I keep getting further and further behind on these – we read The Circus of Adventure between September 9th and October 9th 2024. At this point I’m not sure how many of his comments I’m going to be able to remember – but let’s see!

The best book in the series

Well, that was my opinion anyway. I was really hoping he would like it as much as I did – so there was a fair bit of pressure on my reading!

I think he definitely found this the most tense book in the series – he was on tenterhooks at several points such as:

• Bill and Allie being attacked, the children being rounded up and Jack not being with the others (he was concerned as to whether everyone was going to be OK and about Jack being left on his own).
• Jack exploring the castle for the first time, he was willing him not to make any noises and was exceptionally tense when the ladder fell and made a racket. He was also pretty worried when Jack went behind the portrait and got stuck.
• At the trapeze rescue, which he was adamant he wouldn’t want a ride on.
• At the bears escaping and Philip taming them, though I think he knew Philip could do it!

Reading the book

As I’ve probably said many times before – reading one of the books out loud to someone else is different to reading it to myself. It’s slower for one thing, and I definitely find myself noticing certain details for the first time.

I definitely notice more specific examples of the differences between how the boys and the girls are treated. When reading myself I feel like I probably skim quite quickly over the filler parts whereas reading aloud I have to slow down.

With that in mind I made a few minor tweaks when reading:

• I toned down the (judgemental) uses of foreigner and good English education.
• I also toned down the comments about Gussy’s long hair to make it more that it was unusual than plain bad.
• You two girls unpack everything,’ she said… Arrange the boys’ things in the big chest in their room. I changed to You children unpack everything,’ she said… Boys put your things in the big chest in your room.
• Multiple times Allie was relegated to only being referred to as his/Bill’s wife. I used her name instead.
• He had given up struggling. What was the use? He would only get hurt, and he could see that if the girls were going to be captured, he certainly must go with them to look after them as best he could I changed the last bit to something more like he should stick with them.
• The Tauri-Hessian folk were less dirty.
• Pedro was a circus boy rather than only a circus boy.
• The girls became with the boy who manages the bears instead of belonging to him.

All very tiny changes which don’t alter the story at all, and involve the absolute minimum of word changes, preserving as much of the natural rhythm and feel of the era as possible. And yet they make a fairly big difference to the overall attitude to the girls and non well-to-do British people.

I also noticed a few nitpicks that I’m sure I’ve not picked up on before.

• Jack exits the castle through an unlocked trapdoor into the bell tower. This seems like a major security flaw! It doesn’t sound as if the trapdoor would be hard to find at all, and even if it was locked it could easily be sawn through/burned/smashed. Any determined looters/anti-monarchists/terrorists could then easily smash through the painting at the other end of the passage.
• Initially Toni is Spanish – Toni was Spanish, but he understood English well, though he did not speak it fluently. Later Pedro says that Toni and Bingo understand Italian best. I can speak to them in Italian, which they know best, and it’ll be quicker. It’s possible that Toni is Spanish but is good with Italian, and Bingo is Italian, but there’s no need for making it that complicated.

I found the castle scenes – the King’s rescue particularly – a bit trying as somehow (despite this being my favourite of the series) I have never got all those passages and corridors and rooms in my head so it’s hard for me to imagine (or explain!) exactly what’s going on and who is where, or how they got there.

There were some characters with accents in this book – mostly Tauri-Hessian, which sounds just like a bad european accent which crosses from French to German and back (the same as most European characters in the books). It’s an all-purpose bad accent.

Pedro is half-English so I didn’t attempt any Spanish for him, and the various other Circus characters got a mish-mash of English-ish and bits of accent when they spoke more broken English. Thankfully most of them didn’t have a lot of dialogue. Well, apart from Gussy who had a lot of dramatic speeches which got a bit tiresome! I mean, how do you pronounce Prince Aloysius Gramondie Racemolie Torquinel to begin with, let alone in a bad attempt at an imaginary accent delivered in a dramatic fashion??

Surprises along the way

Quite often the big reveals I’m waiting for to see Brodie’s reaction are a bit of a flop as he was expecting them, and yet there are lots of things that surprise him which I did not expect.

• He was aghast that they had hens.

• He was surprised by the hand-kissing through he went through a (thankfully) brief phase of bowing and kissing people’s hands after reading about Gussy doing it.
• He was very shocked at the idea of putting Kiki in a cage (most pet birds are probably caged some/most of the time, free-range parrots are probably uncommon!)
• He was appalled at cramming four people in the back of a car and three in the front what about seat belts??

One thing was both surprising and not surprising (Schrodinger’s surprise, if you will), and that was Gussy’s identity.

• The children wonder if Gussy could be a prince in disguise and Brodie gasped – IS HE?? I could see him thinking that it explained a lot. But he eventually decided, like the children that no, he couldn’t be.
• Then – gasp – he is a prince.
• But is he REALLY a prince? 

Things he worked out:

• Having more ice-cream after being sick would be a bad idea
• Surky meant circus
• The sword swallower’s sword was retractable (probably from YouTube)

Q&A

Questions always arise which is not surprising as the books were written a long time ago.

• What’s a piebald horse – I have to admit I didn’t know this at his age either and I had to double-check I had it right.
• Where is Tauri-Hessia? Is it a real place? – Like me he was disappointed that it was not real.
• What’s junket? – I knew it was a dessert of some kind but I had to look up exactly what it is, and the definition I got was that it was a sort of pudding. Of course we say pudding when we mean dessert so he has pudding after tea which can be a biscuit or sweets or ice-cream or anything else sweet, and I had to explain it meant a specific kind of pudding so we lost a fair bit of time that night trying to define the more specific kind of pudding.
• What’s an antechamber? I did know this but I ended up looking it up to make sure I was getting it right as I always start to doubt myself on the finer points.

Overall he loved this one, particularly (as always) Kiki’s scenes such as tormenting Gussy and saving the day at the end.