Carter

Love by Angela Carter – #NovNov Day 25

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It is very brave to call your novella something so broad and essential as Love – as Angela Carter did in this book from 1971 – because it necessarily seems to give a grand universality to something specific. In the case of this story, the bizarre relationships between Annabel, Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz. (This cover isn’t the one I read – it’s one on Wikipedia that I rather love, though I’m not sure how representative it is of the novella.)

Like Magnus Mills’ Three To See The King I read yesterday, Carter writes a surreal and unnerving world – but where his is told sparely, Carter’s prose is luscious and almost ornate, even when she is describing unpleasant things. This excerpt isn’t unpleasant, but it is near the beginning of the book and seems to offer a symbolic sense of being drawn to two opposites – when she sees sun and moon simultaneously.

On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above the spires and skyscrapers of the city itself, the rising moon hung motionless in a rift of absolute night. Though one was setting while the other rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so the heavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to see such a dreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself the helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.

The ‘love triangle’ isn’t quite that – Buzz is just obsessed with his brother and Annabel, who have their own overwrought and dangerous relationship. The depiction of Buzz is quite odd. He is introduced in a voluminous dark cape, and seems to live in it; the other characters call him a freak, though without being exactly clear what they mean by that.

Throughout the novel, these three tussle with love and power and violence – drawing others into their web, while also playing at some distorted version of the domestic. It’s all rather strange, like a portrait that – once you look closer – has features that can’t possibly be true, or that unnerve on examination.

This is the third or fourth Carter novel[la] I’ve read, and I certainly admire her writing. In something like Wise Children it is also a bit fey and even joyful. Love has funny moments (”It is like screwing the woman’s page of the Guardian”) and moments of neat insight (‘the false cheerfulness of five in the morning’), but overall it is not a joyful book by any means. Carter is perhaps one of those writers I recognise as great, but don’t especially relish spending time in the company of. It’s undeniably good, but leaves me with a feeling of having a bit sullied.

25 Books in 25 Days: #22 Several Perceptions

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I started At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept this morning, and was only a page in when I knew it wouldn’t work for today’s book. So I took a quick look through my paperback shelves, trying to find the sort of thing I fancied (at the right length, of course) – and landed upon Several Perceptions (1968) by Angela Carter.

I hadn’t heard of this until I came upon it in an Oxfam a year or two ago – I bought it despite this dreadful cover. I think it’s only the second Carter novel I’ve read, after Wise Children. It concerns Joseph – a moody, miserable gent who has recently broken up with his girlfriend (not his choice) and whose only friends seem to be an overly-sexed man called Viv, his prostitute mother, a slightly mad homeless man, and (perhaps) the mousy new resident in his building, Annie Blossom. Looking for purpose, Joseph releases a badger from a local zoo (did zoos ever cage badgers?!) and starts having flirty, desperate, or philosophical conversations – sometimes all three – with the aforementioned group of people.

This is a slightly baffling novel, not least because Joseph seems to sometimes wander into the unbalanced – and I never worked out what the title was about – but Carter is such a fine writer. Her choice of words is so clever – often unexpected, and yet finding the deeper truth in the cracks between cliches. Every page has an example, but one I particularly liked was his view of Annie:

Miss Blossom, the husk of a woman, what was she doing? Making herself a small lunch of beans on toast or performing some other flat, thin activity, ironing rayon underwear or filling in a form?

That ‘flat, thin activity’ is so unusual, and yet creates a vivid impression on the reader. Unusual and vivid is a pretty great description of Carter, actually. I’m not sure why Several Perceptions isn’t better known – or perhaps it is, and I just haven’t noticed it being mentioned – but it was quite the experience.

Btw, for a much more thorough review, check out Helen’s from a few years ago.

A Card From Angela Carter – Susannah Clapp

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When I was given A Card From Angela Carter at a Bloomsbury party a while ago, I was excited to read it – but, at the same time, I worried that it might be a bit barrel-scrapey.  The barrel that, as far as I know, has in fact scarcely been investigated.  The publication of some of Carter’s postcards seems as though it would be the afterthought to a long series of edited diaries and letters – none of which have been published (or have they?)

But I needn’t have worried.  The selection of postcards Angela Carter had sent to Susannah Clapp was really just an ingenious way for Clapp to organise her thoughts about a dear friend, and a refreshingly original take on the memoir genre.

I love biographies where the writer knew and loved the subject.  Indeed, I’m reading one at the moment that is a strong contender for my favourite book of the year.  So it is lovely to see Angela Carter as Susannah Clapp saw her – witty, a little rude, loyal, colourful, more political than I expected, and a lover of literature.  It is the last quality which I noted down most (perhaps unsurprisingly).  I was surprised, though, to learn that she didn’t like Dickens – that she didn’t find him funny.  I know some people do not, but having read Wise Children (which, thankfully, is the novel Clapp talks about most in A Card) I assumed Carter had been influenced by Dickens’ own extravagant joie de vivre.  But there are plenty of writers Carter did admire:

Yet for her deepest admiration she went further back.  Chaucer – who was “so nice about women” and who, in the Wife of Bath, created a character she loved – was to her the “sanest, the sweetest and most decent of English poets”.  She liked the idea that he wrote “before English became a language of imperialism”.  She liked the notion that The Canterbury Tales, coming from an oral tradition, had to be direct and forceful enough to transmit when read aloud to a room full of people who were busy “sewing or shelling peas”.  She liked the aspects of Chaucer’s work that pre-dated the novel, and half-disapproved of the genre in which she made her name.  “I’m sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class.  Actually.”  That ‘actually’ dangling from the end of a sentence was habitual when she spoke.  Dainty but adamant, it was like the flick of a heel or the toss of her head.  It warded off objections but also slightly invited contradiction.  It both emphasised and slightly undermined what she had just said.  Actually.
And then, of course – of course – there is Shakespeare.  Wise Children is a love letter to Shakespeare – and Clapp’s first-hand knowledge of Carter offers an interesting perspective:

