a gallimaufry

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and with poems by Theodora Goss

(Edmund Dulac, Circe, the Enchantress, 1911; from here)

Following on from yesterday’s post about some of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fantastical stories, a quick look at some of her fantastical poetry.

In last year’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week I wrote about the Selected Poems published by Carcanet; they also publish STW’s New Collected Poems. However, I have a little book of poems called Voices from Fairyland and it brings together some of STW’s fantastical poems with works by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew. It’s a collection that works really well together because of the shared theme, and it has good introductions by Theodora Goss. (It’s published in the US by Aqueduct Press but if you’re in the UK you can obtain it with a little ingenuity.)

When I first proposed Voices from Fairyland as a title for this anthology, I meant that Coleridge, Mew, and Warner were writers who had heard voices from fairyland, calling to them as Mew’s changeling hears the fairies calling.[...] But now I think that these poets are the ones calling from fairyland: from a strange, dangerous, and enchanted country. They are calling to us with voices that I am not certain we can understand, because we have not yet learned to understand the fantastical in poetry.

Goss discusses how STW uses fantastical poetry, based on stories we already know, to give voices to those who cannot usually speak and whose voices in those stories are silent: the wife, the child, the lesbian.

How do you speak when speech becomes impossible? The figure for such impossible speech is Echo, who speaks although she cannot. She speaks through repetition and revision. She speaks by saying what others have said, with a different meaning [...]

In this way she can write about a desire that cannot be spoken, a woman’s love for a woman. And she can question whether the way we live our lives, with our mortgages and our three square meals, is sufficient. For example, ‘The Sleeping Beauty woke’, tips the happy ending right over:

The Sleeping Beauty woke:
The spit began to turn,
The woodmen cleared the brake,
The gardener mowed the lawn.
Woe’s me! And must one kiss
Revoke the silent house, the birdsong wilderness?

There is a yearning, in this and other poems, for something beyond the mundane (fairyland?). It can be reached in silence, in wilderness, in dreams, in desire. In the next poem, the poet is called by a voice from this place beyond, this fairyland, and responds:

In the Cotswolds

All day the rain
Fell on the wheat
And dripped from the gable
On to the stone;
And all day long
I sat alone
Save for the dog
Who slept at my feet.

Slept – till a-sudden
He roused in fear,
And snuffed at the door,
And would not be quelled.
I opened – and there
An old crone I beheld,
And round about her
The dusk drew near.

Something she said –
But her voice was hollow,
And chill was the hand
She laid on mine.
Her words were a riddle
I could not untwine;
And when she turned onward
I knew I must follow.

I felt the watery
Stubble souse
My ankles, and round me
Saw corn-shocks blurred.
And faint and fainter
Yet I heard
The dog bark on
In the empty house.

The disquiet of this poem has sunk into its very structure. There is a rhyme scheme – lines 2 and 8 rhyme with each other and 4 and 6 rhyme with each other. But the rhyme is so unusual and the first so delayed that you almost don’t hear it, although you expect it and want it. So there is a sense of waiting and unease to it, which reflects the waiting in the house and then the arrival of the mysterious, icy crone with her alluring riddle. The flatness of the monosyllables of the first stanza is like the raindrops falling, and there seems to be a hard music of ‘o’ and ‘d’ to the rest of the poem as the rain continues to fall and the poet to walk. We end with an empty house, not silent as Sleeping Beauty’s (that dog barking!); the poet wasn’t happy there but the journey on which s/he has set forth with the crone is unsettling in every possible meaning of the word.

The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern

Sometimes I reach the end of a book and really don’t know what to make of it. The Starless Sea has been one of those books.

(Study of an owl, pen and ink, French school, late seventeenth century; found here)

Never having read Morgenstern’s bestselling first novel, The Night Circus, I had no particular expectations of The Starless Sea other than stronger wrists as it is a 500-page tome. However, the promise of a quest inspired by a strange book, a dangerous secret club and a ‘subterranean labyrinth filled with stories’ tempted me to borrow it from the English-language section of my local library. Wouldn’t you?

