Out of the mouths of babes and veterans
Wise Children, by Angela Carter
£6.99, Vintage (1992)
What’s it like to be a twin? Someone I work with is sick of being asked that question (and yes, he’s a twin), and invariably delivers the riposte: “what’s it like not being a twin?” Philosophically adroit, but more reasonable twins, after a lifetime of mistaken identity, might venture something stoic like “ah, well, you make do.” Perhaps in stereo.
Carter is on rich, earthy form with Wise Children, her own Much Ado About Nothing that flashes back from the tarnished, nostalgic present of the Chance sisters—twins Dora and Nora, a rhyming couple—through their careers and relationships. The tangles of their lives are teased out for all to see, dragging the reader willingly, indeed gladly, across continents and from one slightly harebrained theatrical production to the next.
The sisters not only make do, but they have a rare time, doyennes of the stage and film living it up from one end of the century to the next. They make the very best of their bastard’s lot—the Chances are illegitimate offspring of Melchior Hazard, and the wordplay doesn’t stop there. Famous dancer Estella and beefy Cassius sit on the list of dramatis personæ alongside the worthy Worthingtons, a film producer referred to only as “Genghis Khan”, a writer and photographer of children referred to only as “Lewis Carroll”, the Blond Tenor With Unmemorable Name and no fewer than four sets of twins, celebrating the identical melodramas of Shakespeare and vaudeville (off-stage if not on) with a whirlwind, joyful carnival of confusions and happenings.
Ostensibly a bawdy, comic tale, the novel’s depth reveals itself, slowly and quietly, in its depiction of men—particularly the Hazards—with all their loves, desires, accomplishments and spectacular folly, as seen through the eyes of women—particularly the Chances. From this inversion of the usual device of the male gaze Carter pours forth candidness and comprehension, but reins in judgmentalism, to generate affection for all her characters, in a warts-and-all depiction that leaves one crying out for more. More assignations! More parties! More days for Dora and Nora, days for them to dance and sing!
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A want becomes a have
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, by Angela Carter
£6.99, Penguin (1990)
Hoffman has used his inverted, mystical science to conjure up angels and demons from the hearts of men, unleashing them in their world: every wish is granted, yet the streets run red with blood. Seeing his isolated civilization threatened, the Minister makes a spy of unassuming Desiderio, and releases him into the outside world. Desiderio must find and, ultimately, outwit the scheming doctor, hateful as the old academic is of reason and wishing, frighteningly to free man from what he sees as its chains.
Always the desired, so rarely the desirer, Desiderio is somehow immune to the charms of the hallucinations Hoffman creates. Only Hoffman’s daughter, appearing in dreams and undreams, could ever sway his heart and bring him to his destiny in Hoffman’s mountain lair. His route takes him over an ever-shifting landscape, with characters that are as good as hallucinations when they’re not actually so: Hoffman’s mentor-turned-servant, with a sideshow fashioned magically from miniature desire machines; the dozen acrobats who dissect themselves harmlessly in front of a live audience, but who are far more dangerous to Desiderio; earthquakes; boat people; horse people; and, the most dangerous of all, real, normal people who happen also to have machine guns and helicopters.
Angela Carter’s fine grasp of fairytales (both the corpus and the techniques thereof), and of a subtle, childlike wonder that shows faux-naivety up for the cheap trick that it is, works lyrical wonders with this novel, layering it with reality’s bluffs and counter-bluffs. A dreamlike fog pervades throughout, in which we cannot trust Desiderio’s senses, nor the directions in which Desiderio’s wants—or ours, for that matter—might take us next. If the narrative lacks bite, then the book is built to be rich and satisfying, the action melodramatic and self-effacing so that the next beautiful, impossible scene might unfold. Disclaiming even as it makes claims, Carter’s own creation draws you in, and convinces you that her world is only as unreal as any other.
When Eco writes a novel where every single symbol has a special significance, or many such significances, you know you’re in for a difficult read. Not so with Angela Carter, who seems able to throw every meaning she likes at a plot, to find every single one of them sticking. Swift and Grimm: Carter is both, and more.
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Or feyne thyng, or fynde wordes newe
Fireworks, by Angela Carter
£7.99, Virago (2005)
(This review appeared in the ReadReverb newsletter, and on the ReadReverb website)
What does a cursed, beautiful marionette have in common with an unexplored jungle? What’s the horrible secret the executioner keeps strictly in the family, and how might a Dostoyevskian murder be reinterpreted in a crumbling society, where a small tribe of squatters are bound by love and sex instead of the social contract? Ritual and impulse are stirred together in Fireworks, a collection of short stories from Angela Carter that presage The Bloody Chamber, which in turn eventually brought her widespread critical acclaim.
Carter always denied that she was putting the edge back into fairytales per se: rather, her intent was to strip it down to its violent, often sexual roots, to the point where it no longer resembled a story at all. The bare skeleton would then be fleshed out until a new story presented itself. Yet the ones in Fireworks still resemble their ancestors, and the strongest—Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest, and The Loves of Lady Purple—are also probably the closest to the “originals,” whilst Flesh and the Mirror and A Souvenir of Japan meander in comparison, at the same time showing little glimpses of the underlying fairytale.
This is not intended to disparage Carter’s authorship; arguably her own voice is the quintessence which brings the stories to life. But there’s a subtler cautionary tale here for every prospective homo fabulans, hoping to fashion something new in the telling of a story: the pelts of the monsters, that once frightened our ancestors in their caves, can never truly be swept from the bones; and there are deep, dark reasons why things that we might nowadays call terrific or awful can nonetheless sometimes still have teeth.
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