Circus Of Ghosts

Barbara Ewing

Hodder and Stoughton

Otago Daily Times , August 27th 2011

I very much enjoyed Barbara Ewing’s novels previous novel The Mesmerist, and was thus delighted to receive its sequel, The Circus of Ghosts, in the mail.

The story picks up with the lives of Cordelia Preston and her unusual family after their arrival in America. The late 1840s in this new country is a time of excitement, opportunity and growth, and New York is a thriving city ruled by a tacit alliance between the Irish gangs who control the ports and the municipal authorities whose favours are available for an appropriate fee.

At first Silas P. Swift’s circus (with Cordelia and her daughter Gwenlliam as star attractions) is a great success, but as the influence of the church increases, the fortune of such public spectacles declines. Then gold is discovered in California and the entrepreneurial Swift, seeing the opportunity to cash in, decides to transport his business to the other side of the continent. Tired of performing, Cordelia decides to remain behind and find alternative employment. Although the discovery of ether and chloroform mean that her skills as a medical mesmerist are no longer of use, her mentor, Monsieur Roland, has in idea about combining mesmerism with talking therapy to ease psychological distress.

Gwenlliam can’t resist the allure of adventure but neither of them realise that the greatest danger comes not from the perilous journey, nor the lawless eastern goldfields, but from the past: Gwenlliam’s grandfather, the Duke of Llannefydd, has dispatched an envoy to dispose of Cordelia and return her daughter to her ‘proper’ place at his side.

All this takes place against a background of newly-found prosperity and poverty, opportunity and corruption, the rise of spiritualism and a burgeoning of new technology from the deguarrotype to the telegram.

Ewing has obviously done a great deal of research into period and does a wonderful job in conveying a sense of time and place, but it sometimes seems as if the story were the vehicle for the setting rather than vice-versa. Thrown into the mix are a potpourri of colourful characters – La Grande Celine (one-eyed proprietor of Celine’s House of Refreshment and the Preston’s landlady), a New Zealand actress who specialises in playing scantily-clad heroines, the clairvoyant Fox sisters, and a fearsome female gang leader who speaks only Shakespeare to name but a few – and the novel is bursting at the seams.

And therein lies the problem. There is so much to set up that it takes a long time for the plot to really get going, and when it eventually does it keeps foundering on the scenery. This would not be such a disappointment were it not for the fact that when the action is flowing I was completely drawn along by the current. The final third of the book (detailing Gwenlliam’s experiences in California, her abduction and daring rescue) swept me along with the action, only to dump me in London amid a catalogue of popular displays at the Grand Exhibition of 1851.

Ultimately my disappointment is has as much to do with my heightened expectations as it does with the flaws in the novel itself, but sometimes belief just needs to remain suspended.