Josser: The Secret Life of a Circus Girl Book

A "josser" is an outsider, someone who comes to, rather than from, the circus. Nell Stroud came into the circus from university, and from selling tickets during the morning and ice- creams during the performance she worked her way up to the role of ringmistress astride her beloved horse Prince in the family-run Santus Circus, touring Britain during the 1996 and 1997 seasons. This is her account of the people she encountered and the life she led, as she pulls back the Big Top's flaps and ushers us in. Her words are, in its truest sense, a chronicle. Early on she relates how circus folk accept her fairly quickly due to her private, non-gossipy nature, and this is a quality that shines through her text. The problem is, writers are usually fantastic gossips, and a body of writing stripped of curiosity seems bare, or at best functional. Her staccato style of adjectival abstinence is that of a diarist intent on preserving fact at the expense of reflection, leaving one longing for a sentence of Proustian extravagance. This is a pity, because her subtext, of how her family life was shattered by an awful accident to her mother which seemed to impel young Nell in to the ring, is certainly there, and would add dimension to what is essentially a series of anecdotes stretched to a narrative. What is clear is that Nell Stroud has circus in her soul. Whether she has poetry is another matter. --David VincentRead More