While Andy-now-Dany explores the carnival and in doing so, himself, the changeling child attempts to blend into the real Andy's home and life. The old Andy and his mother were close, and when faced with the less forthright, less open and straight up cold new Andy, Eileen is very disturbed. At first she tells herself that these changes were inevitable with the onset of puberty—all adolescent boys drift away from their mothers. Even the psychiatrist she takes her son to tells her that it's not him, it's just her own anxieties at play. We know there's something more to the situation, of course, and so watching Eileen's self doubt grow and consume her sense of self is incredibly sad and frightening—just as frightening as it is to see the changeling child enter the "real" world by way of a carnival mirror, a strange, warped shadow of Andy almost, a not quite right, uncanny version; a sort of Rosemary's Baby switch to potential evil.
Is this a story about adolescence? Yes, and more so about how a mother can feel left out of her own child's entry into adulthood. Is it about more than that, a complicated fairy tale about ancient beings? Yes, that too. The problem is that there feels like a fracture between the two, a strange dissonance in the story that distracts from the wonder it aims for. Much of it is prettily written, and there are some very effective conceits, but something feels cold.
Neil Jordan, interestingly, is the writer of the films The Crying Game, Interview With a Vampire, The Butcher Boy, Byzantium, and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves. It is Carter's works like Wise Children and Nights at the Circus, of course, that inform a great many readers' experience of carny literature, alongside Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. It would be unfair to compare Carnivalesque to Carter's classics, but it is hard to not hope for more from Carnivalesque. It's a complicated, challenging novel, but perhaps without the wonder and awe that it was aiming for.
The trouble with Carnivalesque isn't just that it's a slow burn novel. It's also that the final burn, when it eventually arrives at its peak heat, simply doesn't feel hot enough. There's plenty of creepiness, many strong visuals that will leave your skin crawling, but they somehow still don't feel enough to bring the story to the sort of dramatic finale that moves you, even if it is a quiet sort of dramatic you're hoping for. As one of the carnies says, "there is no why…there is no because; there is just the show." That should be enough, but it isn't. Not quite.
Carnivalesque is available from Bloomsbury.