BOOK REVIEW - ANGELA CARTER - AMERICAN GHOSTS AND OLD WORLD WONDERS 1993 Vintage Press.
A collection of stories and thinly disguised essays on various themes.
LIZZIES TIGER America, a four year old girl wants to see a circus tiger, but her poor parents forbid it. She runs away to see it anyway, and gets molested by the tiger tamer, and weeps when he later shows cruelty and invincibility before the beast that fears him. The girl is then identified by members of the circus audience – she is Lizzie Borden, the murderess, who also appears in Carter’s Black Venus story The Fall rover Axe Murders.
JOHN FORD’S ‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE John Ford was a Jacobean dramatist and this was one of his darkest and most shocking tragedies, a tale of incest and murder. Carter imagines it was really produced by ford’s namesake, Western movie director John Ford, and turns it into a variation on The Searchers.
GUN FOR THE DEVIL – A young man who’s parents were murdered, seeks revenge and makes a pact with Satan to gain control of a magic gun that can never miss it’s target until the 7th bullet is fired. The first six despatch the family of the villain responsible for his parent’s death, while the 7th accidentally kills his lover. Fleeing to desert, the killer finds the devil waiting to claim his soul. A great western horror tale that deserves to be filmed.
THE MERCHANT OF SHADOWS A film student tries to find out the truth about a legendary Hollywood film director, and meets his widow, and her crazy sister, as well as their pet, Leo, the ageing lion from the MGM movie logo. The sisters ruin his chances of disturbing the legend, and keep the truth a mystery and an enigma. The writer is disillusioned and homesick. A creepy story with some great moments, but ultimately vague and unsettled.
THE GHOST SHIPS – A Christmas story with a difference. In Puritan dominated Massachusetts, Christmas celebrations have been banned, but the ships representing the pagan traditions and feastings of the old Yule are seen approaching. The Puritan will causes the ships to founder and sink, but some Christmas pudding washes up on shore and the children find pleasures undreamed of – the past breaks through anyway ready for the great revival of joy.
IN PANTOLAND – Essay contained in a story with fairy tale characters lamenting the rise of television and the sanitization, political correctness of their traditions, but showing how much of its real message is there, for those who look closely while watching.
ASHPUTTLE, OR THE MOTHER’S GHOST - Three very dark telling of the Cinderella story, re-introducing its brutal elements, i.e., a coach made from her mother’s coffin, step-sisters amputating their own toes to make the slipper fit. Carter reasons that the absentee parents and the interfering stepparents were more central to events than in modern versions of the popular fairy tale.
ALICE IN PRAGUE, OR THE CURIOUS ROOM – A real oddity in which Elizabethan alchemist John Dee is in Prague, trying to captures an angel in a bubble as one of his experiments. He is assisted by Ned Kelly, (Dee’s assistant was con-man, Edward Kelley, but Carter deliberately confuses him with the Australian outlaw from the 19th century). They don’t capture an angel, but Alice, of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland fame, and she baffles them by changing size and giving them complicated riddles (answered only in footnotes). Carter piles surrealism on surrealism for the hell of it here, and dedicates the story to Jan Svankmayer, because of his animated nightmare film version of the Carroll stories.
IMPRESSIONS: THE WRIGHTSMAN MAGDALENE – An essay on a famous painting of Mary Magdalene, questioning whether she truly ended her career in prostitution after Jesus forgave her sins. Here she is an ageing reflective woman of some dignity, retired to the Mediterranean.
Not on par with her other short story collections, but still excellent overall reading.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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