Angela Slatter is a sorceress.
I thought I should warn you before you start reading this book. Unless you’ve already read it and are coming back to read the introduction? In which case you already know. You’ve been through the dark, dangerous woods, where women turn into bears and the Erl-King roams. You’ve already been transformed into something different from what you were.
If you meet Angela, maybe at your neighbourhood bookstore signing books or at a literary festival, and she looks like you or me or anyone else, that’s because sorceresses are clever. They know how to disguise themselves. But if you follow her home to what probably looks like a perfectly normal house (but isn’t) and peek through her kitchen window, you will see her standing at the stove in a robe of mist and cobwebs, which is a sorceress’ version of sweat pants. She will be brewing potions in an alembic and making conversation with her pet griffin (probably named Fluff). She will pause to look up recipes in a silver mirror, which is the sorceress’ version of checking Wikipedia on her iPhone.
What is she making? you will ask. Stories, of course. That is how sorceresses make stories. (Revisions, however, are still done on a computer.)
Just like the stories you will read, or have perhaps already read, here. For these stories are spells . . .
What a funny word, “spell.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that most magical of grimoires, to spell is to “set down in order the letters of (a word or syllable),” but that’s actually the third meaning listed. The first is to “utter, declare, relate, tell,” like telling a story. The second is to “make out, understand, decipher, or comprehend,” which is what you’re doing by reading this book. So a spell is something you and the author make together: she utters the story, you decipher it, and the result is magic. Otherwise known as reading, although for some reason that definition does not appear in the OED.
What you have here is a book that takes you to imaginary lands, including Australia, where the jacaranda trees grow. If you have not seen a jacaranda, I will tell you it is a mass of purple blossoms, like a tree in a fairy tale. Australia itself is a magical country bordering on Fairyland that seems utterly fantastical unless you have grown up there, and perhaps even then. (In Australia, griffins are marsupial.) Most of these stories do not take place in Australia, but rather a country I think of as Angelia. I made that up of course: it’s equal parts Angela and Anglia (the medieval Latin for England, because so many of these stories are inflected with an English sensibility). But in all of them, there is a touch of Australia, particularly in repeated references to ships and ports and the sea. Angelia has its displaced queens and impoverished merchants, its mad seamstresses and coffin-makers’ daughters. Its ghosts. I believe there must be an atlas of it inside Angela’s head, and wouldn’t that be an interesting map to study?
According to her official biography, Angela is Australian and has graduate degrees in Creative Writing, but I wonder. This is of course the cleverness of the typical sorceress (to the extent sorceresses are ever typical, for to be a sorceress is by definition to be atypical, out of the ordinary). I’m quite sure she lives primarily in Angelia, in one of the neighbourhoods with tall, narrow houses close to the Cathedral, although she probably has a pied-à-terre in Brisbane when she needs to stay in our world for a while, like for bookstore signings. There must be a secret trans-dimensional passage leading from one house to the other. And I suspect her MA and PhD are actually in Sorceressing. At any rate, I’m sure she has passports from both countries. The one from Angelia is probably stamped with gilt letters and a crown.
All author-sorceresses have their themes, the issues and concerns they explore most often. In this book you will find, above all, stories of women: in love, out of love, trying to find and make their way in the world. They will search for esoteric knowledge, turn feminine arts such as sewing and baking to magical purposes. They will leave home, find home, create homes for their families. They are, above all, different and individual. Whether students at St Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls or Bluebeard’s daughter, they are each utterly themselves.
These stories are also deeply informed by the structure of fairy tales. In some you will find three dresses, in some an apple, but such objects will appear in different contexts than you might expect, take on different meanings than they had for Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm. The action takes place in the moral world of fairy tales, where right conduct is situational: sometimes you must give an old woman bread, sometimes you must push her into the oven. Both old women are witches, but only one is trying to eat you. These are stories in which the characters must do the best they can with the information they are given; they must learn to trust their instincts, take what is offered when they can get it. And these are stories of metamorphosis: by the end, everything will be different, everyone will have changed, like a boy into a bear or a girl into a woman realizing what she wants for the first time, growing up before our eyes. Like fairy tales, they are often stories of revenge, which can be another word for justice. Endings may be harsh, but they are usually fair. They are also usually conditional: the end of a tale is never entirely the end. We get the sense that characters live on; more will happen after we stop reading about them. These are also stories about home: how we lose or create it, where we might find it again. They are about outcasts and misfits, some with aristocratic titles, and about the condition of homelessness. This, I think, makes them deeply Australian, no matter where they take place.
Finally, these are stories about storytelling itself, about the joy of the other kind of spelling: the making of words. They are told in language that is both beautiful and precise, that holds two things in equipoise, like the cameo described in “By the Weeping Gate”: “engraved with the head of a Medusa, lovely and serpentine.” Today we think of the Greek figure of Medusa as a monster, but she was cursed with snakes for hair precisely because she was so lovely she incurred the wrath of the gods. She is a visual contradiction, holding two things in tension and therefore balance. That sort of tension, between love and death, beauty and decay, desire and loss, homecoming and exile, is what gives these stories their strength. They would not be so beautiful if they were not also infused with darkness, if we could not see the skeletal bones beneath the lyricism. They are sad stories, and joyful stories, but most of all they are ultimately satisfying stories, like the loaves of bread baked by Emmeline into fancy shapes in “Sourdough.” Angela is also skilled at making fancy shapes. Just be careful not to get the loaf with poison at its heart, unless you’re prepared with an antidote.
I started this introduction with a warning. If you’ve already read this book, you should be all right. After all, you made it through the dark, dangerous woods once already. You know to watch out for huntsmen, to avoid any houses made of marzipan, chocolate ganache, and caramel spun into a delicate bird’s nest. You know that you must either find your fortune or make it yourself. There are no fairy godmothers out there, or if there are, you should not trust them. This is a world you will need to navigate with intelligence and as much kindness as possible under the circumstances. If you’ve survived to return and read this introduction, so far so good.
But if you’re about to read this book for the first time, watch out. All I can tell you is to keep your head and trust your luck. There’s magic and danger ahead . . .
Theodora Goss
11 April 2016
Boston, Massachusetts, USA