The principal narrative in the novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student writing a thesis on video games who is also a devoted reader, and his discovery of a mis-shelved old book with no publication information. When he starts reading it, he discovers an incident from his own childhood has been printed in it. How could that be possible? The book is decorated with symbols of a sword, a key and a bee, and soon he has left the university campus for New York and a masked ball and adventures. His story is interspersed with stories from the book itself, from other books, from a diary; despite this increasingly complex layered structure it is not difficult to follow what is going on.

For what is remarkable about this novel is its lack of tension and its promotion of symbolism. I know – how can a book including a dangerous secret club lack tension? It does. The club swiftly becomes irrelevant, its leader powerless. The quest plot mainly involves Zachary wondering what the quest is. I too wondered what was going on a lot of the time. The key to the book lies in the juxtaposition of the stories and the repeated use of the symbols, and to be quite honest by the end I was mentally exhausted from the sheer size of the narrative and wanted more help from the author in deciding what was going on. Lazy reader.

There’s a scene early in the book in which a class discusses gaming as part of an Innovations in Storytelling course. They talk about how video games balance the framework of their programmed story (pre-destination, if you will) with giving the gamer the freedom to make their own choices (or exercise some free will. There are options and different possible endings, but all have been foreseen. Now, if only I had ever played a video game I think I would understand this novel a great deal better, because I think that Morgenstern is using video-game conventions to structure her novel, and Zachary – a character who exhibits very little personality and could easily stand as an archetypal reader – is our – the reader-gamer’s – avatar in the story. Morgenstern’s refusal to offer easy explanations of her book’s meaning is part of the idea that we, the reader-gamers, must decide for ourselves. This is made more explicit in the recurring stories about Time and Fate, as well as the ending, which I shall nobly resist giving away.

Another element Morgenstern takes from gaming, though it is common to a lot of fiction too, is immersiveness. I didn’t read The Starless Sea exactly to find out what would happen next, I read it for the pure pleasure of being in the worlds that Morgenstern created. Painted doors which open, precocious cats, strange visitors at a wayside inn, jealous stars. Imagine a library filled with all the books ever and never published, a sea of honey deep in the earth which is actually a sea of stories, a forest of cherry trees blossoming at night, an Owl King. Some of Morgenstern’s ideas have literary antecedents, some seem purely her own invention, all are woven together to form a book-lover’s paradise. Every time I opened The Starless Sea, I wondered what marvel I would read next.

(Still Life with a Snake, Elias Van den Broeck; Belgium, seventeenth century; from here)

For some readers, the lack of tension or character development or explication may be off-putting; for me, some of the gnomic utterances grated, and Morgenstern did not always successfully navigate the line when it came to tweeness. (And the UK cover is hideous!) However, despite all this, how could I not enjoy this beautiful expression of love for stories? I shall definitely be re-reading it as there is a great deal that I missed. (Alas for now I must return it to the library.)

(Images of blocked book covers from here.)

Meanwhile, in ‘not-buying-any-new-books-resolution’ news, I have bought:

• Of Cats and Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (well, I do have to read it for STW reading week, so that doesn’t really count)
• Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg (really I bought it for my daughter) (when she’s older) (but I’ll read it in the mean time, silly not to)

and I have pre-ordered:

• Medusa’s Daughters, edited by Theodora Goss (which has led me to covet Handheld Press’s Women’s Weird)
  The Tower of Babel, by Christelle Dabois (it’s the third in the series and I wouldn’t want to forget to read it the very moment it’s available)
• The Pure Heart, by Trudi Tweedie.

So that resolution has proved strong.

But in other news, while excavating a corner of the study I found my copy of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which I thought I had rashly given, unread, to a charity shop. It turns out that tidying up occasionally has its uses.

Selected Poems, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a published poet before she ever succeeded as a novelist, her debut collection, L’Espalier, coming out in 1925. For about the next decade she interspersed fiction with verse, until the publication of Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933/4. Claire Harman explains in this fascinating article about STW’s poetry why this collaboration with her love, Valentine Ackland, effectively ended her career as a poet. STW continued to write poetry for the rest of her life, though not to publish much of it. Shortly before her death in 1978, a Collected Poems was mooted and she wrote excitedly to her prospective publisher, ‘I intend to be a posthumous poet!’ Although all her poetry is currently out of print (with the notable exception of some of her fantastical poems, which are collected along with work by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew in Voices from Fairyland edited by Theodora Goss), some of it is on the internet and second-hand copies of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems can be readily found, so while it’s true that her fiction still overshadows her poetry, the latter is not entirely forgotten.

