Books, part trois

[petronia]

pere_chan asked the other day how I'd managed Burning Your Boats as reading more than three Angela Carter stories in a row was like binging on dark chocolate. The answer is - I binged. XD; But I doubt I ever got through more than half a dozen at once. Carter has what one might call a Style(tm), which even she doesn't pull off all of the time, and if she was (as Salman Rushdie claims in his introduction) the most-studied contemporary writer in British universities during the 90s, she has a helluva lot to answer for in her imitators. XD;; Many of whom probably don't know they're her imitators. Sorry but if I get a submission in the SSBB inbox with a first sentence like this:

The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain.

The gin bottle comes out and not a moment later. (In this particular story the narrative POV switches constantly for no reason.) When she's good she's very good - and she's often good - but I do find that I prefer the later, more lucid and less baroque pieces, even though The Bloody Chamber is drinking at the source and we can all stop bothering with Johnny-come-latelys.** My favorite is, perhaps, "John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore," or "The Fall River Axe Murders"... I would read a Lizzie Borden novel written by Angela Carter, just as Rushdie posited.

For don't you remember what Katy did next? The story-book heroine took the steamship to smoky old London, to elegant, fascinating Paris, to sunny, antique Rome and Florence, the story-book heroine sees Europe reveal itself before her like an interesting series of magic-lantern slides on a gigantic screen. All is present and all unreal. The Tower of London; click. Notre Dame; click. The Sistine Chapel; click. Then the lights go out and she is in the dark again.

Amusingly, several of the earlier stories are about how she went to live in Japan and had a passionate love affair with this hawt guy she codenames Momotaro - NO FOR REALS - but they were both callow youths and the cultural crap was unsurmountable. Life story of x number of my friends, only Carter was a pioneer who draws very fine and telling conclusions with no recourse to theory that didn't exist at the time (my friends are either poisoned with theory or are incapable of drawing conclusions from their experiences other than "[Japanese/Chinese/Korean] [men/women] are fucking crazy").

I am totally photocopying the glossary in "A Victorian Fable," that shiz could only come in handy. XD


** Neil Gaiman wrote a better take on Snow White. But then, Snow, Glass, Apples is arguably the best thing Gaiman's written to date.