The Bloody Chamber starts as it means to go on. Given the premise of gothic fairy tales, pertaining to female sexuality, the titular metaphor suggests a gritty and visceral sexuality, but Carter has subtlety, and the (deliberately) heavy-handed and over-powering sexual imagery of the title story (closely allied to Bluebeard) is followed by the virginal delicacy of her first version of Beauty and the Beast. The marked contrast is enough to form a strong link between the first two stories, and the third tale in the collection is a contrasting version of the Beast story.
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Extreme Reading #12 – Reading in the Dark Woods
The concept of Extreme Reading was beginning to bore me a little (especially as there are only so many ways to claim extremity for the local woods.) But having completed Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber I couldn’t help thinking that it would be a fun read in the woods at twilight. (Also a breathing space while I figure out how to post on a book of short stories, which always poses a puzzle.) Full-on darkness would have upped the extremeness stakes but the technical difficulties associated with reading in the dark suggested a milder course.
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Wise Children – Angela Carter
This was only my second Angela Carter, so the disparity in tone was surprising. The Magic Toyshop is fey and tragic, Wise Children is bawdy and comic. The contrast between tragic and comic reflects the subject matter of both novels, which both involve stages and acting of one kind or another.
Wise Children is the life story of Dora and Nora Chance, illegitimate twins, as typed by the now aged present day Dora. Dora tells us that at one point in her varied love life she dated an about to be posthumously famous poet, with a fortuitous penchant for the dispensation of literary instruction; a fact which goes some way to explaining the construction of an engaging narrative which might be otherwise unexpected given her background.
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The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
It was this excellent review of The Magic Toyshop over at Another Cookie Crumbles, which finally persuaded me to try Angela Carter. Although, and this was also pointed out by Uncertain Principles, the book once seen becomes instantly an object of desire, for the sake of the fabulous cover…
I’m at something of a loss to categorise this novel; ‘literary fiction’ is not sufficiently precise. Perhaps ‘coming of age meets dark fairytale.’
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