A small circus caravan travels the countryside performing for dwindling audiences. By day they offer other services: hairdressing for women and a close shave for men. But while women come to them for help, men tend to disappear ... Hurdy Gurdy is a powerful and important novel with a crucial and timely feminist message.
'Hurdy Gurdy is relevant to us all, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it on shortlists in the coming months--it's the most unique novel I've read all year.' Readings
Read an extract here...
We’re on the way home but we’re not close yet. There’s a week to go, eight days if you count them and I do every night. Girl is on my lap and she’s asking me questions. Why is the world so bad, Win? Why isn’t it more fun?
I don’t have an answer she’d like to hear so I say, If you ask me the world is pretty fun. You know that we try to be funny in our acts.
What I don’t say is that nothing ever changes. The clown told me about the flat circle of time and sometimes I find myself thinking about it. You want to know who the clown is? That’s Valentina, she’s with the show.
She told me there’s nothing new under the sun which means nothing new that’s good but also nothing bad. Whatever has been done will be done again. The world can’t invent any more terrible things because they already exist and always have. It means that nothing is coming to save us, but also that whatever will destroy us is already here.
When Queenie heard this she made a noise. She thinks the clown talks too much. All talk and no action, is what she says. I don’t know about that, but I do know Queenie does a lot of action that’s for sure, and the clown, well it’s true that she talks most of the time which is fine if you don’t mind listening and I don’t, not really.
As for the sun, it’s still there it hasn’t totally left but people are saying it will and the birds too. The dust is more these days and sometimes you look and can see only a blurred brightness through the haze. It’s everywhere now, the dust. Sometimes it comes out, the sun I mean and those times are good. We know the sun’s there, we know it persists through all of the days and all of the nights but for most people it’s the light that they miss, it’s the shine of it.
What I say to Girl doesn’t take into account any of that. When she asks me why the world is bad, what I say back is I don’t know but that she shouldn’t be scared. She says, Win, why are there too many questions and never good enough answers, and all I can say to her again is that I just don’t know.
When will we be home? she asks.
A few more days, I say. Not long.
Home if you want to know is an old canning factory up north. They processed all types of fruit but that was decades ago, and even though we’ve had it for a long time, the sign is still out front, a piece of beaten metal hanging. It has a cut-out shape of three yellow rings for pineapple: ARCADIA FRUITS.
We think about home when we’re away, which is often, which is now. We’ve been gone for a hundred and forty-eight days and the same number of nights.
We travel from place to place and look for good spots to stay and do a show or two, and for Queenie and me to do a reclamation. We’re always stopping and we’re always leaving, that’s packing up and going to the next location.
Being mostly away is what makes Arcadia even stronger in our minds. It’s home for all of us and for some of us it’s the only one we’ve had, well for one of us that is, and that’s me.
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I’ve heard that to tell a good story you have to catch the person’s attention right from the beginning to make them interested, so because of that I want to say by the end of this Queenie is gone and Girl is gone too.
I’m sorry for this type of trick but I don’t know how I can do it well otherwise. The great Russian clown Slava Polunin said, ‘Sometimes I regret that I cannot hold the audience without any plot whatsoever,’ and I regret that too but that’s life, that’s what I think because what else can we do?
We have to say how it is in our own time in our own way. We have to tell our story the best we can and go on.
This is an edited extract from Hurdy Gurdy, out now in all good bookstores.
Hurdy Gurdy
by Jenny Ackland
A powerful and important novel with a crucial and timely feminist message, from the Stella Prize-shortlisted author of Little Gods.