Spineless Reviews

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!

posted at: 20:25 | path: / c / carter_angela | permanent link to this entry

A man for all seasons

Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City, by Italo Calvino

£6.99, Vintage (2002)

Poor Marcovaldo, out of his depth as always. A humble everyman who struggles to make ends meet and divert if not defuse the anger of his manager, his minor mishaps and even smaller triumphs are charted in this collection of short stories. Each takes place in one of the four seasons over what might be several years, each a in Marcovaldo’s undramatic drama. And loveable Marcovaldo, with his empathy for everything that rarely translates into a useful discourse with anyone, leads the reader by the hand and heart through his world.

Calvino uses Marcovaldo’s peasantry as a brush to daub the countryside on the city where Marcovaldo is unwittingly trapped. Marcovaldo’s naïvety ridicules these crazy city folk—disease scares, consumerism, the abandonment of streets in August—yet Calvino never portrays the alternatives as some saccharine Arcady. Marcovaldo becomes a force of nature, timeless and ageless like the creation myth or Charlie Brown; as he passes through the seasons, these could be any seasons, any years. When Marcovaldo fools about in the snow, he is careering and japing through every snow flurry there ever was: though there are the occasional mentions of cars in the English translation, these are almost always inert and lifeless, scenery that does not detract from the story’s universality.

This trick of all-encompassment leads to some aimless stories. For every couple of lovely tales—the infected rabbit, or the out-of-control office plants—there is a throwaway one that reveals little while being neither gripping nor particularly heartwarming. Sometimes, apart from the sheer joy of the meandering words and description, it’s never clear whether there’s a point to the story. But, on one level, who cares? Get off that tram; reclaim the rooftops; gather in the streets; head away from here. And wherever you end up: follow Marcovaldo. He knows where he’s going, though he may not know that he knows.

posted at: 18:00 | path: / c / calvino_italo | permanent link to this entry

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.

posted at: 22:00 | path: / c / carter_angela | permanent link to this entry

Shamus! Where is thy bluff?

Playback, by Raymond Chandler

£7.99, Penguin (2005)

Philip Marlowe, favourite protagonist (and arguably alter ego) of Raymond Chandler, never seems to get the whole story from his clients. The case handed to him by the uppity lawyer representing anonymous Washington big-shots seems no different, although right from the start it’s clear that someone is holding back. Who’s the dame he’s meant to follow from the train station? What’s she running from? What has local spiv Larry Mitchell found out about her, and did he or didn’t he appear, briefly, with a bullet in his heart on her balcony? What did Henry Clarendon IV see? What did the car-park attendant see? More importantly, what did his parrot see? And will he talk?

Chandler’s plots are notoriously complicated. The Big Sleep never actually made sense, whoever the reader decided at the end the real killer was: there was always one death outstanding. In addition, Chandler’s—well, Marlowe’s—habit of rarely explicitly prejudging other people’s actions means that you’re left with what Marlowe narrates, and what others say or do, as the only indicators of what’s really going on. This is either a hindrance to understanding character motive, or an indispensible element of Chandler’s style, depending on your taste. Certainly, more than any other thriller writer, Chandler puts you right in Marlowe’s skin, seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears, smelling what he can smell, occasionally thinking what he thinks, but no further than that.

Eventually the plot almost disentangles itself, or at any rate the central thread does. In any other writer—Agatha Christie, say—the sudden introduction of a new character to move the plot along might be criticised. But the centre is never the kernel of a Chandler story; rather, the reader is drawn to the little investigations and interactions that circle around it. Like Columbo, Marlowe entertains us in his journeys, not his destinations. Still, it’s fitting that in this, Chandler’s last novel, Marlowe finally arrives at the terminus he justly deserves, rather than the one he has always feared. Suddenly, it seems there is a God that shapes our ends; but Marlowe probably wouldn’t like to comment, given such flimsy evidence, and Chandler… maybe he knows by now, but dead men don’t say nuthin.

posted at: 20:47 | path: / c / chandler_raymond | permanent link to this entry

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.

posted at: 12:48 | path: / c / carter_angela | permanent link to this entry

A misanthropic sort of occupation

Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad

£1.99, Wordsworth (1996)

The province of Sulaco, convulsed by the revolution which has engulfed the Latin-American state of Costaguana, desperately needs honourable men. Captain Mitchell would gladly inform anyone who might ask him that Giovanni Battista Fidanza, the Capataz de los Cargadores, the great Nostromo, was the most trustworthy fellow along the entire coast. But Nostromo’s honour is a constructed thing, a fame built purposefully by the Capataz with the premise that one might as well be famous for being honourable than for being duplicitous. When he is asked to save the silver of San Tomé mine from the armies, so that Sulaco might gain independence, the brave deed fits so well into the story of his life that he cannot refuse. But as he finds himself alone in the Golfo Placido, and finally the last person alive to know that the silver has not been lost, his resolve, and the faith he has in his capitalist-idealist masters, begins to quaver.

The rest of Sulaco can only ever guess at the genuine beliefs and passions of such an actor as Nostromo, a man who has become the devil-may-care cavalier of his own myths. But as silver and expectations weighs heavy on the backs of Nostromo and Martin Decoud (the architect of future independence), we begin to see beneath the façade. A complex Gian’ Battista had once determined to create the simple, boisterous Capataz, and when his faith in his place in the schemes of his so-called countrymen is shaken then the original, less dependable Fidanza emerges, confused and thinking furiously. Conrad takes an archetype and forces him to shrug off the armour of his cynicism, leaving a more vulnerable, sympathetic character behind. Almost all of the characters in Nostromo provide an enjoyable read, but it is to the tragedy of the Capataz that the reader’s heart goes out.

Nostromo is a huge story in a reasonable-sized book. It encompasses capitalism, revolutionary politics, vast tracts of geography, the complexity of a tempted, imperfect man, and the birth of a new nation. It reads almost like a serial, certainly like an epic. Conrad has used a number of techniques to spread his work far beyond the vision of his book, reaching out into misty indistinction both at the beginning of the story and at the start of the denouement. Here the story looks far into first the past and then the future, so that it draws all of history and predestiny into its scope. And as one approaches the fovea centralis, the narrow, frightening pit of the silver’s concealment and of Nostromo’s darkening soul, the story slows, repeats and concentrates. The scenes in the Golfo Placido, when Decoud can see nothing but Nostromo’s near-black corneas, become indelible phosphorescences, long after the book has ended.

The sheer substance of Nostromo can make it hard to digest at times, and the book is certainly no easy page-turner. Yet its density is also instructive, and scarcely as heavy as the load that the poor Capataz must carry on his back: of hopes, responsibility and guilt. The story of a man in torment is no easy read, but it becomes an inevitable one, drawing the reader back to the sometimes difficult work over and over again.

posted at: 21:17 | path: / c / conrad_joseph | permanent link to this entry