fairy tales

The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

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What if you grew up reading fairy tales, all the ones I found in a corner of the little stone library near our house: the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault? Perhaps like Zoë you would come to believe that someday a fairy godmother would come or a magic cloak be given, a prince, a slipper, so that you yourself need do nothing but hold yourself in readiness, be calm and pleasant and passive.

What if you lived with your widowed mother, a sad and solitary woman, with no friends or even visitors aside from two of your mother’s cousins-in-law who descend on you with indigestible food, unsolicited advice, and unwelcome invitations before disappearing again (to yours and your mother’s relief)?

Zoë says:

After I had done my homework in the evening I would take up my position at the window. I liked to watch the lights go on in other houses, as if preparing for a wayfarer’s return. My reading had conditioned me to think in terms of wayfarers, so that footsteps on the pavement gave me an agreeable sensation that the stories contained enough authenticity to justify the fact that I still read them.

When Zoë is sixteen, her mother unexpectedly meets a man at one of the cousins’ parties and marries him, whereupon Simon whisks his new wife off to his home in Nice. Zoë is delighted with Simon but wants to stay in their old London flat. She is finally ready for freedom.

Freedom. It can mean so many things. As Zoë faces increasingly difficult challenges, she discovers different ways of being free, from sacrificing her own ideas and desires as she clings to an indifferent lover to Sartre’s existentialist freedom with its attendant responsibility and anguish.

As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice.

With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of the people Zoë interacts with, such as elderly Mme Levasseur whose face was somewhat twisted after a stroke, and her bitter disappointment when her grandson, a small child, refuses to kiss her.

As quietly brilliant sentences follow one upon the other, Zoë’s experiences bring her to a place where many of us have found ourselves. As poet Stevie Smith put it:

Oh I know we must put away the beautiful fairy stories
And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment

Then we must read on to discover how Zoë will manage her new adult freedom. This most unusual coming-of-age story will deliver surprising insights if you will let it.

What coming-of-age story have you read that was especially memorable?

Burning Your Boats, by Angela Carter

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Somehow, in all my reading, I only recently stumbled across this author. Carter was a British author who died in 1992, only fifty-two years old, and known for her wildly inventive and imaginative work. In addition to the short stories collected in this volume, she wrote novels, poetry, children’s books, plays and nonfiction. I know! How could I have missed her?

I love these stories. Actually she calls them tales, saying, “The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience.” Thus she draws on images from dreams and legends, from fairy tales and the unconscious. The tale “retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease.”

While, yes, these tales do provoke unease, they also overwhelm with audacity and rich allusions and tangled passion. She layers in the descriptions and emotions until you feel as though the whole thing is going to explode—and then she reels you back with a coolly humorous detail or sarcastic observation. You may be reading along, buried in a forest, and only gradually understand that you are in a bizarre version of Briar Rose where the sleeping maiden is actually a vampire. Or is it Jack and the Beanstalk? Maybe they are actually the same story.

Within all the fun and games lurk shadows, ones we can’t help but find resonances of in our own lives. Sex and power and passivity shift in surprising ways in these stories. What happens when the girl with the red scarf finds a wolf has eaten her grandmother, but she only laughs when he threatens to eat her? Who emerges triumphant when a wild child who’s grown up with the wolves is returned to her family? What did the “stern and square” four-year-old Lizzie Borden learn when she ran off to see the circus tiger, who is obedient until he is not?

Some tales go directly for society’s jugular. One such is “Our Lady of the Massacre”, written in the lush voice of a Lancashire orphan, transported to the New World for stealing where she ends up with an Iroquois tribe. Another is “The Bloody Chamber”, a richly imagined Victorian version of Bluebeard, where the power struggle between man and woman reaches a surprising resolution.

As Salman Rushdie says in his Introduction: “She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the now-story we want to hear, within.”

My two favorites stories are “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”, narrated by a Puck even more irreverent than Shakespeare’s creature, and “The Erl-King”, a passionate retelling of the classic tale that begins—against modern story-telling advice—with a long descriptive passage that immerses the reader in the haunted atmosphere of the autumn woods, woods that

. . . enclose and then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes opening one into another; the intimate perspectives of the wood changed endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an invented distance that perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.

Here is another one of her subtle, rule-breaking techniques: changing the point of view without warning. She sometimes goes from first- into third-person or vice versa, leaving me unsettled and wondering what I’d missed.

In his essay on Carter in Children of Silence, Michael Wood suggests that among her exuberant and often hilarious imaginings, Carter is luring us into considering other possible ways of being in the world. She isn’t recommending them per se but rather making a passage for them, as a bullfighter creates a space for the bull to pass him.

He says, “Difference is Carter’s great theme. We can know other creatures, including humans, but only if we know their difference.” He goes on to talk about how she so often uses beasts in her fiction, beasts being “absolutely other”. But they are not “beyond transformation.” Nor are we, as the many tales here of people turning into beasts and beasts into humans suggest. Even though there are plenty of evil deeds perpetrated by both humans and beasts, Wood concludes that “there are no monsters, there is only difference.”

I cannot think of a theme more relevant to our world today.

Have you discovered a new author lately?