She favoured the bland lines that moved the plot on: “a ship has come from France”.  She was dismissive of the routine idea that had he been alive now he would have been writing for television: he would more likely have been a used-car salesman.
As for the cards themselves – they’re reproduced in b/w in the book, and are mostly a little silly.  There’s the car which looks like a chicken; the myth of mountains in love; the Charles/Diana divorce card… the Statue of Liberty in a lake; Betty Boop as a geisha, and (but of course) Shakespeare.  Clapp uses these cleverly to organise her thoughts about Carter, only occasionally seeming to read more into the choice of card than was probably intended.

It could have all been the scraping of a barrel, but it actually turned out to be very innovative, and rather moving.  For a writer as unusual as Angela Carter, only an unusual form of memoir would do, wouldn’t it?

Wise Children – Angela Carter

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Twins. Theatre. Shakespeare. Eccentrics.  There was never really any chance that I wouldn’t like Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter, was there?

Everything kicks off with 75 year old twins Dora and Nora Chance (with Dora as our narrator) getting an invitation to their father’s 100th birthday party.  Only he (Melchior) has always denied his parentage, instead claiming that his twin brother Peregrine is their father.  They’re understandably a bit miffed by this, but nothing keeps them down for long.  They really are eternal optimists – and delightfully over the top.  They prepare for going out…

Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge.  Revlon, Fire and Ice.  The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle; haven’t had a man for yonks but still we slap it on.  Nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night.
That’s a pretty good example of the tone of the novel, actually.  It’s the heightened, slangy voice of Dora, a little coarse but endlessly cheery heroine, along with a good dose of literary references (but the sort that even someone with my rather fleeting familiarity with poetry will get.)  (Yes, I have studied English literature for eight years now – argh! – but I’ve always avoided poetry wherever possible.)

It took me about half the novel before I realised the significance of the title, but I’ll save you some time – it is a wise child that knows his own father, as the proverb goes.  Oh, and if you’ve got the edition pictured (and probably others) then there’s a Dramatis Personae at the back – I didn’t find that until the end, but it would have been VERY useful, as the family is complicated beyond measure.  Heaps of twins, heaps of multiple marriages, and all manner of possible and probable illicit parentages.  All very Shakespearean – which, of course, is precisely the point.  I learnt, in Susannah Clapp’s A Postcard From Angela Carter (which I’ll be writing about soon – maybe tomorrow?) that she intended to get in references to every one of Shakespeare’s plays, but missed out Titus Andronicus.  I wish I’d known that before I started – I’d have had my checklist!  Some are more obvious than others (they film A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance) but some are fun to try and spot (is the mysterious resurrection of a character presumed dead a reference to A Winter’s Tale?)

A little while ago I mentioned my literary bête noire, of novels starting in ‘present day’ and then going back to the beginning.  I would probably have loved Wise Children more if Carter had chosen a different narrative structure, but that is what happens here.  We reverse back to Dora and Nora’s youth, their early activities in theatre and film, and their various beaus.  Not to mention the increasingly complex family.  Melchior’s various wives make for fun reading.  Then there is Nora’s boyfriend whom Dora rather likes, so they swap perfumes (the only way they can be told apart, apparently) and Dora has her wicked way with him… and there is a fire.  Everything is gloriously over the top.  So much happens, to so many people, that it is a little dizzying in a short novel, and impossible to recount in detail.  But that is what I loved most about Wise Children – it is mad.  Dora Chance is wonderful – particularly in old age (which is why I wished we’d spent more time there, and less on the past) and the whole novel is wonderfully exuberant – mostly because of the inexhaustibly optimistic voice of Dora, and her turns of phrase, her cheekiness, and her ability to laugh at everything life throws at her.  And Carter is obviously having a whale of a time – it must be an author’s dream to be able to use the most excessive and absurd images all the time – par example:

Flash! A passing paparazzo took a picture of an old lady who looked like St Pancras Station, monumental, grimy, full of Gothic detail
– and to concoct the most extraordinary plots and interrelations, while still able to point over her shoulder and say “Well, it’s no more zany than Shakespeare.”

It’s such a fun book, and a good introduction to Angela Carter for me.  It was her last novel, and I have plenty more to explore now – maybe I’ll even work my way backwards?  But my second dip into Carter territory was, as mentioned, the book Susannah Clapp wrote about her postcards – more on that coming up shortly!

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“Angela Carter’s last novel is an over-exuberant bear hug of a book; it’s the literary equivalent of being dragged into a conga line at a party, and it does this with such big-hearted, good-natured cheeriness that it is quite impossible to resist.” – Victoria, Tales From The Reading Room

“I think that Angela Carter is like what I imagine marzipan to be like, or maybe this particular sort of chocolate mint cake my father has: delicious and rich but you maybe wouldn’t want a massive lot of it at once.” – Jenny, Jenny’s Books

“The novel succeeds on multiple levels, and on a uncomplicated plane it sincerely argues for the recognition of simple joy under the long and often theatrical masks of seriousness and complexity.” – Leif, Leif and the Pages