Cirque: Attack of the Moral Poop

Maybe calling Cirque by Terry Carr an Apocalypse is stretching things a little, but since it involves a religious revelation, we think it could fit in the category. Also, we’re trying to keep the religious weirdness in this blog. Warning: SPOILERS.

In the future, with the majority of humans spread out through space, Earth has been reduced to a historic landmark. Its most important city is Cirque, a tourist attraction with a peaceful population and many temples. The people of Cirque are all connected through the monitor, a holopath who can see into every mind and broadcast the experiences they deem the most important to everyone. The city was built around a seemingly bottomless hole dubbed the Abyss. Scientists believe the Abyss goes all the way down to the centre of the Earth, while the priests believe that it’s where all sins come together to form the Beast.

The Abyss was a gigantic receiver of all that was dark and evil in human nature, a deep force that drew to itself the hatreds, fears and pettiness of all people.

And now, all that moral poop is getting closer to the surface (by the way, the chance to use “moral poop” may or may not have been the reason we decided to review this book in the first place). To priestess Salamander III of the Cathedral of the Five Elements, this means doom. For the head of the City Guard, Gloriana, it’s just a dangerous wild animal that must be eliminated. For insecure Nikki, who uses special pills to split her personality in a bid to become someone else, it’s an adventure. To Annalie, the monitor, who sees herself suddenly powerless, it means being alone for the first time. However, what’s happening in Cirque has drawn the attention of others far away, like a millipede, newly arrived from Aldebaran, who can see the future and travelled to the city to witness…

I know of what is happening now in your Abyss because this eruption is famous on my world. How could it not become famous?

Throughout a single day, these characters will cross paths with each other and others, and in that same day, the fate of the city will be decided.

One good thing that we can say about this book, is that Carr managed to link all the characters to the main plot instead of having several unrelated side quests. We weren’t sure what Nikki’s role was going to be, and were pleasantly surprised when her story intersected with the millipede’s. Even Annalie, who spent a lot of time on her own, felt like another piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, much like Nikki, whose full personality, Nikki-One, is never as compelling as the split ones (cautious Nikki-Two, cynical Nikki-Three, always happy Nikki-Four), when we get the full picture, it’s not as interesting as (some of) its parts. At first, it looked like we might see a city dealing with a huge, angry creature, but Cirque isn’t that kind of book, even if there are a couple of moments when the Beast goes on a rampage. However, the religious aspect, which turned out to be the main issue, remained very superficial. We didn’t need a detailed explanation for everything, but Carr left things way too vague. Worse, he ignored some contradictory elements he himself included in the story. Robin, a young student who joins Nikki and the millipede on their boat trip to see the Abyss, says she’s a Centrist:

The world radiates out from the Abyss because God lives down there, where it’s dark and nobody can see.

However, Gloriana states that all the temples were in agreement with the plan to dump a boatload of chemicals on the creatures found in the Abyss. Considering the Centrists’ beliefs, that sounds a little suspicious, as does the fact that the other temples would think something as mundane as a chemical attack would be able to destroy this aggregation of sins. Salamander complains about the general lack of genuine faith of the people of Cirque, but it seems that the temples themselves lack faith, too. Unfortunately, Carr focused on Salamander and ignored all other religions, which made us wonder what the point was of mentioning those other temples (which include a Catacomb of the Meek, something we would’ve loved to see, and the Pragmatic Temple of the Apocalypse, which happens to be Nikki’s Church). But even within her religion, there was nothing about the conflict between how the leadership (chemical attack) and Salamander (“love and greater awareness of the Spirit”) decided to deal with the Beast. And more baffling – why give the Centrists such different beliefs if that wasn’t going to mean anything?

The nature of the Beast itself remains a mystery, though, again, it felt more like Carr just got lazy. The idea that it looked different to different people was an interesting one, but the differences were never big or well defined enough to make it look truly supernatural. People have different perspectives and that’s it. What’s odder is that the people of Cirque, thanks to the monitor giving them glimpses into each other’s minds, should’ve been aware of it. Nikki comparing it with a tiger made sense – some will see beauty, while others will see danger, and they’d both be right. Except, it’s clear that Cirque doesn’t want them to be both right. So, when she and Gloriana talk, Nikki gets to psychoanalyze her as having control issues because she wants to stop a huge, wild creature from reaching the city it’s her job to protect. And when in the end, Salamander acts like the mayor in a monster movie who refuses to postpone the town’s festivities and insists on going through with the religious service in a building right by the river where the Beast is loose, it’s of course Gloriana’s guards who cause the most damage. This is just ridiculous considering the Beast barged through a thick, panicking crowd in an enclosed space. Oh, and how did the Beast get in the Cathedral of the Five Elements in the first place? Because Salamander opened the back of the building, which overlooks the river… That’s genius. Gloriana’s worry that the religious nutjob could work the scared people coming to the service looking for answers into a hysterical frenzy is naturally dismissed, and she’s made to look like the the bad guy. When the Beast finally arrives and is (non-lethally) rampaging around, the people are calmed and shown just how wrong they were to be scared by Annalie, who transmits Nikki’s thoughts to everyone and lets them see the Beast through her eyes. We’re guessing that Nikki was a member of the Pragmatic Temple of the Apocalypse on purpose, though Salamander says they’re cynical (so, more like Nikki-Three?), and that’s pretty much all we ever hear about them. After being pushed into conformity via mind melding, everyone marvels as the Beast dies by the altar’s flame and turns into a flowerbed. Salamander’s reaction?

