe, without explanation, without apparent effort, and with a deft eye for the enforced clarity and conscious lack of awareness necessary in a tiny, close-knit community.

The truth she brings to the characters: women are as real, visceral, needful and passionate as men, but totally different; and the effect of having parts of oneself become machine by nature do not pass without their imprint on the soul.

And lastly, Ms. Valentine's extraordinary power to make you sit up and pay attention to her wanderings. This is based partly in her queer and tangible subject matter, partly in her ability to weave dreams, and partly in some odd trick of words, words which lead like an old track through a meadow to secret places: you want to follow them, they intrigue you, even if the clues are faint and meandering. And then, like a fine circus act, she draws you up tight, bringing the slow and lovely performance up into a breathtaking, even painful, series of moves that delight and satisfy the reader.

Strong Female Characters: @@@@@ (5 points out of 5)
I liked Bird very much: the woman who is destroyed over and over and still keeps her self; and Elena is a force to be reckoned with.  However, Boss holds the keys to the circus, so to speak, and her combination of willpower and democratic leadership is worth reading about.


Treatment of Women in the Book: @@@@@ (5 points out of 5)
The women in the circus are creatures of will and autonomy, who are conscious of their choices and who are as vulnerable and badass as any women we could hope to read about.

Appearance of Women in the Cover Art:  Moot (no people at all)