The poems in the Selected Poems display STW’s ability in a wide range of forms and genres. She was as versatile in her poetry as she was in her fiction. I can’t find an interesting way to write about the collection as a whole, so I have picked out some poems which appealed to me. Overall there is less evidence of her spiky wit in the poetry in this collection, more melancholy.

One of my favourite poems is ‘King Duffus’:

King Duffus

When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned;
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.

For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.

Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?

There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:

My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.

I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.

Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?

King Duffus’s awakening immediately follows on from the destruction of the witches; it is surely their power that has held him for six months in this wonderful dream world. The water of his ‘freshet’ tears contrasts with his ‘blackened’, coal-like physique and the ‘smoky hall’ of his responsibilities. These externals are further linked, through the metaphor of fire, with the burned witches and their ashes. King Duffus’s dream was of harmony and flowers, a crown light as ‘foam’, a feast under ‘linden’ trees in a ‘green yard’. There he was nourished as much by the song and conversation he had with poets, philosophers and Christ’s mother as by the ‘fat bacon’ he carved and the ‘cool beer’ he drank. The world to which he wakens is hard and sterile, a ‘vexed kingdom’ of clattering swords. He cries (petulantly?) that he wished to dream longer. But these dreams were also bonds, a ‘spell’ that ‘trussed’ him and perhaps the kingdom is vexed because he has been indulging himself too long in his beautiful fantasies and avoiding his responsibilities.

‘King Duffus’ is a poem containing a story, and another such is ‘Road 1940’. This poem is very different, however.

Road 1940

Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine,
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And lies across my heart heavy as lead,
Heavy as the dead.

Why did I lift it, she said,
Out of its cradle in the wheel-tracks?
On the dusty road burdens have melted like wax,
Soldiers have thrown down their rifles, misers slipped their packs:
Yes, and the woman who left it there has sped
With a lighter tread.

Though I should save it, she said,
What have I saved for the world’s use?
If it grow to hero it will die or let loose
Death, or to hireling, nature already is too profuse
Of such, who hope and are disinherited,
Plough, and are not fed.

But since I’ve carried it, she said,
So far I might as well carry it still.
If we ever should come to kindness someone will
Pity me perhaps as the mother of a child so ill,
Grant me even to lie down on a bed;
Give me at least bread.

Inspired I should think by the German invasion of France in May 1940, it’s a poem in which a woman laments picking up an abandoned baby on what is presumably her flight ahead of the invading troops. Her initial act of kindness has soured, as war sours the generous impulses in us. The child, already depersonalised as ‘it’, is nothing but a burden comparable to a soldier’s rifle or a miser’s pack. Its only use might be as a means to food or somewhere to sleep for the woman. The woman despairs that the child is just one of a multitude in an overpopulated world, destined either to be a hero who will ‘die or let loose / Death’ or a starveling, faceless worker. Yet she too is depersonalised, an anonymous woman on a road with thousands of other refugees. Why should she deserve succour and not the child? She knows that her best hope of charity is to make herself less anonymous by using the child to garner pity, otherwise she remains just another face in the crowd. Repenting of rescuing the child strips her of some of her humanity though it is sadly understandable in her desperate circumstances.

(Photograph of refugees in France, 1940, from here)

Everything should come in threes so the final poem that I’ve chosen the last poem in the book, ‘How fare my ash-trees now?’ Like many of the poems included in this collection, it is about death and about life continuing anyway, and seems to form a conversation between a ghost and someone still living who loved them:

‘How fare my ash-trees now?’

How fare my ash trees now?
Do my fruit-trees bear?
The gnarled apple and the stately pear –
How do they grow, and I not there, not there?

Neither more nor less
Than when you walked below.
Apple and pear tree fruit, and ash-trees grow,
And the ripe fruit falls, and leaves begin to snow.

Yes, I remember well
The plunge of apple and pear,
The whirled whisper of ash-elaves flocking down air –
But is it all as when I was there, was there?

Yes and no.
Nettles and weeds grow tall
Muffle each fruit fall:
Unsought-for lie apple and pear, and rot one and all.

