• Send us Mail
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed
  • Search Site

Polari Magazine

  • Home
  • Up Front
    • Editorial
    • Clementine: The Living Fashion Doll
    • Polari Safari
    • WTF? Friday
    • Bulletin Board
    • Polari Facts
  • Features
    • Interviews
    • Features
    • Gallery
    • Opinion
    • Heroes & Villains
  • Community
    • Oral Histories
    • Coming Out Stories
    • Relationships
    • IDAHO
    • LGBT History Month
    • Blogs
  • Reviews
    • Books
    • Film and Television
    • Music
    • Stage
    • Visual Arts
    • Classics: Books
    • Classics: Film and Television
    • Classics: Music
  • About
    • About Polari Magazine
    • Contributors
    • Contact

You are here: Polari Magazine / Books / The Trapeze Artist • Will Davis

The Trapeze Artist • Will Davis

24 Jul 2012 / Comments Off / in Books/by Tim Bennett-Goodman

The Trapeze Artist ★★★★★
Will Davis
307 pages • Bloomsbury • May 10, 2012 [PB]
…………………………………………………………………………………………. 

‘You think it is so easy as you just run away and join the circus? One of those people who think that all it takes is for you to one day decide “Oh, I shall learn a few tricks today” and then the next day – ha! – you can be a great aerialist … it’s not so fucking easy!’

Ever since childhood I’ve always loathed circuses and fairgrounds and found clowns downright creepy. But I always made an exception for aerialists, those gymnasts of the air. In my youth we seemed to have a lot of circuses on TV, especially at Christmas, and they provided a rare opportunity for watching half-naked, well-oiled men strut their stuff. (Nowadays, with the East End graced with 50 foot high images of Tom Daley in micro-speedos at every turn in readiness for the Olympics, this seems incredibly quaint, and rather akin to an Edwardian gentleman catching a titillatory glimpse of ankle!)

Of course, we’ve all heard those stories of children running away to join the circus but Will Davis’ endearing and thought-provoking The Trapeze Artist has a forty year-old man doing so, and apparently finding love in the arms of a male Transylvanian (well, Romanian actually) trapeze artist ten years his junior.

Out of this unlikely scenario, and bordering on magic realism (shades of Angela Carter’s 1984 Nights at the Circus perhaps?), Davis weaves an intriguing and entrancing tale of physical and emotional pain, struggle, loss and redemptive love.

We never find out the name of the leading character but, gradually, through Davis’ short, inter-cutting sections, switching rapidly between lonely, bullied adolescence, to an early-middle age still tied to his mother’s apron-strings, through to eventual (literally soaring) liberation, we piece together the jigsaw of his troubled life.

His miserable, isolated schooldays as a fourteen year-old growing up gay in a hostile environment, are suddenly transformed by the arrival of a new boy, Edward: dashing, cool, arrogant and impertinent. Eventually, the two team up and Edward reveals that he is also gay, though the contrast between the main character’s conformist, lower-middle class upbringing and Edward’s bohemian arty one (his father a successful novelist and his mother a painter) could scarcely be greater.

There is also another gay boy, Paul, who tags along with them, much to Edward’s amusement and the leading character’s chagrin, but there is little doubt that Edward and he are lovers and Paul merely a rather pathetic hanger-on. The petty jealousies of a ‘threesome’ inevitably come into play and Edward manipulates these rather cleverly, and to his own advantage, although it eventually backfires in spectacular and tragic fashion, colouring the rest of the leading character’s life.

Aged forty, and still living at home with his now-widowed mother, he has become, like his mother, a care-worker for the elderly. Suffering from what can only be described as a mid-life crisis (although he himself characterises it as a nervous breakdown) he leaves home and joins a circus. Or, rather, he joins the trapeze artists and travels with the circus, whether they want him or not – which they make emphatically clear they do not.

His love for Vlad, it finally becomes clear, is very much a one-sided affair and the leading character once again finds himself alone in a hostile world. He returns home to find that, in his unexplained absence, his mother has suffered several strokes and is now a resident, rather than a worker, in a care home.

