LOVE - Book review

Angela Carter’s slim novel Love was published in 1971 and revised in 1987. In her new Afterword she states that the three main characters are ‘the pure perfect products of those days of social mobility and sexual licence’ (p113). Sadly, the characters themselves are not perfect – far from it.

 Annabel is psychologically unstable: ‘a sparse, grotesquely elegant, attenuated girl with a narrow face and hair so straight it fell helplessly down around her as a mute tribute to gravity. She had prehensile toes that could pick up a pencil and sign her name. She stole’ (p27).

Her husband is Lee: ‘Annabel was quite incomprehensible to him and he already knew she was unbalanced; yet his puritanism demanded he should be publicly responsible for her. He was overcome with conflicting apprehensions’ (p30).

Lee’s brother Buzz ‘had been grievously exposed to his mother’s madness’ (p13) and lived with the married couple. ‘Their mother’s madness, their orphaned state, their aunt’s politics and their arbitrary identify formed in both a savage detachment’ (p11).

It’s a distinctly destructive love triangle tainted with infidelity, self-loathing, suicide, jealousy and a split from reality for impaired souls. The kind of fractured relationships Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine indulged in most effectively.

At one point Lee is interviewed by Annabel’s psychiatrist, ‘She was dressed entirely in black and lavishly hung about with hair of metallic yellow. Her eyes were concealed behind tinted glasses and her voice was as if smoked also, dark-toned and husky’ (p55).

With few pen-strokes Carter effectively inhabits the damaged trio. And of course her prose is always readable, the writing of an astute and acute observer:

‘... and old men sit outside in shirtsleeves on kitchen chairs, as if put out to air upon the pavement. On the low window ledges, one might find, here, a pie set out to cool or a jelly to set, there, a dreaming cat’ (p11).

‘the peeling walls, bare and lopsided staircase, fissured linoleum underfoot, foetid accumulated reek of years of greasy cookery’ (p91).

‘He felt nothing but the absence of feeling which is despair’ (p100).

Indeed, it won’t end well.

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.

Loose change in the treasury of fiction

In his introduction to the volume collecting all his short stories, J.G. Ballard states, ‘Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allen Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that will glow for ever in the deep purse of your imagination.’

To continue yesterday’s theme about next week’s UK National Short Story Week, I thought I’d scan my book shelves for the collections by sci-fi and horror authors (a separate set of shelves).

Here I find Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Anthony Boucher, Ray Bradbury, John W. Campbell, Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, Cordwainer Smith, Philip K. Dick, Christopher Priest, Clifford Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree Jr (Alice B. Sheldon), Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis and H.G. Wells.

 

 

Aldiss’ title story (see cover) plus two other linked tales were adapted for Spielberg’s film A.I.

 

Jack Finney’s classic novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers has been filmed more than once; yet it’s his beautiful short story ‘I love Galesburg in the Springtime’ that lingers in my memory.

 

 

Science fiction lends itself to the short story form because it’s often the fiction of ideas; though in truth that was in the early days; by the 1960s with the New Wave spearheaded by Moorcock and Ballard, light was shone on the inner space embedded within the human condition.

Some readers are quite insular in their taste, and eschew certain genre writing, which is a pity, because there is a richness of prose and idea within all genres; a good story, about people and emotion can be found in all genre writing; a good story is a good story.

‘I don’t read sci-fi’ is perhaps as common a statement as ‘I don’t read westerns’ or ‘I don’t read horror’. Perhaps these opinions stem from a bad experience with a poor writer within a particular genre. Yet you won’t hear anyone say ‘I don’t read novels’ (well, apart from those who prefer non-fiction!) because this statement is too broad. And that’s the point. Within any genre, there’s a very broad range of style, quality and imagination. Short story collections by an author can introduce you to his or her style, and I believe that any of the above mentioned authors have something like ‘precious metal’ to offer readers who are bold enough to mine these treasures.