Last weekend I decided that the best way to take my mind off the worst gales that France has seen in a while was to settle down to a bit of Angela Carter. This seemed fitting as I discovered Carter a few years ago in equally inclement circumstances. I was in Ukraine of all places with my husband and a few friends for a skiing holiday. Now, I am not one of life’s skiers – not by a long chalk. So I spent most of the holiday – deep in the Carpathian winter, curled up with a hot chocolate and Angela Carter’s wonderful final novel Wise Children.
This weekend’s bad weather choice was the Virago Modern Classic – Several Perceptions. Several Perceptions was Carter’s third novel and in 1968 won the Somerset Maugham prize. It is the short and highly intense tale of Joseph – a confused and disorientated rebel without a cause whose disorderly life has been turned on its belly by the desertion of his adored girlfriend, Charlotte. In many respects the novel can be read as an allegory of the freedoms and adversities of the “swinging sixties”. Our characters wander around in a mad hatter world where they can do anything and yet seem to do nothing. Finally a resolution of sorts is reached via a bewildering carnal escapade and a drunken party – neither of which are communicated without irony.
Like many of Carter’s other novels – it deals wonderfully with a community of misfits – depicting with a sharp eye the kindness and the cruelty that can lurk just beyond the word “eccentric”. Carter presents her characters as the flotsam and jetsam of the sixties revolution – people who have been slightly lost in a cultural idea. What is more – the popular bohemia of that era is shown without gloss and sentimentality. Carter manages to celebrate the era without revering it.
There are few writers who are able to describe with the power and humour of Angela Carter. Sometimes the writing is so good that I read it again – savouring each word. For example these words are used to describe the slightly adorable, desperately unhappy prostitute Mrs Boulder:
“Viv’s mother had a bright white steeple of curls on top of her head; this fragile construction slid sideways as she drank during the course of an evening while the bright peach false face she assumed upon her natural features began to run with moisture until she looked like a pink stucco Venetian palazzo about to subside into a cascade of mud and rubble into a canal”.
Carter’s description of Maggie, the tin whistle playing sidekick to an Irish band, is equally striking:
“It was a tilted, brazen face, a carefree slut’s face; she was a raw boned country girl, young and very rackety, the spirit of Saturday night in small country towns at the back of beyond, a neighbourhood bad girl, meaning no harm”.
Carter surveys humanity thus – with breathless and powerful irreverence.
The only sadness of my time with Several Perceptions is that I did find Joseph unsympathetic – and although I realise that this is intended – still it is a barrier to my loving the book in the way that I loved Wise Children. For me Wise Children was the height of Carter’s achievement as a novelist – but all of the ingredients – the humour, the strange optimism and that little bit of magic – are here in Several Perceptions.
I probably ought to stop associating Angela Carter with rotten weather though – I don’t want to have to wait for another storm before reading more of her work.
I have included a photograph of Carter and of the shutter - smashing havoc wreaked outside during my reading.
This weekend’s bad weather choice was the Virago Modern Classic – Several Perceptions. Several Perceptions was Carter’s third novel and in 1968 won the Somerset Maugham prize. It is the short and highly intense tale of Joseph – a confused and disorientated rebel without a cause whose disorderly life has been turned on its belly by the desertion of his adored girlfriend, Charlotte. In many respects the novel can be read as an allegory of the freedoms and adversities of the “swinging sixties”. Our characters wander around in a mad hatter world where they can do anything and yet seem to do nothing. Finally a resolution of sorts is reached via a bewildering carnal escapade and a drunken party – neither of which are communicated without irony.
Like many of Carter’s other novels – it deals wonderfully with a community of misfits – depicting with a sharp eye the kindness and the cruelty that can lurk just beyond the word “eccentric”. Carter presents her characters as the flotsam and jetsam of the sixties revolution – people who have been slightly lost in a cultural idea. What is more – the popular bohemia of that era is shown without gloss and sentimentality. Carter manages to celebrate the era without revering it.
There are few writers who are able to describe with the power and humour of Angela Carter. Sometimes the writing is so good that I read it again – savouring each word. For example these words are used to describe the slightly adorable, desperately unhappy prostitute Mrs Boulder:
“Viv’s mother had a bright white steeple of curls on top of her head; this fragile construction slid sideways as she drank during the course of an evening while the bright peach false face she assumed upon her natural features began to run with moisture until she looked like a pink stucco Venetian palazzo about to subside into a cascade of mud and rubble into a canal”.
Carter’s description of Maggie, the tin whistle playing sidekick to an Irish band, is equally striking:
“It was a tilted, brazen face, a carefree slut’s face; she was a raw boned country girl, young and very rackety, the spirit of Saturday night in small country towns at the back of beyond, a neighbourhood bad girl, meaning no harm”.
Carter surveys humanity thus – with breathless and powerful irreverence.
The only sadness of my time with Several Perceptions is that I did find Joseph unsympathetic – and although I realise that this is intended – still it is a barrier to my loving the book in the way that I loved Wise Children. For me Wise Children was the height of Carter’s achievement as a novelist – but all of the ingredients – the humour, the strange optimism and that little bit of magic – are here in Several Perceptions.
I probably ought to stop associating Angela Carter with rotten weather though – I don’t want to have to wait for another storm before reading more of her work.
I have included a photograph of Carter and of the shutter - smashing havoc wreaked outside during my reading.
