It’s been a while since I wrote any new book posts, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been reading; quite the opposite. Recently I’ve been embracing the pleasure (and economy) of rereading old favourites. Although one re-acquaintance was disappointing (my favourite book when I was 15, Tania Kindersely’s Don’t Ask Me Why, now seems cringingly mawkish), elsewhere I’ve found new appreciation of some neglected friends.
First Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, a heady exploration of the magical adventures of orphan Jordan and his ‘mother’ The Dog Woman. Set in the seventeenth century, this book takes us to worlds far removed from any solid time or place with which we might be familiar – the whole narrative disputes the reality of linear time and space as we know it. The real journey in this book takes place in the mind; we can find more ‘truth’ in that imagined world than in the chartered reality outside; an empowering revelation:
A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined. When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place of my imagination. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true. And now, swarming over the earth with our tiny insect bodies and putting up flags and building houses, it seems all the journeys are done. Not so. Fold up the maps and put away the globe. If someone else has charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.
Illustration by Matthew Richardson
The book retells classic Grimm fairy tales, casting a new feminist light on the Twelve Dancing Princesses (the depiction of Fortunata, the dancing twelfth princess, is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read). I’m annoyed that I let myself be put off reading Winterson for so long after studying Oranges are Not the Only Fruit to death at school. She’s an incredible author, able to conjure up an atmosphere and an image of a place so vivid that it appears entirely real, yet also completely unreal in its eerie otherworldliness. Take this passage from the opening page of the book:
Where the sky was clear, over the river and the flat fields newly ploughed, the moon, almost full, shone out of a yellow aureole and reflected in the bow of the water. There were cattle in the field across, black against the slope of the hill, not moving, sleeping. One light, glittering from the only house, looked like the moat-light of a giant’s castle. Tall trees flanked it. A horse ran loose in the courtyard, its hooves sparking the stone. Then the fog came. The fog came from the river in thin spirals like spirits in a churchyard and thickened with the force of a genie from a bottle. The bulrushes were buried first, then the trunks of the trees, then the forks and the junctions. The top of the trees floated in the fog, making suspended islands for the birds. The cattle were all drowned and the moat-light, like a lighthouse, appeared and vanished and vanished and appeared, cutting the air like a bright sword.
For me, descriptions like this recall Angela Carter, still unrivalled for me in her ability to create an utterly compelling sense of place. So it was that I dusted off The Bloody Chamber immediately after setting down Sexing the Cherry.
Illustration by Rose Alexandra Forshall
Like Winterson, Carter uses magic realism in her novels and her fairy tales also subvert the ‘traditional’ nature of femininity. However, for me, the beauty of Winterson’s narrative is sometimes secondary to her politics, the story becoming too obviously a vehicle for her feminist agenda. With Carter, the magic of the description is never sacrificed. There’s no room for nostalgia here either, her fairy tales for adults just as powerful now as the originals were when read as a child. Our childish imagination makes it possible to conceive vividly, with very little description, a magical world where impossible things can happen. As adults we need more help to see this world, and Carter provides this by feeding us a sensory feast via her narrative. She evokes a dark, harsh fragrant land where goblin kings and werewolves rule, and where it is always winter. I love this paragraph at the start of The Werewolf:
It is a northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives. To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I.
And then the tableau of the Erl-King in his clearing surrounded by wild things; a sharp, uneasy parody of that innocent scene in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty where the friendly woodland creatures flock around Aurora. Carter brings the gathering to life with a few simple brush strokes, painting a scene that is at once familiar and forebodingly strange.
It was a garden where all the flowers were birds and beasts; ash-soft doves, diminutive wrens, freckled thrushes, robins in their tawny bibs, huge, helmeted crows that shone like patent leather, a blackbird with a yellow bill, voles, shrews, fieldfares, little brown bunnies with their ears laid together along their backs like spoons, crouching at his feet. A lean, tall, reddish hare, up on its great hind legs, nose a-twitch. The rusty fox, its muzzle sharpened to a point, laid its head upon his knee. On the trunk of a scarlet rowan a squirrel clung, to watch him; a cock pheasant delicately stretched his shimmering neck from a brake of thorn to peer at him. There was a goat of uncanny whiteness, gleaming like a goat of snow, who turned her mild eyes towards me and bleated softly, so that he knew I had arrived.
He smiles. He lays down his pipe, his elder bird-call. He lays upon me his irrevocable hand.
His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood.
There are some eyes can eat you.
In Carter’s title story, The Bloody Chamber, you feel the cold edging in like an icy shroud as we follow Carter’s heroine, snug in in her furs, to her new husband’s home in the snowy wasteland. These are stories to read by the fire, cosied up and grateful to be looking in rather than out. This particular tale contains what might be my favourite piece of descriptive prose in all of literature, depicting the ruby choker gifted to the young bride by her formidable betrothed:
His wedding gift, clasped around my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat. That night at the opera comes back to me even now… the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels round her throat, bright as arterial blood.
Illustration by Sidsel Sørensen
The Halloween outfit to end them all, right?
Re-reading each one of Carter’s set pieces was the most satisfying, rewarding experience – I felt like I could take even more time over the prose than on first meeting, and this is prose that bears close attention. It should be savoured and revisited, time and time again.
Illustration by Kirsten McNee