(Andrew Wyeth, In the Orchard, 1972; watercolour and pencil on paper; Adelson Galleries; from here)

 

(Picture of King Duffus from here, where you can read more about him and the witches)

the state of me

Today the sun is shining, an afternoon’s training on evaluating students’ speaking and writing skills has been cancelled and we are not exiting the EU with no deal. Reasons to be cheerful!

Another reason to be cheerful: my review of Forms of Enchantment, Marina Warner’s collection of essays on art and artists, is up at Shiny New Books.

Another reason to be cheerful: the world is full of wonderful books! Worried by the prospect of never again being able to buy a British book after Brexit, I have been stockpiling. A little reckless, considering how many unread books I already have, but no half-measures in a crisis...

First: a collection of fairy tales and fairy-tale poems by Theodora Goss. Confession: I’ve already read this. Although I like her novels, I believe she’s a better short-story writer (at the moment, anyway). I did not think that everything in this collection was great but I enjoyed everything, especially ‘Blanchefleur’, a new version of ‘The White Cat’, and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, which adds a lovely twist to Oscar Wilde’s story (as a child I disliked Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales and found them mawkish, perhaps I should revisit them).

Next: Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Gingerbread. A novel about a gingerbread-maker, a mysterious long-lost friend, a country that may not exist, by one of the best British writers working today, I can’t wait to start on this. (But I still have about eleventy billion pages of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree to read, not that this is a chore, plus something for SNB...)

Then, well, this is all Hayley’s fault. She wrote a review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories so beguiling that I had to order a copy immediately. And then I accidentally bid on a lot of STW books plus Valentine Ackland’s autobiography, For Sylvia (Ackland was a poet and the lover of STW), and won! Tthe books are the novel The Corner that Held Them, and a collection of short stories called The Innocent and the Guilty.) On a roll, I then bought STW’s diaries, edited by Claire Harman. I suspect the only justification for this will be a STW week. Is there a STW week?

Finally, although not strictly stockpiling as I bought these locally in the kringwinkel or recycling shop:

(Bandits, by Elmore Leonard; Maigret and the Madwoman, by Georges Simenon; The Best Man to Die, by Ruth Rendell; Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden.) I had never heard of Dorothy Eden but who could resist that cover? And it was only 25 cents. According to Wikipedia she was born in New Zealand and emigrated to Britain. I am assuming she’s going to fill the Mary-Stewart-shaped hole in my life.

I like to have at least a small pile of detective novels to hand for times when I am ill or unhappy. Nothing like murder to cheer you up I suppose.

But even while I’m writing this, I am still obsessing over Brexit. Crossing my fingers that the WA is voted down (again) today and that MPs can find a way forward on Monday. Now I am going to take advantage of the nice weather and do some gardening, and then I’m going to work on a rather limp short story I am writing. Have a happy weekend, everyone! What are you reading at the moment?

(Nala, demonstrating how to cope with British politics)

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, by Theodora Goss

(Yanina Movchan, Embrace, from here; her website is here)

It’s been pretty hot here and so, when not concocting horrible puddings, I’ve been ignoring the work I should be doing, also my daughter, and lying as close to a fan as possible, reading. And I can heartily recommend this book as the perfect way to forget that it’s 42^oC in your garden, and that you have a pile of work, and, indeed, a child.

Mrs Poole frowned and put her hands on her hips. ‘I’m worried about Miss Mary and the rest of them, that’s all. I wish they would write us a proper letter—telegrams are like those Egyptian hieroglyphs they have now at the British Museum. You never quite know what they mean. As for Alpha and Omega, and I don’t know why you couldn’t have called them sensible, decent cat names, like Tom and Puss—just keep them out of my kitchen. Two dead mice they left on the floor yesterday! I stepped on one of them this morning and had to clean the bottoms of my slippers with carbolic!’

‘Well,’ said Catherine, reasonably, ‘I think that comes under the category of doing their jobs, don’t you think? After all, you said they could stay as long as they caught mice. They must have overheard you. And two dead mice are better in the kitchen than two live ones, aren’t they?’

‘Hrumph!’ said Mrs Poole.

        MRS POOLE: I would never make such an undignified sound! [...]

Just then, the front door bell rang.

        MRS POOLE: It was actually half an hour later, but if you want to put lies into your book, don’t let me stop you!

        CATHERINE: It’s more suspenseful this way.

