The Bounce, by Betsy Tobin

The love and loss of a lion-tamer

The big top has proved to be a popular venue for many writers. Djuna Barnes and Angela Carter both used the circus – with its compelling mix of tawdriness and glamour, nomadic lifestyle and tightly knit community – to explore personality as performance and the idea of "home".

Now Betsy Tobin has set her beautifully written second novel in a 19th-century London circus. In a backwards movement from the New World to Old, 19-year-old Nathan sails to England from America in search of his mother, a performer who abandoned him as a child. He gets work as an apprentice lion-tamer at the circus, now managed by his mother. The novel charts Nathan's attempts to get to know her and to understand why she left him.

Nathan's performing lions, Queen and Nero, are given human voices. The novel is written with the contemporary horror of the caged lion: Queen's imprisoned life leads her to kill her cub. This becomes a rather ham-fisted analogy for Nathan's relations with his mother. Tobin tends to overstate her point, and often leaves readers little room to make connections for themselves. However, relations between the lions and their tamer are very cleverly made into symbols for power-relations within families.

The novel moves dextrously back and forth between reflections on Nathan's circus life and his past. The story also focuses on Lulu, a transvestite trapeze artist, and Nan, who sells refreshments. Both characters mirror Nathan's troubled life with their own chequered histories. The novel catches them at a moment when their lives have reached a state of suspended animation, able to reflect upon their past but not to emerge from it.

Nathan, Nan and Lulu are isolated inside their heads. Their lack of interaction means that the story becomes stilted at times. It slumps halfway through, becoming as stagnant as the River Thames so evocatively described by Tobin.

Lulu is an intriguing character, and Tobin should have made more of him. She describes Lulu's cross-dressing in brilliant detail, asserting that the "French call it trompe l'oeil, but Lulu likes to think of it as his camouflage". His visits to a transvestite gentlemen's club are particularly enjoyable and provide a social context the novel otherwise lacks.

Tobin brings Nathan's life to some kind of resolution by setting the circus alight and engulfing both Nathan's mother and Queen in a strangely healing ball of fire. This is satisfying, especially as the starkness of this ending is troubled by Nathan's assertion that "he cannot afford to break with his own history, but neither can he covet it".