Mabel Stark, renowned as the greatest female tiger-trainer in history.
Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, between Canada Day and Labour Day, Globe writers share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
For a kid who spent big chunks of my military-brat life longing to run away with the circus, Robert Hough's The Final Confession of Mabel Stark delivers the ultimate escape fantasy.
Its heroine – blunt, sardonic, profane, hilarious and totally unconventional – is a voice I could revisit endlessly ever since I first devoured the book in the early 2000s and gifted it to all my girlfriends for Christmas.
Robert Hough's novel recreates the turbulent real life of Mabel Stark – orphan, mental-institution runaway, exotic dancer, repeated bigamist – and first-class tiger trainer in the heyday of the American circus.
The meat of the story takes place in the 1910s and 20s, when outfits such asthe Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus owned the American rails, criss-crossing the country with mile-long trains hauling menageries of lions, tigers, bears, zebras, camels and elephants – along with all of the beasts' motley human handlers, fellow performers and sideshow freaks.
In this psychedelic melee of caged beasts, knife throwers, tumblers, dancing girls, horse-riding midgets and social-outcast labourers, Mabel thrives. She's a bit of a caged beast herself, having lost her parents to TB and a farming accident early on, then made a disastrous marriage that wound up with her stranded in a locked psychiatric ward.
After escaping the tortuous "tubbings" and faradizing sessions of hospital life – that era's idea of psychiatric care – Mabel joins the circus as a "cooch girl," wryly observing that carnival life is "[not] all that much different from a madhouse."
Blending easily into the crowds of grifters, petty criminals and fugitives from various laws who man the shows, she works her way through many identities, discarding each one as a new marriage or opportunity comes along.
Tiny, blond-curled and brazen, Mabel knows how to get and use men's attention, even if she has little but scorn for most of them – including four of her five husbands.
She is obsessed, instead, with the terrible majesty of tigers – their power, the way they command ultimate respect, the way they can be trained but never tamed, the fact that one day they all inevitably "go rogue."
Her most passionate love interest is Rajah, the heavyweight Bengal cat she bonds with as a cub and thereafter keeps in her quarters, sleeping with him in more ways than one. Their curious interspecies partnership enables Mabel to develop a risqué tiger-wrestling act for the rubes. Her way with tigers is to "gentle" them. She scratches their "sweet spot," and trains them by taking their natural behaviours and adapting them to her act. A tiger that has good balance will become a ball-roller in her ring. One who likes to wave his paws in her face will be put in her sit-up chorus. Rajah's natural inclination is toward bodily contact.
By the end of the 1920s, Mabel's circus career has started to wane as audiences grow bored with visual artistry and synchronized movements, gravitating instead to the more dangerous and bloodthirsty animal-bullying acts involving whip blows, starter-pistol blasts and dramatic near-maulings.
Mabel herself survives multiple maulings in the ring, but none more brutal than the mauling she gives herself over the event that is the central point of her "confession."
"That thing I did in 1927. Jesus. Was the worst thing one person can do to another person, and the hell of it is I did it without even trying."
We learn gradually, with many hints along the way, how a mistake she cannot forgive herself for led to her losing both of her true loves in one ghastly stroke. Three decades later, when she's also lost the gig at the JungleLand menagerie that she settled for after her circus days were over, she contemplates the arc of her life, and where she went wrong, with her perpetual clear-eyed honesty.
"There likely wasn't a woman on Earth who'd sinned worse than me or more often," she confesses.
A measure of self-awareness comes: "I'd spent my whole life locking horns with others, and while I could find a reason for each specific battle, I couldn't find a reason why I'd had so many of them, the one possibility being it wasn't others I'd been fighting all along."
Mabel's blunt, unsentimental voice is irresistible and utterly convincing – quite an achievement for her male creator. Robert Hough nails contained female rage, and engages us in his heroine's courage and vulnerability without ever letting Mabel whine.
"If I stop to describe exactly how scared I was every time something happens, we'll be here for the next 10 years," Mabel tells us near the beginning of her story. "So do me a favour. At parts like this imagine how you'd've felt, and we'll both do fine."
With this book, I didn't so much run away with the circus as the circus – and Mabel – ran away with me.