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, apart from having a brilliant title, is the second in a trilogy which began with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (published last summer). In the first book, we were introduced to the Athena Club, a group of female monsters from famous nineteenth-century texts (mostly – Mary Jekyll and Diana Hyde never existed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story but they are plausible inventions). Goss re-imagines these monsters, their stories and the stories of their creators, re-casting the monsters as likeable heroines struggling with their unusual abilities, and their creators as monstrous scientists who have abandoned all ethical constraints in their work.

In this second book, Goss takes on Dracula. When the Athena Club – Mary, Diana, Justine Frankenstein, Beatrice Rappaccini and Catherine Moreau – receive a letter from Lucinda Van Helsing begging for their help, they immediately make plans to assist her. But before Mary and Justine can leave for Vienna, a telegram arrives from Mina Murray: Lucinda has been kidnapped. It seems that, like the members of the Athena Club, she has been subjected to dreadful experiments – by her own father. The Athena Club must race to rescue Lucinda, discover the latest fiendish plot by renegade scientists and expose it to the Annual Meeting of the Société des Alchimistes in Budapest, while evading capture by old enemies and destruction by a new and deadly foe, and ingesting vast quantities of cake. It’s fast-paced and entertaining, a book for which the terms ‘madcap’ and ‘romp’ were surely designed; it’s also charming and rather funny.

Goss, many of whose wonderful short stories are formally inventive, has said that the forms of the gothic texts she draws upon are themselves monstrous, and she has tried to reflect this in her Athena Club books. So her tale of derring-do, which is being written down by Catherine, is frequently interrupted by other characters, who comment on – and complain about – the story and on Catherine’s way of writing, adding extra information they deem important. This revising of well-known stories is a collaborative act among the characters who have been ‘wronged’ in the classic versions. It’s also a way of highlighting the inherent partiality, unreliability even, of any one version of a story – Van Helsing’s perspective of events in the novel might be radically different to that of the Athena Club members, in fact sometimes even Catherine’s perspective is different to someone else’s. Furthermore, it reminds us of how an author must shape a text, imagining what she doesn’t know, leaving out some details and including others (Catherine has to deal with interpolated protests about all of these things from her friends, as in the piece I quoted above in which the housekeeper, Mrs Poole, takes issue with her writing). Sometimes she even has to change the language in which the characters are speaking:

‘He does, actually,’ said Greta. Suddenly, she grinned, and Justine could see the street urchin she had been behind the carefully trained maid. ‘Don’t ask me how I know that.’

Justine could not help smiling in response. ‘Very well, I shall restrain my curiosity.’

        DIANA: Wait a minute, you were telling Mary’s story, in her voice and everything. And now you’re telling Justine’s.

        CATHERINE: Well, Mary wasn’t there, so I can’t tell this part from her perspective, can I?

        DIANA: It just seems ... weird. [...]

        JUSTINE: Catherine, I seem to remember that Greta and I were speaking in French.

        CATHERINE: If you want this section to be in French, you’ll have to write it yourself.

‘Perhaps I’ll tell you another time how I learned where the Emperor keeps his handkerchief!’ said Greta, in French, for that was the language she and Justine were speaking. ‘It is, at any rate, an amusing anecdote [...]’

It’s a clever device and I have to say it works better in this book than in the previous one, enriching the reader’s understanding of the characters, keeping the tone light and balancing the more outlandish happenings.

Although it’s not strictly necessary, if like me you’re a homeworky sort of person it is worth (re)reading the classics on which Goss draws (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Island of Dr Moreau, Frankenstein, The Great God Pan and Rappaccini’s Daughter, and for this volume, Dracula, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and Carmilla). Certainly, seeing how Goss re-works these texts is one of the many pleasures of her two novels and they are all classics for a reason, they’re no hardship to read. (Now I’m sounding like a teacher again...)

All in all, this is superior fun and ideal summer holiday reading...

(Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov, By the Lake, oil on canvas, 1918; from here)

on why holidays are good

Well, that was more of a break than I’d intended! It seems that even people who only work part-time sometimes need a holiday too, and I’m just back from two weeks of jauntering about England visiting unlucky friends and family and probably leaving a trail of odd articles of dirty laundry behind me. We learnt about the pioneering plastic surgery performed during the Second World War on pilots and aircrew who were badly burned at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead; we marvelled at Viking musical instruments and also a massive Viking poo at the Jorvik Centre in York; we revisited the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, despite the National Trust still a magical place; and we went several times to the Ipswich Museum, where the Egyptian Gallery has inspired my daughter to mummify the next unfortunate pet to die (she has even purchased a small canopic jar for the stomach; I am hoping that I can steer her more in the ship-burial direction, coward as I am).

