Books & Poetry

When writers die before their time, what dies with them is all the possibilities: all the books they might have written, and all the witty things they might have said. Angela Carter is 14 years dead, which means 14 years have passed in which she has not mocked idiocy and created magic.
She was a great cultural journalist as well as a great novelist – the lively intelligence that pervades the fiction needed its daily exercise. The obsessions of her work weave back and forth between reviews and short stories and screenplays and novels – werewolves and harlequins, drag queens and jewelled flowers, stopped clocks and sharp blades. She wrote one of the most decorated proses of the twentieth century; it would have been precious were it not for the tensed muscularity underlying it.

Carter was witty without feeling that she had to be funny. She saw compulsive jokiness as one of the traps of British charm; if you are engaged in a struggle to make and save your life, as all women are, and most people born in the working class and on its bohemian fringes, it is a mistake to smile a conciliatory smile or to make your masters laugh. Far better a sardonic grin or a dark jibe that leaves them uneasy. The sharp, wry edginess of Carter’s work was a considered strategy of resistance. Feature continues

She was also a writer and a woman torn between a dour sense that things will end in tears and a joyful love of the show-off moment. In one of her fragments of memoir, she talks of going to see her grandmother dressed in the fishnets and leathers of late-’50s finery. The woman mocked her, saying that one day Carter would be old and ugly like her. Wrong, and not merely factually – in the early middle-age in which she died, Carter still had her own chastened glamour.

Carter’s work is full of mirrors and the truths they tell. Mirrors are where we find out what is glamorous, what is deceitful and what is true; the feral child Wolf-Alice learns her humanity from looking at what she never quite understands – an other self which gives her the wistful half-smiles otherwise lacking in her life.

But the tricks of reflected light must be balanced out by the knowledge that we inhabit flesh as well as mirrors. In ‘Nights at the Circus’, the essential truthfulness of Fevvers’ tall tales is guaranteed by the solid thump of her large feet on the stage; she may have wings and fly, but she is also a creature of earth who wolfs bacon sandwiches and swills expensive champagne. The ageing hoofers of ‘Wise Children’ live long enough to be symbolic of their century because they always have an eye to the main chance – food first, morality later, as that nice Mr Brecht once said.

Carter is a poet of the urban jungle, as well as of the wild wood where we find danger, and the haunted palaces of love where vampires lurk. There is a vividness in her work that comes from the enthusiasm with which her characters face life and its sensations; it is also a construct, a made artifice based on the premise that all these places are aspects of the mind as well as the backdrop for the body’s perils and pleasures. One of her best radio plays is about Richard Dadd, the Victorian painter and father-killer, and she shares his sense that every inch of canvas must be filled with imagery, and that images should always be crisp to the eye and terrifying in their intensity.

The passionate, singing glitter of Carter’s prose and plots is the servant of her desire to tell tales. All of her characters are ultimately storytellers, and the tales they tell are often twice-told tales made new. One of her best books was ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which refashioned Bluebeard, and Beauty and the Beast, sometimes over and over, as parables of the desire of the mind and the lusts of the flesh. We tell stories to warm winter nights when the wolves are outside the house; they entertain us, but they also teach us how to live sanely in a world we share with horrors.

Angela Carter is dead and lives in her readers’ sense of her work as a bundle of gifts she left to boobytrap our memories. The body of work she produced is constantly present as a cabinet of bright curiosities. It is also a perpetual source of righteous thinking, free of shabby managerial orthodoxies, and anarchic in its scorn of the powerful and cruel and thoughtless. We need constantly to read and reread her.