A review by thecommonswings
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney
5.0
What an extraordinarily odd book: part of it has aged badly, particularly the racial epithets, but then again Dr Lao himself has this amazing tendency to drop into offensive patois when obviously annoyed by a question from a rube so a lot of it is very obviously meant to poke fun at the natives. It’s a strange old story, part shaggy dog story, obviously partly a rebellion against Finney’s ancestors and their religious fervour.
It’s a black comedy, partly a fantasy, occasionally a satire and occasionally straight horror. In it’s own quiet way it’s as much a neighbour to Mark Twain as it is Charles Williams’ fervid religiosity. The appearance of Satan and the final sacrifice sequence can be read as both horror and as a joke, because Finney is adept enough at juggling the tone. There’s something also weirdly haunting about the final paragraph or two which feel on one level anticlimactic but also very, very sad. The weird tone is totally matched by the astonishing art of Boris Artzybasheff, who juggles surrealism and grotesqueries with a strange beauty in his art here. It’s quite an achievement
And then we get the catalogue. Finney basically spends the last part of the book sending the rest of the novel up: it’s a dry collection of jokes at the expense of characters in the book, with occasionally haunting, moving or deliciously blackly comic asides. It’s waspish and wry and is phenomenally close to the way more modern writers like Pratchett and Adams love to wring jokes out of footnotes. In fact the whole thing seems deeply prescient of dozens and dozens of later books, and it’s a shame that Bradbury’s overwritten and lumpen Something Wicked is the most famous novel to be influenced by it
It’s a black comedy, partly a fantasy, occasionally a satire and occasionally straight horror. In it’s own quiet way it’s as much a neighbour to Mark Twain as it is Charles Williams’ fervid religiosity. The appearance of Satan and the final sacrifice sequence can be read as both horror and as a joke, because Finney is adept enough at juggling the tone. There’s something also weirdly haunting about the final paragraph or two which feel on one level anticlimactic but also very, very sad. The weird tone is totally matched by the astonishing art of Boris Artzybasheff, who juggles surrealism and grotesqueries with a strange beauty in his art here. It’s quite an achievement
And then we get the catalogue. Finney basically spends the last part of the book sending the rest of the novel up: it’s a dry collection of jokes at the expense of characters in the book, with occasionally haunting, moving or deliciously blackly comic asides. It’s waspish and wry and is phenomenally close to the way more modern writers like Pratchett and Adams love to wring jokes out of footnotes. In fact the whole thing seems deeply prescient of dozens and dozens of later books, and it’s a shame that Bradbury’s overwritten and lumpen Something Wicked is the most famous novel to be influenced by it