Two writers I hadn’t read before amazed me with their ambition, erudition, and skill. Lawrence Norfolk’s Lemprière’s Dictionary is a dazzling linguistic and formal achievement that takes on a rich and under-explored subject: the East India Company. (There are countless Raj fictions but few imaginings of the earlier period of Company rule.) It reminded me at times of the Dutch masterpiece of colonial trade, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar. And Adam Lively’s monster-novel of a dystopic future, Sing the Body Electric, is as rich and complex a novel of ideas as one could wish for.
To see so diverse a list dumped on by people who simply haven’t read the books is to feel a kind of despair about the culture of denigration in which we live. Can’t we be fair-minded enough to give these books, these writers, a chance? Can’t we even let them have their fifteen minutes in the spotlight before we start trashing them?
The list’s critics say that by forty, writers should have some solid triumphs under their belts. How about The Remains of the Day, The Wasp Factory, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Famished Road, The Passion? They say the young writers on the list don’t merit attention. But Fischer, Freud, and Nicholas Shakespeare have been acclaimed and won prizes; Will Self is already a cult figure.
True, some of these twenty writers are only just arriving at publication: for example, A. L. Kennedy, a writer rich in the humanity and warmth that seems at a premium in these bleak times, and well able to handle a layered narrative and build to a shocking climax that is fully earned and not a bit gratuitous.
It is a tribute to the strength of the list that so many highly rated writers—Adam Thorpe, Robert McLiam Wilson, Rose Boyt, Lesley Glaister, Robert Harris, Alexander Stuart, D. J. Taylor, Richard Rayner, David Profumo, Sean French, Jonathan Coe, Mark Lawson, Glenn Patterson, Deborah Levy—didn’t make it. I personally regret not having been able to find room for such talented first-time writers as Tim Pears, whose beautiful first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, brings just a touch of Macondo to rural Devon in the heat wave of 1984; Nadeem Aslam, whose novel of modern Karachi, Season of the Rainbirds, is much better than its title; and Romesh Gunesekera, whose first story-collection, Monkfish Moon, gives notice of a fine writer in the making.
Twenty young writers did make the list because in our opinion they were the best we have. We can argue about the names—who should have been in, who should have been out—but for Pete’s sake, guys, let’s give them a break.
If you read two hundred or so novels, you do begin to notice certain general trends and themes. There was a point at which I said that if I read another novel about a young girl beginning to menstruate, I’d scream. (A. S. Byatt pointed out that the best of these novels had in fact been written by a man, Tim Pears, whose point-of-view character is female.) There was a lot of violence about, a lot of writers who wanted to write about pornography, a lot of violence to women—novels that would begin, as it were, “She sat down opposite me on the tube and I wondered what she’d look like with an axe in her face”; and there was Helen Zahavi’s hideous, kinky little revenge-novel of violence done to men.
There were a number of wimp-novels: “I had this really boring job as a clerk in a small provincial town,” they would begin, “when I met this really wonderful gay cripple and entered a whole new world.” (I am lampooning, but only a little.) There was a whole group of son-of-Kelman Scottish novels in which people said “fuck” and “cunt” and recited the names of minor punk bands. There was, too, the Incredibly Badly Sub-Edited Novel. I remember one set in the sixties in which a Communist character couldn’t spell “Baader” or “Meinhof” (“Bader,” “Meinhoff”). Many of the entries read as if no editor had ever looked at them.
More seriously—and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation—it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience—a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled, and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie-novel, the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction, had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded.) It was plain that too many books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a chord.
When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for “Best of Young British Novelists II” because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is. The four of us have worked extremely hard, reading, re-reading, evaluating, debating. It was a marvelously un-bitchy experience, and I hope that we will be seen to have performed some service, not only to the chosen writers but also to readers. I hope just a little of the excitement that surrounded fiction a dozen or so years ago might be regenerated by this list.
One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of the epigrams of Martial. I remember only one, his version of Martial’s message to a particularly backward-looking critic:
You only praise the good old days
We young ’uns get no mention.
I don’t see why I have to die
To gain your kind attention.
January 1993
Angela Carter
[First published as an introduction to The Collected Stories of Angela Carter]
The last time I visited Angela Carter, a few weeks before she died, she had insisted on dressing for tea, in spite of being in considerable pain. She sat bright-eyed and erect, head cocked like a parrot’s, lips satirically pursed, and got down to the serious teatime business of giving and receiving the latest dirt: sharp, foulmouthed, passionate. That’s what she was like: spikily outspoken—once, after I’d come to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, “Well. You’re going to be seeing a lot more of me from now on”—and at the same time courteous enough to defy mortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea.
Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one consolation. She had taken out an “immense” life insurance policy shortly before the cancer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortune to “her boys” (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating black-comedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh.
She planned her funeral carefully. My instructions were to read Marvell’s poem “On a Drop of Dew.” This was a surprise. The Angela I knew had always been the most scatologically irreligious, merrily godless of women; yet she wanted Marvell’s meditation on the immortal soul—“that Drop, that Ray / Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day”—spoken over her dead body. Was this a last surrealist joke, of the “thank God, I die an atheist” variety, or an obeisance to the metaphysician Marvell’s high symbolic language from a writer whose own favored language was also pitched high, and replete with symbols? It should be noted that no divinity makes an appearance in Marvell’s poem, except for “th’ Almighty Sun.” Perhaps Angela, always a giver of light, was asking us, at the end, to imagine her dissolving into the “glories” of that greater light: the artist becoming a part, simply, of art.
She was too individual, too fierce a writer to dissolve easily, however: by turns formal and outrageous, exotic and demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black. Her novels are like nobody else’s, from the transsexual coloratura of The Passion of Ne
w Eve to the music-hall knees-up of Wise Children; but the best of her, I think, is in her stories. Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky opium-eater’s cadences interrupted by harsh or comic discords, that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flimflam, can be wearying. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while she’s ahead.
Carter arrived almost fully formed; her early story “A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home” is already replete with Carterian motifs. Here is the love of the gothic, of lush language and high culture; but also of low stinks—falling rose-petals that sound like pigeon’s farts, and a father who smells of horse dung, and bowels that are “great levelers.” Here is the self as performance: perfumed, decadent, languorous, erotic, perverse; very like the winged woman, Fevvers, heroine of her penultimate novel, Nights at the Circus.
Another early story, “A Victorian Fable,” announces her addiction to all the arcana of language. This extraordinary text, half “Jabberwocky,” half Pale Fire, exhumes the past as never before, by exhuming its dead words: “In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.”
Be advised, these early stories say: this writer is no meat-and-potatoes hack; she is a rocket, a Catherine wheel. She will call her first collection Fireworks.
Several of the Fireworks stories deal with Japan, a country whose tea-ceremony formality and dark eroticism bruised and challenged Carter’s imagination. In “A Souvenir of Japan” she arranges polished images of that country before us. “The story of Momotaro, who was born from a peach.” “Mirrors make a room uncosy.” Her narrator presents her Japanese lover to us as a sex object, complete with bee-stung lips. “I should like to have had him embalmed . . . so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.” The lover is, at least, beautiful; the narrator’s view of her big-boned self, as seen in a mirror, is distinctly uncozy. “In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: ‘For Young and Cute Girls Only.’ When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch.”
In “Flesh and the Mirror” the exquisite, erotic atmosphere thickens, approaching pastiche—for Japanese literature has specialized rather in these heated sexual perversities—except when it is cut through sharply by Carter’s constant self-awareness. (“Hadn’t I gone eight thousand miles to find a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it to satisfy me?” her narrator asks; as, in “The Smile of Winter,” another unnamed narrator admonishes us: “Do not think I do not realize what I am doing,” and then analyzes her story with a perspicacity that rescues—brings to life—what might otherwise have been a static piece of mood music. Carter’s cold-water douches of intelligence often come to the rescue of her fancy when it runs too wild.)
In the non-Japanese stories Carter enters, for the first time, the fable-world which she will make her own. A brother and sister are lost in a sensual, malevolent forest whose trees have breasts, and bite. Here the apple tree of knowledge teaches not good and evil but incestuous sexuality. Incest—a recurring Carter subject—crops up again in “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” a tale set in a bleak upland village, the quintessential Carter location, where, as she says in the Bloody Chamber story “The Werewolf,” “they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” Wolves howl around these Carter-country villages, and there are many metamorphoses.
Carter’s other country is the fairground, the world of the gimcrack showman, the hypnotist, the trickster, the puppeteer. “The Loves of Lady Purple” takes her closed circus-world to yet another mountainous, Middle European village where suicides are treated like vampires (wreaths of garlic, stakes through the heart) while real warlocks “practised rites of immemorial beastliness in the forests.” As in all Carter’s fairground stories, “the grotesque is the order of the day.” Lady Purple, the dominatrix marionette, is a moralist’s warning—beginning as a whore, she turns into a puppet because she is “pulled only by the strings of Lust.” She is a female, sexy, and lethal rewrite of Pinocchio, and, along with the metamorphic cat-woman in “Master,” one of the many dark (and fair) ladies with “unappeasable appetites” to whom Angela Carter is so partial.
