By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
Crime, real-life history, young adult series – the Shane Peacock bookshelf is amazingly varied.
Fresh off a win for the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada (last fall’s As We Forgive Others), Peacock this month released a young adult book simply titled Show that – in the tradition of The Little Prince, Huckleberry Finn and his own Boy Sherlock series – has meaning for adult readers as well.
As summed up on the book cover, Show takes place in an alternate 1899, when a young boy (who is also a talented contortionist) leaves his home in North Britain to enter the Empire of America and somehow make desperately needed money for his family.
He encounters another young performer named Snake Boy and helps him escape the deplorable conditions his keepers force him to live in.
This Empire of America is a world where entertainment is everything. Snake Boy takes him on a journey that ultimately frees a number of other talented performers also living in cruel and exploitative conditions, but it’s all more than an escape mission – it’s an effort to evade their pursuers, one of whom is flamboyant entertainment mogul Leopold J. Coop. In addition to dominating the entertainment industry, Coop is running for president.
In the best adventure tradition, there is a string of “trapped” situations and – somehow – narrow escapes. This is the task to which a mystery writer is set, Peacock noted.
“We are always painting ourselves into corners. That is what you do when you tell stories. That is the best way to write a crime novel, that is the way I teach – when you are coming up with a crime, you have to come up with a crime that is unsolvable,” he said, evoking the classic crime that was committed inside a locked room no one could possibly have gotten into or out of.
“You come up with something absolutely impossible to solve, and then you solve it. It’s your job as a storyteller, creating these terrible situations, and you’ve got to find a way out of it.”
Fans of Peacock’s work may be reminded of his first book in 1995, The Great Farini.
Peacock is the son of Hope Township historian Jackson Peacock, and he had long been fascinated by the title character – William Hunt, who gained fame in the 19th century by walking the tightrope over Niagara Falls. The Hunt family lived for a time in the former Hope Township when he was a child, which is where he saw his first circus and developed a life-long fascination for that brand of showmanship.
His first high-wire performance was above Port Hope’s Ganaraska River during the Durham Agricultural Fair. He would go on to perform wondrous feats around the world before retiring back in Port Hope.
“I think that was one of the motivations for writing the book, when I first got the idea for it,” the author said in a recent interview.
“You get the sense that, even though it is 1899, it feels contemporary, dealing, I think, with a lot of issues that seem to be going on right now.
“I originally got the idea 10 years ago, before Trump was elected for the first time in the US.”
The Great Farini was the other great inspiration for Show.
“I was so intrigued by his life – I think he was the most amazing Canadian who ever lived. Not the greatest Canadian, but he lived the most amazing life. I would challenge anybody to come up with a more amazing life. He did so many interesting things,” he explained.
“I am drawn to big personalities, and I like performers. I wanted to write something that was historical and dealt with the circus and allied arts. That was the original motivation long ago. Then over the years it started to grow into something different.
“And then, because of political events and things going on in the past 10 years, I thought I should revisit that idea. I thought I could make something interesting of it.
“It’s speculative fiction, not a political essay. It’s about humanity, where humanity is right now. I think it’s an unusual book in many ways.”
Those exploitative conditions the young performers live under, for instance – Cleo, a beautiful young black girl, is the human-cannonball star attraction for one circus, but offstage she is confined to her trailer except when they let her out to clean the toilets.
“It’s such an important subject right now,” Peacock said.
“When we went through the pandemic, it made our whole world reflect on the way we treat each other.
That is the bottom line in this story, the importance of respecting one another in this whole milieu of a world that is racist in so many ways, entertainment-obsessed and materialistic. How do we treat each other in that whole atmosphere that our world finds itself in right now.
“The world has always been like that, which is why I set it in 1899. These are kids, and yet we are dealing with all these pretty heavy subjects. That’s kind of challenging, to try to write something that is an adventure and it’s fun. But the challenge is to write something where they are swept up in the story, It’s a work of fiction, an attempt at a work of art, rather than political commentary.
“Hopefully, when kids read it, it makes them think a little bit about our world.”
