THE BRITISH WRITER Angela Carter died too early, at the age of fifty-three. Her career spanned four decades, and produced several acclaimed novels and much astute criticism. It also produced four collections of the extravagant, baroque, and disconcertingly down-to-earth short pieces — such as The Company of Wolves — that have become her trademark; so much so that publishers are now sending out requests for fabulist fiction “in the manner of Angela Carter.” Ironically, she’s become more widely appreciated since her death than she ever was before and is now the most frequently studied author in British universities. She’s even become that rarest of creatures, an unabashed feminist it’s okay for the guys to like. Maybe it’s because her feminism is not of a very puritanical sort. She’s a rowdy girl rather than a goody-two-shoes: she can say tits and bum with the best of them, and does so quite frequently. If she were a character in a work of fiction in the style of Angela Carter, she’d now, in spirit form, be guffawing raucously down the chimney. “In the manner of,” indeed! Who would dare?
Burning Your Boats is a collection of her short fictional pieces, including some very early ones and some that were unpublished at the time of her death. It’s an amazing plum pudding. If Carter were a colour she’d be purple, if a flower a cross between a wild rose with lots of thorns and a Venus flytrap, if an animal a cunning fox with gryphon claws, if a bird or other airborne device, hybrid lyre-bird-cum-Siren, with a bit of jackdaw thrown in — for all things bright and beautiful, as well as all things gnarled and macabre, appeal to her, and she filches them with abandon, picks them apart, sticks them together again in a new order, and adds them to her deliberately cluttered verbal nest. Not for her Hemingway’s clean, well-lighted place, or Orwell’s clear prose like a pane of glass. She prefers instead a dirty, badly lit place, with gnawed bones in the corner and dusty mirrors you’d best not consult. Prose like glass, yes — but it’s stained glass. Many of her best effects are achieved by overloading. She piles the adjectives up into a towering chocolate-and-cherries mound, then pulls the tablecloth out from under it so the whole edifice comes crashing delightfully down. She loves blowing bubbles, and she also loves bursting them.
If you were writing her literary naissance in the manner of Angela Carter, you’d have to provide a troupe of ghostly godpersons gathered round her typewriter. Oscar Wilde would be there, whispering “Nothing succeeds like excess” and bestowing the gift of the inversion of truisms; Sylvia Townsend Warner, with her clutch of ruthless fairies; Edgar Allan Poe, the subject of one of her more spectacular stories, although Carter wears her Rue Morgue with a difference. And Bram Stoker, and Perrault, and Sheridan LeFanu, and George Macdonald, and Mary Shelley, and perhaps even Carson McCullers, and a whole gaggle of disreputable tale-telling old grannies. Although like every child she had ancestors, like every child she was unique; though Carter, it must be said, was more unique than most. (I know: more unique is a contradiction; but I said this was in the manner of.)
Burning Your Boats is an apt title: It’s what you do when you’re fighting on perilous ground and choose to cut off your own retreat. At the outset Carter was obstinately unfashionable, both in manner and in matter, but she didn’t give a toss. She became herself almost immediately, and never looked back: “A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son At Home,” one of her first stories, is about the deadening grip of dominating mothers on their children, and so is one of her last: “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost.” “A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)” is an early piece written in Victorian thieves’ cant, and illustrates both Carter’s penchant for combining scholarship with little bits of junk picked up in curio shops, and the lifelong delight she took in the gaudiness, multiplicity, and untidiness of language itself. Sow’s ears into silk purses, and vice versa; the smart-as-a-whip intellectual essay blending into the sensual narrative mode, and vice versa: What concerned her was the magical act of transformation. She knew no bounds, and also no boundaries.
She’s best known for her haunted European forests, replete with wolves and werewolves, but England is here too — the polymorphousperverse Pantomime, and a wonderful country-house kitchen, and Shakespeare’s enchanted woods. So is America, the mythological America that is. Carter redoes John Ford’s Jacobean shocker ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore as a Western movie directed by the other John Ford, and provides two renderings of Lizzie Borden, and a bravura piece in which she transmutes Der Freischutz into a Mexican-border melodrama, and an Indian captivity narrative in which the captured white heroine prefers the Indians, as they frequently did in real life.
But the attempt to summarize is hopeless. Suffice to say that you should not miss this book nor should you try to read it all at once, as, like a pound of Turkish Delight, it’s too rich for a single mouthful. There’s a warm and perceptive introduction by Carter’s old friend Salman Rushdie, in which he pays tribute both to the woman — “sharp, foulmouthed, passionate” — and to her work. As he says, “She hadn’t finished. . . . The stories in this volume are the measure of our loss. But they are also our treasure, to savour and to hoard.”