In her second collection, The Bloody Chamber, these riot ladies inherit her fictional earth. The Bloody Chamber is Carter’s masterwork: the book in which her high, perfervid mode is perfectly married to her stories’ needs. (For the best of the low, demotic Carter, read Wise Children; but in spite of all the oo-er-guv, brush-up-your-Shakespeare comedy of that last novel, The Bloody Chamber is the likeliest of her works to endure.)
The novella-length title story begins as classic Grand Guignol: an innocent bride, a much-married millionaire husband, a lonely Castle stood upon a melting shore, a secret room containing horrors. The helpless girl and the civilized, decadent, murderous man: Carter’s first variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. There is a feminist twist: instead of the weak father to save whom, in the fairy tale, Beauty agrees to go to the Beast, we are given, here, an indomitable mother rushing to her daughter’s rescue. It is Carter’s genius, in this collection, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” it is for the Beauty to save the Beast’s life; while in “The Tiger’s Eye,” Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new (“animal” in the sense of spiritual as well as tigerish) world. In “The Erl-King,” however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reconciled. Here there is neither healing nor submission but revenge.
The collection expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, always proximate, underlie and unify them all. In “The Lady of the House of Love” love and blood unite in the person of a vampire: Beauty grown monstrous, Beastly. In “The Snow Child” we are in the fairy-tale territory of white snow, red blood, black bird, and a girl, white, red, and black, born of a count’s wishes; but Carter’s modern imagination knows that for every count there is a countess, who will not tolerate her fantasy-rival. The battle of the sexes is fought between women, too.
The arrival of Red Riding Hood completes Carter’s brilliant, reinventing synthesis of Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Now we are offered the radical, shocking suggestion that Grandmother might actually be the Wolf (“The Werewolf”); or, equally shocking, the thought that the girl (Red Riding Hood, Beauty) might easily be as amorally savage as the Wolf/Beast; that she might conquer the Wolf by the power of her own predatory sexuality, her erotic wolfishness. This is the theme of “The Company of Wolves,” and to watch The Company of Wolves, the film Carter made with Neil Jordan, weaving together several of her wolf-narratives, is to long for the full-scale wolf-novel she never wrote.
“Wolf-Alice” offers final metamorphoses. Now there is no Beauty, only two Beasts: a cannibal Duke and a girl reared by wolves, who thinks of herself as a wolf, and who, arriving at womanhood, is drawn toward self-knowledge by the mystery of her own bloody chamber; that is, her menstrual flow. By blood, and by what she sees in mirrors, which make a house uncozy.
At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous. . . . He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self. . . . As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much scenery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old country tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman
.
Carter’s farewell to her mountain country, at the end of her last wolf-story, “Peter and the Wolf,” in Black Venus, signals that, like her hero, she has “tramped onwards, into a different story.”
There is one other out-and-out fantasy in this third collection, a meditation on A Midsummer Night’s Dream that prefigures (and is better than) a passage in Wise Children. In this story Carter’s linguistic exoticism is in full flight—here are “breezes, juicy as mangoes, that mythopoeically caress the Coast of Coromandel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian Shore.” But, as usual, her sarcastic common sense yanks the story back to earth before it can disappear in an exquisite puff of smoke. This dream-wood—“nowhere near Athens . . . located somewhere in the English Midlands, possibly near Bletchley”—is damp and waterlogged and the fairies all have colds. Also, it has, since the date of the story, been chopped down to make room for a motorway. Carter’s elegant fugue on Shakespearean themes is lifted toward brilliance by her exposition of the difference between the Dream’s wood and the “dark necromantic forest” of the Grimms. The forest, she finely reminds us, is a scary place; to be lost in it is to fall prey to monsters and witches. But in a wood, “you purposely mislay your way”; there are no wolves, and the wood “is kind to lovers.” Here is the difference between the English and the European fairy tale, precisely and unforgettably defined.
Mostly, however, Black Venus and its successor, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, eschew fantasy worlds; Carter’s revisionist imagination has turned toward the real, her interest toward portraiture rather than narrative. The best pieces in these later books are portraits—of Baudelaire’s black mistress, Jeanne Duval, of Edgar Allan Poe, and, in two stories, of Lizzie Borden long before she “took an ax,” and the same Lizzie on the day of her crimes, a day described with languorous precision and attention to detail: the consequences of overdressing in a heat wave and of eating twice-cooked fish both play a part. Beneath the hyper-realism, however, there is an echo of The Bloody Chamber; Lizzie’s is a bloody deed, and she is, in addition, menstruating. Her own lifeblood flows while the angel of death waits in a nearby tree. (Once again, as with the wolf-stories, one hankers for more; for the Lizzie Borden novel we can’t have.)
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