HEROES AND VILLAINS - Book review

Angela Carter’s novel Heroes and Villains was published in 1969; my paperback copy was published in 1981.

We’re in post-apocalypse territory, where remnants of rational civilisation reside in steel and concrete enclaves, administered by Professors. Beyond are tribes of marauding Barbarians; while in the surrounding jungles, forests and derelict cityscapes roam the mutilated Out People.

Marianne is a Professor’s daughter, somewhat pampered and spoiled. During a raid by Barbarians, she witnesses the murder of her brother and later, perhaps bored with her predictable existence in her white tower, she is content to escape the strict confines of her ‘home’ and join a handsome Barbarian, Jewel. Perhaps she is partly drawn by the mystery of ‘outside’ – ‘Around the edges of the horizon spread the unguessable forest’ (p4).

Gradually she is accepted by Jewel’s people, especially when their leader, the enigmatic ex-Professor Dr Donally takes her under his wing. They’re nomadic but presently staying in some ruins: ‘This house was a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot’ (p31).

There are several reasons to read a book by Angela Carter; one of them is her lush prose. ‘She looked out of her window and, in autumn, she saw a blazing hill of corn and orchards where the trees creaked with crimson apples; in spring, the fields unfurled like various flags, first brown, then green’ (p1).

Now exposed to the filthy, coarse and brutal reality of the Barbarian tribe, Marianne realises her romantic attraction to the unknown ‘outside’ has evaporated. ‘When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don’t know which is which anymore’ (p125).

Some (mostly literary) writers destroy suspense and tension by telling the reader in a bald sentence or two what is going to happen and then go into detail to show it happening. Carter does this when Marianne attempts to escape the tribe: ‘but Jewel found her, raped her and brought her back with him’ (p52) Then for a number of pages we work up to witnessing that traumatic event...

It is a well realised hell on earth, with very little room for compassion, and there is no happy ending – how could there be?

Doubtless the book would benefit from re-reading. But I felt the ending was rushed.

Even so, I came away feeling that Marianne had persevered through hardship and was made stronger and life of a sort would go on.