Before my holiday I was tired, depressed and grappling with the problem I expect most of us deal with, of what is the point of any of this when there is so much misery, cruelty and destruction in the world. How can people bear such suffering as so many do, and how can we bear to witness it and yet do nothing effective to prevent it? Now I feel better but this is because I have distanced myself from it, and that feels wrong somehow, selfish and solipsistic. People who are fleeing war or poverty don’t have the option of taking a holiday, enjoying their garden, reading lovely novels or picnicking with friends. So although I feel happier at the moment, I do not know how to resolve this. Any suggestions gratefully received. :)

Anyway, back to the holiday and cheerier themes. As ever, I forgot to take any photographs. But! I also went a bit wild in the bookshops. For this we can all blame my parents who generously gave me a book token for Waterstone’s. (Although even I cannot blame them for the church-fête and charity-shop acquisitions.) So, I shall show you my haul and am keen to know which ones you have read and what you thought of them...

(The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson, because I love the Romantics and I love reading biographies of talented women; The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley, because her first novel was fun; The Encyclopaedia of the Dead, by Danilo Kiš, because both Kaggsy and Nicholas Lezard recommended it; Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics, because how could I not after reading HeavenAli’s review? Starlings, by Jo Walton, because she seems an interesting writer and short stories are a good way to get to know someone’s work)

(Emily of New Moon, by L.M. Montgomery, because how is it I don’t have a copy of this already? The Storm Keeper’s Island, by Catherine Doyle, which is obviously for my daughter and not at all for me; Peter Pan and Wendy, by J.M. Barrie, this is actually really for my daughter and is illustrated by Mabel Lucie Atwell sentimentally but sweetly)

(Here is the frontispiece from Peter Pan and Wendy, how could I reasonably resist?)

(The Complete Fairy Tales, by Charles Perrault, which is a kind gift from Hayley of Desperate Reader and which I only just managed to prise from my mother’s hands; Folk Tales of the British Isles, edited by Kevin Crossley-Holland, my star score from the Samaritan’s Bookshop at only £2.50, I am still cackling with glee over that one how lucky am I? In the background a dragon made by my daughter is posing nonchalantly)

(And a handful of detective novels, The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin; False Scent and Death at the Dolphin, by Ngaio Marsh; I like to have a little pile of detective novels, children’s books and other easy reads for when I am lazy or tired and I now have definitely enough to keep me going for a while)

That is not all: I have forgotten to photograph another charity-shop purchase, Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman, which I am devouring at the moment. It is lovely. Meanwhile, as if that weren’t enough, I came home to find Theodora Goss’s new novel had arrived, yippee!

(There appears to be a Christmas decoration as well as a dragon in the background, oh dear...)

And while I was away, Shiny New Books had their Booker Anniversary Week, to which I contributed short pieces on Troubles, by J.G. Farrell (winner of the Lost Booker), The Sea, by John Banville, and The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. I enjoyed all of them very much but I have to admit my favourite was Troubles. The other reviews are excellent and it forms an interesting if partial survey of changing literary tastes and fashions.

Normal service here will be resuming, in the mean time please do comment with your opinions and advice and I hope that you have been enjoying the summer so far.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss

(Detail from Fernand Khnopff, I Lock the Door Upon Myself (1891), inspired by a poem by Christina Rossetti; found here)

I’m very fond of Theodora Goss’s short stories, so when I saw that she was publishing a novel I was excited and ordered a copy straight away. Goss’s stories are often formally quite experimental and fantastical; if you like Lud-in-the-Mist or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, her work will appeal to you. This novel in fact grew out of a short story called ‘The Mad Scientist’s Daughter’, which you can read here. While I feel that ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’ have become overused in titles, here that use is appropriate, since it is their fathers and their fathers’ work which form the common bond between the main characters. It also alludes to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which as you will see is also appropriate.

