Title: The Palace of Curiosities Author: Rosie Garland
Published: September 26, 2013
Genre(s): Magical Realism
Page Count: 326
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Before Eve is born, her mother goes to the circus. She buys a penny twist of coloured sugar and settles down to watch the heart-stopping main attraction: a lion, billed as a monster from the savage heart of Africa, forged in the heat of a merciless sun. Mama swears she hears the lion sigh, just before it leaps...and when Eve is born, the story goes, she didn't cry—she meowed and licked her paws. When Abel is pulled from the stinking Thames, the mudlarks are sure he is long dead. As they search his pockets to divvy up the treasure, his eyes crack open and he coughs up a stream of black water. But how has he survived a week in that thick stew of human waste? Cast out by Victorian society, Eve and Abel find succour from an unlikely source. They will become The Lion Faced Girl and The Flayed Man, star performers in Professor Josiah Arroner's Palace of Curiosities. And there begins a journey that will entwine their fates forever.
Magical realism is always a strange genre; you don’t always know what you’re going to get. In The Palace of Curiosities, a novel about performers in a Victorian freak show, I think I got a little more than I wanted. Garland offers readers a potentially charming romance between two misfits, told in rich, evocative prose…but also manages to be unexpectedly gruesome. I finished the novel feeling that I’d just read a very beautiful book that nevertheless unsettled me.
In chapters that alternate perspective, Rosie Garland shows readers two “freaks”: Eve, the woman who is covered in fur like a lion, and Abel, the man who cannot die. After mishaps and general miserableness, both find themselves as attractions in a popular freak show. Of course, neither Eve nor Abel them the circus act particularly enjoyable either, and so they eventually make plans for their escape, to live a more “normal” life.
Yet while I think we could certainly think of The Palace of Curiosities as a romantic novel, I also feel like the author was trying to say more. The way Eve feels trapped in her role of submissive wife, for instance, could be a commentary on historical sexism, or it could just be a convenient plot device. I’m not a reader who always searches for “deeper meaning” in my books or believes that symbolism is everywhere, but I can’t help but wonder if Garland didn’t have some broader message in mind. Is this just a book about to strange people find each other, or is it something else? I’m not sure, and that uncertainty affects how I think about this book.
There is also the issue of gore, which I mentioned previously. Prior to his arrival at the freak show, Abel works as a slaughterer for a meat plant. The entire process is described. In excruciating detail. How the beeves are killed (apparently “beeves” is the plural of “beef”), how their blood is drained, how they’re gutted, how they’re skinned, on and on and on. While I most definitely appreciate that realism, and while I thought Garland’s imagery was good…surely such explicit gore had a purpose?
And, of course, there’s more. Since Abel is a man who cannot die, he must prove his deathlessness by cutting himself. His act is basically to cut himself with knives over and over again while the audience watches his body magically heal. This process is, again, described in lengthy detail. Even after he escapes the freak show with Eve, Abel doesn’t stop cutting himself. See, in order for him to maintain an erection, Abel must cut himself. So the entire time the two of them are having sex, he’s knifing himself. Er…that’s some “erotic” imagery I could do without, thank you very much.
Unsettled as I was by the blood and detailed violence in The Palace of Curiosities, I thought Garland was able to create a very evocative, magic-tinged look at Victorian London and the kinds of abnormal entertainments the common man sought. We see a seedy side of life, falsely elegant, but full of cons and threats and ambition. That was very well done, especially when set against Abel and Eve, two people who want only to be happy in a manner of their own choosing.
The Palace of Curiosities isn’t your typical circus romance. Rosie Garland’s prose is lush and hints at darker things, while telling a story that unsettles the reader as much as it engrosses. This novel is certainly well-written, but perhaps it lacks a particular something that would bring everything together. But even so, it’s a worthwhile book.