“We have seen a miracle tonight. We called Spirit to us, and Spirit has come.” Salamander drew a breath, glanced at the flowers and frowned slightly. “It came first as confusion and pain, but that is the way of birth. Ultimately, it is beauty, and now that beauty lives before us. We shall nurture it forever, here on our altar.”

Nice save. Robin has questions about the Beast and tries to see it in a scientific way, but her teacher, Jordan, tells her not to think about it and commands her to stop being negative about everything. When we first meet Robin, she was learning “negatives”, and when she gets too insistent, Jordan tells her to only see the positive in things from then on. Which apparently means no questions and no science? And there’s another, simpler problem with the Beast:

Alton wondered if the people of their worlds had seen anything this night as strange as the events in Cirque. He thought of the crystal armies orbiting Procyon, fighting their enigmatic wars of alignment; the Six Sleepers of Tenebrum, their dreams still shaping storms on their planet; the subtle power dances of lost fetuses in the Great Cloud, each striving for birth.

Any of the things Alton wonders about is weirder than what happened during the service, and if the humans know about all this, why would they be impressed to the point of changing their religious rites? The Beast is simply not magical enough to justify this.

In the end, the millipede reveals it’s sort of a preacher in its world and thanks to its temporal vision wrote the The Book of Causes, which details the events surrounding the Beast’s emergence. This is its people’s holy book and turns causality into a religion. The millipede and Robin had already had a conversation about this exclusively human concept and the humans’ need to find a meaning and purpose for everything that happens.

I admire the originality of human thought. You see a how and you create a why to take its place. Actually there is no why; it is the how that acts.

Exactly how the millipede changed its mind never really becomes clear. All we get is that it finally understood causality when it saw all the people coming together and made the creature change. Except, this doesn’t make much sense, as the Beast only entered the Cathedral because Salamander acted like a complete moron and opened the building. It was one person doing something very stupid. Of course, the only reason Nikki had already seen the creature and ended up at the service was because she joined the millipede on the boat, which wouldn’t have happened if the millipede hadn’t come to Earth. And the millipede only did that because he had seen it happen thanks to its ability to see the future. Without the millipede’s presence, there wouldn’t have been a new religion, and without the new religion, the millipede wouldn’t have been there. It’s a chicken and egg situation that generates questions about predetermination and free will, but once more, Carr didn’t do much with it. Despite the obvious religious conclusion, the story could easily function as a critique of the belief that there’s a meaning and purpose behind every event, as Salamander sounds less like someone who had a genuine revelation and more like she’s improvising a self-serving explanation before her followers have time to think for themselves and reach one of their own. Of course, if the dreaded Beast turned out not to be the threat most temples had been preaching, shouldn’t this boost the only religion that had a positive view of the Abyss? But, like we wrote previously, the Centrists are never mentioned apart from Robin. Carr ignoring the other religions means that we have no idea the effects the Beast’s emergence will have on Cirque’s society other than a future boost in tourism by becoming a pilgrimage destination for the followers of The Book of Causes. There’s also an environmentalist angle, when the millipede talks to Nikki and Robin about the humans use of a dangerous, possibly Universe-obliterating technology called stellar inertia, but Carr didn’t go too deep into that.

