The Carnivale of Curiosities: A complex carnival story with an antihero protagonist

The Carnivale of Curiosities by Amiee Gibbs

This carnival book completely satisfied. 2023’s The Carnivale of Curiosities, by Amiee Gibbs, is set in 1880’s London. It’s a slow-burn, late-Victorian-styled literary novel, filled with magic, lies, secrets, and revenge plots, all centered around Ashe and Pretorius’s Carnivale of Curiosities, and its leader, Aurelius Ashe, who can grant anyone nearly any wish… for a price.

Unlike other circuses and carnivals of the day, Ashe uses real magic and many of his “freaks” have magical powers. Some are simply unusual-looking people, who have learned a skill or an act to enhance their star power like Georgie the dog-faced boy, who plays the violin, or Columbine the albino, who is an aerialist. Whatever you are, magical or not, in this carnival, you are part of the family.

The cast includes:

• Mr. Pretorious. He doesn’t perform himself, but his whole stage is a performance, and he can build or repair anything—or anyone.
• Aurelius Ashe grants wishes, after the wisher has signed a contract. Ashe has been in the wish business a long time, and he sometimes hints at his background, which involves a war and a very long fall.
• Lucien can create and control fire. Lucien is a man of secrets, and most of them he doesn’t know himself.
• Dita reads palms, hearts, and minds.
• Timothy Harlequin is a shapeshifter—an ancient Irish faerie who loves trickery and thievery.

Ashe soon clashes with Odilon Rose, a financier, the only son of a wealthy and powerful family. Rose seeks an extreme favor from Ashe–to cure the family ward, Charlotte Bainbridge, who is dying of a blood disorder. Ashe, who knows the Rose family’s history all too well, originally refuses, but Rose genteelly threatens Lucien, planning to expose a fire that happened when Lucien was a boy, before he could control his ability. Ashe says he’ll meet with Charlotte. If she agrees to his treatment, they will have a deal. Rose signs a contract he can’t even read, because it’s in a language older than Latin, but he is sure he has an ace up his sleeve—an advantage over Ashe of which Ashe is unaware.

It’s been a while since I read a book with an antihero protagonist, and Ashe is an excellent one. Lucien tells Rose that Ashe has greatness, but not much goodness. While he does seem to have goodness, Ashe’s belief that he alone knows best leads him to manipulate the people he is protecting and whom he loves.

As the classic villain, Odilon Rose is conventional but well-drawn. Three former carnies, each of whom has a contract with Ashe and who wishes to break that contract, have joined forces with Rose and put even more pressure on him to agree to Rose’s demand. They beat the dog-faced boy Georgie, and start a deadly fire, sure that Lucien, a human flame, will be blamed.

The book opens with a prologue, in which Aurelius and Mr. Pretorius are performing a procedure on Charlotte. The first chapter shifts in time, starting a few weeks before that incident. That opening made me interested in Charlotte, and the introduction to her later in the book, but earlier in the timeline, was a disappointment at first. Charlotte is a nearly silent, compliant young woman, remembering the words of her dead mother about being obedient and grateful. She seemed like a wet blanket, but the story then clearly shows us her powerlessness, financially, socially, and, due to her illness, physically. She has no protection from Rose and even the close friendship of his rebellious sister Florence is no real help.

Charlotte’s character arc got much more interesting in the second half of the book, and while some of her choices are bad or even nonsensical, I was intrigued watching her make them, coming to grips with a newborn sense of autonomy and self-determination.

Before that happens, though, Gibbs takes us to the circus, and then draws aside the curtain to reveal important secrets to us; the truth of the Rose family’s rise to power; the convoluted relationship each of Odilon’s three ex-carnie minions have with Ashe and others in the carnival, and several startling truths about Lucien. Odilon’s corruption and perversity is uncovered layer by layer, along with the details of his “secret weapon” against Ashe, one that looks as if it might work.

I thought I knew the general direction the book was taking, and that I’d kept track of threads, but near the end of the book came a scene that shocked me. That shock distracted me and kept me from focusing too much on the sudden speed with which Charlotte’s character changes.

The book isn’t perfect. I think Gibbs tries to create a late-Victorian tone with her prose. It worked for the most part, but odd sentence constructions brought me up short, as did occasional odd word use. Odilon is bad, but, as I mentioned, pretty conventionally bad, and Charlotte’s decisions came very quickly without much development. None of this kept me from enjoying this book.

I have the feeling this book missed its audience, because it falls somewhere between literary and genre. I don’t know who the audience would be, except people like me. It is slow, with lots of description of the Southwark slums and the theater of the carnival, but slow in an immersive way. Gibbs has plenty of points to make about power and exploitation, about hypocrisy and manipulation, and the question of “Who is a monster?” but the story and the characters take center stage. And isn’t that what we all want?