Carnivalesque

by Neil Jordan

Overview

Magical storyteller Neil Jordan steps into the realm of fantasy--for fans of Jonathan Strange&Mr. Norrell and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.

It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn't. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new mall and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination . . .

Andy walks into Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors, and then he walks right into the mirror, becomes a reflection. Another boy, a boy who is not Andy, goes home with Andy's parents. And the boy who was once Andy is pulled--literally pulled, by the hands, by a girl named Mona--into another world, a carnival world where anything might happen.

Master storyteller Neil Jordan creates his most commercial novel in years in this crackling, cinematic fantasy--which is also a parable of adolescence, how children become changelings, and how they find their own way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632868886
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/06/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Neil Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter and author based in Dublin. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He is also a former winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Irish PEN Award, and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Jordan's films include Angel, the Academy Award-winning The Crying Game, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy.

Editorial Reviews

Spellbinding . . . Carnivalesque contorts with magic and otherness, conjuring an eerily seductive shadow world.” —O, the Oprah Magazine, "20 Books of Summer"

“The author's words flow with poetic cadence, conveying the light and dark sides of fairy tales from long ago. . . Fans of Jordan's The Drowned Detective (2016) will be entranced by this fantastical coming-of-age chronicle.” —Booklist

“This new work from director/author Jordan is a house of mirrors, reflecting and distorting Celtic fairy tales to reveal new dimensions to timeless stories. Jordan's seductive narratives are unmatched in modern literature, although many will recognize parallels to Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman.” —Library Journal

“Poignant. . . . It's an entertainment, a pageant, a whirl of colourful characters and vividly realised events, to be enjoyed” —The Guardian

“Beautifully poetic prose.” —Daily Mail

“Jordan's at his best when exploring the dark history of his circus fey or when detailing the quiet miseries of the supporting cast. . . there's much here to like.” —Kirkus

“Neil Jordan demonstrates his vast literary imagination in Carnivalesque—a fantasia of the highest order that is marvelous, whimsical, dark and daring . . . More than fantasy, there's some magical realism at work . . . Jordan grounds his fantasy in painful elements of the human condition . . . Such self-conscious realism contrasts with moments of lavish poetic splendor in which Jordan gives his formidable powers of description free rein . . . The ending arrives breathlessly, with surprising emotional intensity. And the journey there is, in a word, magical.” —Shelf Awareness

“A gripping tale unfolds.” —Locus

“[A] novel-length dream . . . Inside this menacing, dripping, mist-bound urban landscape, Jordan takes care to give us a story and characters that aren't cut loose from the quotidian elements we recognize . . . [Jordan] knows how to pace a story — an uncommon gift these days . . . His writing is quick and supple.” —New York Times Book Review on THE DROWNED DETECTIVE

“Ghostly and mesmerizing, its narrative unreeling in a nearly hypnotic fashion, yet overlaid with a powerful sense of inevitability. A striking blend of mystery and Hitchcockian romantic suspense.” —starred review, Booklist on THE DROWNED DETECTIVE

“A kind of ghost story that Kafka would have written, had he been inclined to that genre . . . You can never know where you are going with Neil Jordan . . . Extraordinary . . . Highly suspenseful . . . The Drowned Detective is a powerful study of the psychology of jealousy and a man's fear of being judged and found wanting; it is also a book about fate and chance, and how, within the seeming apparatus of destiny, a form of grace is revealed by the suprarational powers of the imagination.” —The Guardian on THE DROWNED DETECTIVE

“There are plenty of slick literary thrillers around, but for the knotty morality of a troubled marriage, and noir of real emotional and psychological depth, The Drowned Detective is one to seek out.” —British GQ on THE DROWNED DETECTIVE

“Jordan shows his strengths as a writer in the terrific dialogue and atmospheric imagery.” —Publishers Weekly on THE DROWNED DETECTIVE

From the Publisher

2017-03-21
An adolescent boy is abducted into a world of secrets and addictions by a magical circus while his mother suspects something is masquerading as her son in Jordan's (The Drowned Detective, 2016, etc.) coming-of-age fairy tale.It is a fairy tale: the carnies and roustabouts of the traveling circus are the last fey, reduced to surviving off mortals' emotions, and hiding their superhuman abilities in plain sight. Mona, who can fly, poses as an aerial dancer...and "adopts" a British youth who falls through the cracks of the carnival's Hall of Mirrors. Andy—or Dany, as his name becomes in the circus—is a boy like many others save for his close relationship with his mother, Eileen, a suburban housewife in a troubled marriage. As Dany adjusts to the carnie life under Mona's tutelage and learns the carnival's dark secrets, something else has exited the mirror in Dany's place...and now calls itself Andy. Eileen struggles to understand the seeming changes in her son, rationalizing them as adolescence and puberty, but she is haunted by memories of Andy's unusual birth. Though the tale builds slowly, progressing in a parallel haze of Dany's state of uncertain enchantment and Eileen's growing unease, it comes to a visceral head with the revelations of Dany's origin and a villain whose delightfully macabre presence will leave the reader reaching for some bug spray. However, the showdown between Dany and his foe is over too quickly, and the story sinks back into a languid emotional remove. Jordan's at his best when exploring the dark history of his circus fey or when detailing the quiet miseries of the supporting cast; our hero feels less Real Boy than a reactive cipher, muffled by cotton candy. Still, spun sugar is tasty, and there's much here to like.

Kirkus Reviews