Review: Roustabout by Michelle Chalfoun

Over the years, we have seen circus life depicted in many ways, as a place where murder take place almost casually, particularly if you are a knife thrower or a flyer. How easy to kill your partner because he or she is cheating on you!

Or as a place where horrors abound, with twisted faces and lives beneath the make-up and glitter, misfits who find refuge and soul mates in the dark world of the circus.

Or as a mythic, glamorous world where clowns go to bed in their costume and make up, and people have sawdust flowing through their veins.

We circus people used to laugh mostly. There is nothing glamorous about getting up at 4am and putting up a tent. A knife thrower or flyer is no more likely to wreck the act by killing his partner than he is of settling down and getting a day job. And beneath the make-up there are ordinary people, with ordinary every day concerns, just like everyone else. Except they are circus people.

Michelle Chalfoun's Roustabout takes the dark route. Behind the glitter and glamour there are monsters, she says. Monsters that abuse women, do drugs and treat weaker members of the society like disposable diapers.

The book concerns a girl called Mat, who was abandoned by her mother and left to the sexual predations of her stefather. At 15, she leaves him and goes to live with a roustabout (tentman in English parlance) who uses her body and knocks her about. She falls in love with a young man who is apparently murdered (another convenient acciden, that circus people are supposed to be so good at arranging) and gets into a druggy threesome with a horse trainer.

The book supposedly ends on a supposedly high note, with Mat leaving the circus and going off to look for a new life.

The problem with the book is that it is not about the circus. It is about drug addiction and child sexual abuse. It uses the circus as a setting. Where it mentions the circus at all, it is barely accurate.

We learn nothing about the circus artistes or the day to day life of circus people. Michelle Chalfoun claims to have spent three years with the circus before she wrote this book. If it an accurate account of those three years, what kind of circus was it? There would barely have been any time or inclination for the hard work required with all this sex and drugs and rock and roll going on.

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