Circus
(Contains spoilers)
Circus is Alistair MacLean’s 1975 published adventure, thriller and spy novel. I was certain that MacLean was American, because of the clear confrontation of Eastern Europe and the USA, estate from the Cold War. Despite that, the writer is Scottish, and maybe this feeling of Eastern Europe — bad, USA — good, is just the ability to identify with Americans, write American stories to Americans. Many of his other novels are based on the USA, he gained a lot of popularity there, and he also negotiated movie contracts on his novels there — some made, and some left on planning phase (Liukkonen & Pesonen, 2008).
Maybe I should explain myself, why I felt like this confrontation between Eastern Europe and the USA occurs. Well, most importantly it’s the Europeans that have the possession of this powerful antimatter weapon. They want to use it for evil, for gaining authority over others. They are cold-blooded murderers and execute cruel human experiences on their laboratories and imprison innocent people in their facilities. Even when Bruno questioned the same inhuman researches that USA is performing, they brushed it off by saying: it doesn’t belong in my field. They know they practice the same warfare tactics, but decide to not speak about it.
The plot follows the Wrinfield’s Circus and especially one performer there. Bruno Wildermann is Central-European, mentalist and trapeze artist who CIA recruits for a mission to steal antimatter formula that can possibly be used in warfare. In order to ensure the undercover status, the circus goes on a tour across the Eastern and Central-Europe. Along side Bruno, CIA sends four of it’s agents to the circus, which two of them, Fawcett and Pilgrim, get killed off before the book even properly starts. Two remaining agents are Doctor Harper, who pretends to be the medical help in the circus, and Maria, who works along side of Wrinfield as a secretary.
For me the strangest part of the whole story is the supposedly romantic relationship between Bruno and Maria. Not once did I get the feeling that these two actually loved each other, and still out of the blue they decided to get married. They constantly whine about marriage — Bruno referring being married to a woman as being their slave, and having to listen the “nagging” even before they tie the knot. Maria isn’t that excited about it either — sitting in a miserable bar and asking “Is this what marriage is too?”. Why are these two getting married? Why did this story need a romantic relationship? It certainly doesn’t provide anything to the plot of the book.
Maria is also a character that the main character, Bruno, can present his brilliant ideas to. Maria stays clueless throughout the whole book, when Bruno, the intellectual, fills her, and the reader, in to all the things that happened or are happening. She has no character development what so ever, and neither has most of the other characters. Bruno is all-knowing, he doesn’t mess up, when things happened, he already knew they were about to happen. The ending of the book seemed as it was quickly scratched together. As it turns out, the bad guy was Doctor Harper all along. Why? Well, no one knows of the motives of a secret agent.
I would say that this book was easy to read. I didn’t really care about any of the characters, even when Bruno was allegedly dead — no emotions. The theme of the book, however, was interesting to me. I don’t usually go for spy novels but this one seemed fun, because it was based on a circus. It’s not necessarily waste of your time, but you can certainly find better books out there. Even MacLean’s fans gave some harsh criticism about this one (Wikipedia, 2019).
2/5
References:
Liukkonen, P. & Pesonen, A. (2008). Alistair (Stuart) MacLean (1922–1987) — wrote also as Ian Stuart. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto. http://authorscalendar.info/maclean.htm.
Wikipedia (2019). Circus (novel). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_(novel).