On her death, he tears the guts out of the suburban family home he has inherited from her (much to the horror of the elderly neighbours) in order to erect a full-height trapeze rig, upon which he tortures his body night and day with exercises and drills until he is ready to perform in public as an aerialist in his own right.

In his moment of bleakest despair, when Vlad has rejected him, he finds sympathy from Jethro, the clown who has always appeared to hate him, and also from Paul, who reappears having made a new gay life for himself in London.

This novel moves by turns from the bleak and alienating to the humorous and life-affirming, with its message that, through all life’s adversities, struggle can overcome and bring its own rewards. In the case of the leading character the ultimate reward is triumphant, if short-lived, but then, one might say (and I take Davis to imply) that’s life – take it and leave it. It is not a rehearsal. And, as an aerialist himself, he should know.

 

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
Tags: aerialist, angela carter, bloomsbury, gay love story, nights at the circus, trapeze artist, will davis

Related Posts

Did you like this entry?
Here are a few more posts that might be interesting for you.
Related Posts
All The Beauty of the Sun • Marion Husband
The Insurrectionist
Patrick Wolf • The Bachelor
The Song of Achilles • Madeline Miller
Niv • Itamar S.N

Search Polari

Latest Posts

  • Polari Magazine 2008-2014December 3, 2014 - 6:16 pm
  • Tearing Up Their Map: An Interview with LambDecember 2, 2014 - 2:45 pm
  • Future Islands • GigDecember 2, 2014 - 1:41 pm
  • Puppets with Attitude (at Christmas)December 1, 2014 - 6:30 pm
  • The Aesthetic of Voyeurism: Interview with Antonio Da SilvaDecember 1, 2014 - 1:25 pm
  • Broke With Expensive Taste • Azealia BanksNovember 28, 2014 - 3:59 pm
  • Royalty Strutting on an American College Stage: Miss and Mr. Gay ISU 2014November 27, 2014 - 2:59 pm
  • Bright Light Bright Light: Everything I Ever WantedNovember 26, 2014 - 11:15 am
  • Jaime Nanci And The Blueboys: ‘Toy’ TalkNovember 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm

About Polari Magazine

Polari Magazine is an LGBT arts and culture magazine that explores the subculture by looking at what is important to the people who are in it. It’s about the lives we lead, not the lifestyles we’re supposed to lead.

Its content is informed & insightful, and features a diverse range of writers from every section of the community. Its intent is to help LGBT readers learn about their own heritage and to sustain a link between the present and the past.

Polari is designed to nurture the idea of community, whether that be social and political, or artistic and creative. It is your magazine, whether you want to read it, or whether you want to get involved in it, if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer.

Polari Magazine is all these: it's a gay online magazine; it's a gay and lesbian online magazine; it's an LGBT arts and culture magazine. Ultimately, it is a queer magazine.

Latest Posts

  • Polari Magazine 2008-2014December 3, 2014 - 6:16 pm
  • Tearing Up Their Map: An Interview with LambDecember 2, 2014 - 2:45 pm
  • Future Islands • GigDecember 2, 2014 - 1:41 pm
  • Puppets with Attitude (at Christmas)December 1, 2014 - 6:30 pm
  • The Aesthetic of Voyeurism: Interview with Antonio Da SilvaDecember 1, 2014 - 1:25 pm
  • Broke With Expensive Taste • Azealia BanksNovember 28, 2014 - 3:59 pm
  • Royalty Strutting on an American College Stage: Miss and Mr. Gay ISU 2014November 27, 2014 - 2:59 pm
  • Bright Light Bright Light: Everything I Ever WantedNovember 26, 2014 - 11:15 am
  • Jaime Nanci And The Blueboys: ‘Toy’ TalkNovember 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm

Twitter

Tweets by @PolariMagazine

Archive

  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • July 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
© Copyright - Polari Magazine - Wordpress Theme by Kriesi.at
  • scroll to top
  • Send us Mail
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Website Privacy & Cookies