THE BALLOON MAN

REVIEW: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti
by Genevieve ValentineRRSTAR.COM

 

Posted Aug 11, 2012
FROM: dawnbooksandauthors.com
A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti became one of the most talked about speculative fiction works around. That it is, in fact, a steampunk novel, may have added to the interest it generated — steampunk has always been popular with a certain audience but it has had a recent renewal of sorts with a larger, slightly more mainstream audience, partly thanks to Hollywood, Robert Downey Jr and the new Sherlock Holmes movies.

The Circus Tresaulti is run by a woman known only as Boss who has the ability to enhance her performers’ skills by adding mechanics to their bodies from pieces of metal found and salvaged. She sometimes gives them skeletons of hollow pipe, at times uses human bones to create magnificent, mechanical post-human beings who bring to the circus something never seen before. The circus performers range from human jugglers with an occasional false leg (“but these days there are so may bombs and so many people to remake; one shiny leg is no surprise”), to Panadrome, the “true marvel… the mechanised band”, to the Winged Man, “so beautifully married to machine” that members of the audience routinely faint when they see him. The circus travels from broken, fallen city to city, where “most people don’t live long enough to see the circus twice. These are ragged days”, writes Valentine, creating the background of dystopia that does not need to be more detailed than suggestions of war, bombs, radiation and the “makeshift walls of sudden city-states.”

Against this backdrop, Circus Tresaulti is a place of safety for its performers, most of whom have been saved or ‘fixed’ by Boss. But while they live and work together as a sort of clockwork carnival family, there is a constant shadow over them and over Valentine’s narrative. The ageless Boss has an old, mystical magic that she harnesses to build the bodies that will survive with the circus, and as ringmaster.
READ MORE AT:
http://dawn.com/2012/08/12/review-mechanique-a-tale-of-the-circus-tresaulti-by-genevieve-valentine/