(courtesy Hachette Australia)
When you think of hopes and dreams, those alluring baubles of possibility and fulfillment that dangle prettily far above the grungily depressing landscape of life, you never really think in terms of how much it takes to make them happen (assuming they happen at all but who wants to contemplate that?).
But the salient truth is that unless you want said hopes and dreams to stay firmly in the realm of “woulda coulda shoulda”, you need to roll up your sleeves, set your eyes firmly on the prize and get stuck into making them a tangible thing.
But as The Show Woman, the luminously intense debut novel from Emma Cowing makes abundantly and compulsively readably clear, even when you commit to the hard graft to make the wished-for the actually-yours, you’re not always guaranteed of success.
It’s 1910 and the death of Lena’s father, a show man of long standing who dotes on his ageing, handcrafted carousel as if it’s a child, on top of the disappearance of her mother some years before, has left the titular protagonist in a devilishly precarious position.
Unable to run the ride alone and desperately short of funs, Lena has no choice but to sell up her father’s pride and joy and go and find, as advised by sager, less visionary minds, either a husband to support her or a job in one of the factories of the time where it’s fairly safe to say dreams go to well and truly die.
Violet rolls her eyes at the end of this speech, and Harry turns his attention to the rest of the women. Rosie has stopped crying. Carmen shrinks into her bunk. But it is to Lena that Harry speaks.
‘I hear there’s a new show woman in town,’ he says. And with a theatrical sweep he lifts his cap and doffs it elegantly. Violet cracks up laughing.
It’s not an auspicious start to her new life as an independent woman, but The Show Woman is about to let Lena’s amazing story stop there.
The return of Lena’s bestie, Violet, with whom she has a somewhat fraught relationship even though they are as close as sisters, who is billed as “the greatest trapeze artist that ever lived”, brings with it the idea that perhaps she and her old pal could go it alone with an all-female act.
It’s an audacious idea in an era known for its misogyny and its downplaying of women’s aspirations in any form, but Lena, bolstered by Violet’s ballsy garrulousness which leaps at problems confident an idea will find her somewhere before she plummets to earth, goes along with it, unwilling to give up a life of performing on the road and the family of fellow showpeople that come along with it.
Not all of those people have Lena’s best interests at heart, and the way in which they try to sabotage her and her friends is at turns annoying and catastrophically violent, giving the narrative of The Show Woman a dark and troubling edge, but Lena loves the world in which she’s grown up and the promise of making her own way in it is too much to give up.
In turn, she and Violet hire Rosie, on the run from a fearfully abusive father, and Carmen, with dark secrets of her own, and together these talented and determined women set out to remake travelling acts in their own all-female image.
(courtesy official Instagram account)
As hopes and dreams go it’s a doozy, and even more excitingly Lena, Violet, Rose and Carmen actually make it happen, their bond unshakeable and their need to prove themselves unstinting and unrivalled.
But life has a way sadly of sh*tting on dreams that big and wonderful from a great height, and while that doesn’t have to be the end of the story, life does become very difficult for these four amazing women as they attempt to stare down the odds and battle rivals, not all of them opposed for reasons of bigoted gender.
In fact, what powers much of the brilliantly written The Show Woman, which balances the warmth of found family and the intoxicating power of hopes and dreams realised (or on the way to being that way anyway) is how bitter people know no gender and how, no matter how strong your bond may be and inspiringly motivating your dreams might be, they will try to bring you down.
If that all sounds unremittingly grim, in many ways The Show Woman is BUT that doesn’t mean it is a mire of broken hopes and dreams without redemption nor that it is so bleak that you emerge glum beyond measure.
In fact, for a novel that doesn’t flinch from being honest about how terrible people can be, The Show Woman is one of those reads that leaves you feeling empowered and dreaming loftily of the possible.
And as she takes this perilous final journey, it is not to the royal brooch at her throat that her hand moves, but to the milky pearls at her wrist, her tiny lost loves, gleaming in the dusk like miniature rays of light.
The back cover blurb calls the world in which Lena and her friends and fellow performers boldly walk “harsh and dangerous”, and that’s right, it is; even so, while they encounter violence and bigotry and near-weaponised condescension, they also know the embracing power of forging their own path through life and the giddy sense of empowerment that gives them.
Even amongst tragedy and loss and a pervading sense that the world is very much against them, they persevere, though not sometimes without pause or a darkening absence of hope, and it’s this sense of hanging onto their hopes and dreams, even in the face of a million distressing reasons not to, that gives The Show Woman such an amazing emotional power.
It knows how dark and terrible life can be, but even in the face of knowing full well that fairytales do not come for the likes of Lena, Violet, Rose and Carmen and that magic wands to craft a sudden and wondrous turn in fortune are thin-to-non-existent, these remarkable, if very human, women persist, eventually anyway, inspiring you to do the same.
Charming and wondrous, dark and emotionally intense, The Show Woman is that rare debut that comes out into the world and into the hands of lucky readers fully and flawlessly formed, a joyful paean to found family and the rich and enlivening possibility of hopes and dreams that, while they might cost you damn near everything and suck so much from your beleaguered hearts and souls, provide the rocket fuel for rich and rewarding lives that can happen even in the face of a host of enemies, within and without, arrayed against them.