Customer Reviews

Cirque

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Terry Carr--beloved as an editor/anthologist; as his own fiction proves, a Renaissance author as well. "Cirque" takes place in the city of the future, where citizens are telepathically linked, "monitors" under the age of puberty screen the tele-calls, and both material and psychic debris begins to pose a concern for the denizens. First printing 1977, incredibly topical in/for 1999. 187 pages, orig.pub. Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc.

I don't know there's anything quite like Cirque. It's quiet, short, and what would be the city or world destroying terror in another novel is best described as an emotional dust bunny long overdue for a firm dusting.

It's not that the dust bunny is no threat, it is, but the mood of the book is so precise yet so difficult to capture explaining what the threat is is difficult. It is the literal accumulation of discarded dark/dangerous emotions/moods (but not all of them) but this is no horror novel, nor are inhabitants of the small city where the novel is set--all the remains of humanity, seemingly--blissed out prayer bots or hapless eloi.

The novel can be read as allegory in many ways, some of them probably intended, but if it is a polemic it is the most gentle, even genial, example of such. My spiritual needs are satisfied by stretching a rubber band and saying, "ooh, neat", before making a grilled cheese sandwich but even this simpleton gets a little shiver when dipped in. Cirque is sad without being melancholy, hopeful without being treacle, and still without being static.

Don't want to oversell the book. Cirque is definitely no masterpiece. It is what the title of the review says: a lovely oddball.