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Sunday Times Magazine, 1993 Katie Hickman is not so much a travel writer as "a writer who has always travelled". She was born in New Zealand to British ex-pat parents and grew up in Spain, Singapore, Ecuador and Chile. While travelling through Belgrade on a research trip with her first husband, photographer Tom Owen Edmunds, Hickman came across a photograph which sent the pair shuttling across the globe to Mexico, the setting and subject of Hickman's latest book, 'A Trip To The Light Fantastic, Travels With A Mexican Circus'. The photograph showed an anonymous, ageing circus artiste gamely striking the showy poses of her youth. "I looked at this picture," says Hickman, "and for an instant I knew everything there was to know about her. I knew which acts she had perfected and the countries she had travelled through to perform them. It was a vision, not just of a woman, but of a world. It would not go away." Six months later, driven by this momentary insight into the closed culture of the circus, Hickman was herself riding an elephant round the big top of Circo Bell's in Mexico City. Dressed in sequins and billed as "La Gringa Estrella", Hickman, a forthright 30-year-old well versed in European feminism, developed an act that consisted largely of tossing her waist-length blonde hair and smiling seductively from under 3in false eyelashes. But however rudimentary the skills required, the transition from observer to performer placed her in a unique position to experience the "magia del circo from the inside". Magic is at the heart of Hickman's narrative, not just in the fabulous illusions of the acts themselves or the superstitions of the circus people, but in the fantastic stories of the characters she presents. Dona Elena, the steel-corseted matriarch, who married at gunpoint and spent the rest of her life cursing her husband, or Olga, struck dumb by the trauma of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and rescued from silence by the love of a prize fighter, would not seem out of place in the oeuvre of Gabriel Garcfa Marquez or Isabel Allende. Hickman has already published two books - 'Dreams Of The Peaceful Dragon', an account of her horseback trek across the Bhutan region of the Himalayas, and 'The Quetzal Summer', a novel set in the Andes. 'A Trip To The Light Fantastic', with its "anti-linear", discursive style and frequent forays into individual life stories, reads more like an exhaustively and imaginatively researched novel than a travelogue. But Hickman rejects the tag of "magical realism". "I wanted to write about real people in a fictional style," she says, "and was determined to resist the impulse to embellish the truth, but I ended up having to tone down some of the stories because they became so fabulous that I thought nobody would believe me. There is something marvelous, in the true sense of the word, about Mexico. You have all these characters whose lives, to a western audience, read larger than life. The term 'magical realism', which South American writers detest, suggests something that is wildly exaggerated, an almost mythological style of writing, whereas they are simply telling it like it is. What I wanted to write about was not 'magical realism' but 'real magic'."
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