By Thuy On
Within the pages of The Trapeze Act, a show marmoset named Punch will exact his revenge on a bully, a naive explorer will trek to Australia's outback in search of elephants and a mother will do the school pick-up in a spacesuit with a pair of heels.
Welcome to the debut novel from Libby Angel, a carnivalesque book that explores identity, ancestry and history. Loretta (Ettie) is the offspring of an unlikely coupling. Her Dutch mother, Leda, has circus pedigree and her father, Gilbert, is a criminal barrister. She's also a distant descendant of an ivory merchant and her middle name, Maartje, derives from "Flying Maartje May", the first woman in the world to successfully complete a triple somersault to catch on the flying trapeze.
Libby Angel: "I had a romantic notion I could learn to fly.''
With such impressive bloodlines, is it inevitable that she inherits her forebears' bohemian spirit? Is she "the next incarnation in a matrilineage of anarchists with wings"? Or will the pressure to be daring and adventurous prove overwhelming? At any rate, Ettie knows how impossible it is to disavow her background: "The desert becomes little more than an ache in my joints, the circus a collection of fairytales told to frighten children. With every retelling, details are changed or lost. But there is no way to forget, not yet. In my cells, I know."
A beguiling mix of fact and fiction underpins The Trapeze Act. Angel points out it was her father's cousin who was the family archivist. "He found a letter concerning one of our ancestors, an ivory hunter, who emigrated to Australia as a free settler in the hope of finding elephants. As for the more contemporary narrative, much of Loretta's childhood is a re-imagining of my own, or at least, concerns the same time and place as my own childhood."
Indeed, there's a wealth of historical information that props up the book, much like the scaffolding that supports the painted performers before they swing in the air. A lot of the early material was unearthed as part of Angel's honours degree.
"The ship journals and Ernest's expedition journal formed part of my thesis. I researched 19th-century immigration at the South Australian Maritime museum. Much of the circus research was incidental and anecdotal – I worked as a trapeze artist for many years."
Having trained at Circus Oz, Angel then went to London and performed in all sorts of places. "I had a romantic notion I could learn to fly. Of course the reality was less ethereal. I was always covered in bruises and rope burns; it took brute strength and skill just to climb a rope. I became obsessed with flying trapeze: the grand scale of it, the freedom, the fear and adrenalin."
Now based in Castlemaine, in regional Victoria, Angel grew up in the South Australian capital. The novel swings back and forth in time, from 1960s Adelaide to 19th-century England and Australia, with different generations in alternate chapters. Angel says her interest in non-linear narrative was to "show how the past reverberates in the present. I also wanted to demonstrate how history only exists in fragments, and is subject to irretrievable gaps in memory."
And the meta-fictional, stories-within-stories structure? "The polyphonous narrative voice seemed an ideal vehicle for representing the osmotic and evolving nature of identity. Loretta's identity is largely a composite of the voices around her."
The prose is brightly evocative and sharply rendered, so it's not surprising to learn that Angel is also a poet. Her move into prose was not without its creative challenges. "I had to resist the persistent desire to obsess over one word, one phrase, one sentence."
As someone who lives her life like "experimental theatre", the pulse of the novel is Ettie's mother Leda, the runaway trapeze artist, the flamboyant "carnie" whose refusal to conform to domestic standards and her outlandish dress ups raise eyebrows. She's defiantly unconventional.
On the subject of Leda's feminist credentials, Angel says: "I think Leda developed as an antidote to repressed small-town life. She ignores social mores, including those related to femininity and child-rearing. The town people call her 'eccentric' but this term is often applied to independent, creative women as a dismissal of their power. Leda provides a kind of snide commentary on Australian suburbia."
The Trapeze Act is published by Text at $29.99.