The religious aspect isn’t the only superficial element of the story – there’s also the characters. Nikki is the one we spend the most time with, but while we see parts of her and know her issues, we don’t see how all that comes together. Nikki-One is terribly generic. Her love interest, Jordan, is a personality-free, blandness void. The rushed resolution robbed Salamander of the expected inner conflict when her beliefs clashed with the reality of the creature she had feared most of her life. Nikki’s live-in boyfriend, Gregorian, is somewhat of a jerk, and a sceptic, who randomly hooks up with Salamander after a single conversation about religion and faith. Hilariously, right after there’s a broadcast involving Nikki, though he never gets to react to it because these characters are treated more like plot points and devices than people. Jamie is Gloriana’s insecure boyfriend who gets annoyed at her for his own passivity. The sequence where he talks to the outsider couple and projects all his feelings on the man, seeing him as oppressed by the more talkative woman was incredibly annoying. Even worse was him siding with Salamander against Gloriana after he had been shown to share his girlfriend’s concerns regarding the service in a previous chapter. Gloriana takes her job seriously but underneath her cool exterior, she often second-guesses herself, and it doesn’t help that everyone keeps lecturing her. We really felt sorry for Gloriana, even if dumping the chemicals without checking if there was anyone near the Abyss first was pretty dumb. Robin is just a foil for happy Nikki-Four, and Salamander’s apprentice, Erich, basically exists so she has someone to talk to. Anton, who first welcomed the millipede to Cirque, seemed to be at the service so someone could tell Annalie what she had missed and clunkyly set the stage for the religious ending by complaining about everyone’s lack of faith. The millipede itself is a bit of a cipher, but that fits the character. Finally, Annalie, the current monitor, who gets cut off from everyone after Salamander freaks out about the Beast while watching it for the first time in a broadcast. In theory, she’s an interesting character, but not only did Carr never delve into the awfulness of the monitor situation, but all the issues connected to the job, like the very short life expectancy, seem to have magically disappeared in the end. So, we get a happy Annalie encouraging her successor, Livy, who was afraid of taking over and ending up like her, to become the new monitor. In fact, all the characters’ issues are quickly resolved. After the revelation, Nikki’s insecurities are simply gone and she trades Gregorian for Jordan, while Gregorian and Salamander carry on their random pairing. Salamander herself quickly adjusts to the change in the rites. Gloriana decides to quit the City Guard, but Jamie swoops in and heals his wounded masculinity by ordering her not to. He also gets to refuse to marry her after having proposed at the beginning of the book, though he doesn’t end the relationship. Oh, and he’s going to apply to the City Guard, too. How lovely. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t want readers to roll their eyes at this idiot. By the way, all that happens in quick succession while everyone goes to say goodbye to the millipede.

The society of Cirque itself is described pretty vaguely. We get more about how it works on a practical level than about its values and beliefs. There’s the usual polyamory, children having to learn to express themselves negatively (Nikki-Two is actually surprised when Robin says the millipede is boring), and a bizarre exchange between Jordan and Nikki in which he claims she’s fat because she had a demanding male teacher when she got her first period. There are some capable of projecting their thoughts, like Robin, who’s learning to develop her gift, but apart from becoming a monitor it’s unclear what they do with it. It’s also unclear the effects the monitor and the broadcasts have on the people. How does the fact that they know that there’s someone spying EVERYTHING they do and can at any moment show it to everyone along with their thoughts and feelings affect them? Think about it, there’s ZERO privacy. There’s a quick mention of people not always tuning in to the broadcasts, but it’s still a creepy concept, a much more intrusive Big Brother. In a way, it makes sense that the characters don’t question anything, as they’ve lived like this their whole lives, but the book never acknowledges it, either. Worse, Carr simply ignored this when it was time to make the creature from the Abyss seem more than an animal. Why would the apprentice monitors, who have been seeing into people’s minds, find the different perspectives meaningful? You’d think being able to read people’s thoughts would make someone more open to difference – in Cirque, this is a way to breed conformity. The monitors themselves are pretty disturbing. They’re children, orphans, skilled at telepathy and thought projecting recruited very young, who don’t live long past their teen years: Annalie became a monitor at 6 and at 15, she had already outlived her predecessor by 2 years.

The first monitors had been monks and priestesses: Seanne, Ram-tseu, Alyxandra. Saint Seanne, of course, and the venerable Ram-tseu; they had all been people touched with grace. They had seen a central oneness of existence and had thought to teach it to others by showing them what they saw with their minds.

It’s all very deep, but all we’re getting from this is that Cirque used to be some sort of theocracy and we should be sad that things have changed. Annalie ends up surviving the kind of crisis that killed her predecessors, which raises the question of whether they might have lived. Naturally, no one thinks about that. Something else no one really thinks about is how barbaric it is to recruit children who will die before they reach adulthood just so people can get the news. And don’t forget all the weird shit those kids have to see on a daily basis. We didn’t need a lecture, just something, anything that indicated that Carr was aware of how fucked up this place he created is. But there was nothing. If the characters and their world were better developed, we could’ve seen it as a truly alien society (like Rome, which showed the Romans’ weird customs as perfectly normal), but like we already said, this whole story is too superficial for that. Maybe it would’ve been better if Carr had written about those earlier, more spiritual times. In a way, Cirque reminded us of Steven Erikson’s Rejoice, which we reviewed in 2 posts on our main blog (here and here). Both books feature a situation that most other sci-fi authors would’ve used as the starting point in a story set in a dystopian future, but show it in a positive way. So, instead of people freaking out about omnipotent, manipulative aliens who have rendered Humanity helpless, they’re supposed to embrace it as an opportunity to rebuild Earth as a peaceful utopia. In this case, instead of fighting for individuality and the right to not having someone accessing their thoughts, characters must open their minds and submit to whatever point of view some emotionally stunted teenager deemed superior. It’s just so weird. Annalie’s whole arc is regaining her identity, but that doesn’t seem to spread to other aspects of the story.

VERDICT

Simply disappointing. It’s true that the story that Carr wanted to tell wasn’t the one we were hoping to read, but there were plenty of issues that had nothing to do with going against our expectations. Cirque promised either a monster on the loose or a deep theological meditation – it delivered neither.