Mary Jekyll has just buried her mother; her father predeceased her some years before and in mysterious circumstances. A provision in her mother’s will leads her to the Society of Mary Magdalen and a young girl named Diana Hyde who claims to be her sister. The fate of their father(s) is intertwined with an investigation into a series of brutal murders of prostitutes in London’s East End, conducted by Sherlock Holmes. For yes, this London of the 1890s is a London in which monsters abound, there’s a nefarious secret society and Mary and Diana are not the only young women with monstrous fathers.

It isn’t actually necessary to have read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Island of Dr Moreau and Dracula, but I must say that part of the fun of this novel is seeing what Goss has done with the original texts. All of the female monsters have their first appearances, however fleeting, in these Gothic classics. During the course of Goss’s novel they recount their own versions of the stories, which differ significantly from the originals. The differences imply a feminist commentary on the originals, while destabilising them and insisting they are not ‘true’. Questioning the factual ‘truth’ of fiction and claiming it is poor biography is a nice inversion of the accusation sometimes levelled at autobiographies that they are not ‘true’ but ‘made up’ like fiction. There are some good in-jokes too, such as Justine having ‘Miltonic’ English prose.

Goss’s playing with the idea of text and fiction continues in a lovely innovation. One character is the ‘author’ of the novel; she writes the main action and she ‘rewrites’ the other characters’ stories, presumably to their satisfaction because they all chip in with their comments. Here Diana has been telling/writing the story of her origins – Mrs Poole is the housekeeper.

‘To think that you were born in such a place!’ said Mrs. Poole. Suddenly, her heart swelled with pity for the poor orphan child, and she regretted her earlier harshness.

MARY: It’s a good thing Mrs. Poole is sorting laundry, or whatever she’s doing. I don’t want to hear what she would say to that!

DIANA: How do you know her heart didn’t swell with pity? Mrs. Poole can say what she likes, but she always gives me the largest chop and the most pudding.

CATHERINE: That’s because you’re so scrawny.

DIANA: How do you know? Wouldn’t it be rich if our precious Mary wasn’t her favorite after all?

MARY: For goodness’ sake, can you just finish your section?

DIANA: You were the one who interrupted in the first place.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, also feeling a surge of pity for her long-lost sister.

MARY: Oh please!

This questions the ‘truthfulness’ of this account too; after all, Catherine admits that she is using her imagination when writing it all down. It also enacts, on a textual level, the mutual co-operation of the characters who must work together to defeat their common enemy, and the reclamation of their own voices.

By doing this Goss diverges from a tendency of the classics on which she draws to use their monsters and their plots to externalise fear. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, is at a very basic level concerned with our relationship with our ‘dark side’ and our terror of being overwhelmed by it: the characters and plot externalise this. In Goss’s work, the female monsters are a marginalised group who turn their differences to their advantage, whether this be by appearing in a circus or running an apothecary. There is little of the psychological darkness and horror here other than the division of London into two distinct cities: the ‘nice’ London of the West End and the poorer, darker one of the East. Goss instead creates a very detailed and physical world in which the efforts of the main characters are often hampered by practical issues. Such matters as housekeeping, the supply of clean clothes, the lack of pockets in women’s clothes, food, the cost of a cab, the propriety of entering certain places: these all prey on our heroines’ minds. This focus on the mundane makes the monsters and the monstrous more acceptable. Sherlock Holmes mansplaining to Mary Jekyll the story of her own father’s death made me chuckle.

Do I have some quibbles? I do indeed, although this shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is a very enjoyable book to read and clearly written in a spirit of fun. It’s a very plot-driven novel and the pacing is good but the plot itself holds no great surprises or twists. The real strength of the book is its premise – female monsters telling their own stories! – and the literary games it plays. I wished Goss had pushed the commentaries which interrupt her narrative further; they sometimes became a bit repetitive or even redundant and that was a pity. I should also have enjoyed a little more introspection on the part of the characters, especially about their monstrousness, in between the somewhat breathless action. One of the victims of the serial killer is named Molly Keane; I couldn’t help wondering what an innocent Anglo-Irish novelist had ever done to Theodora Goss that she had to meet such a gruesome end. However, it seems there is a sequel in the works – our heroines have been invited to Vienna by one Lucinda Van Helsing, an orang-utan is on the loose and surely heading for Paris – so perhaps some of my quibbles will become superfluous. Certainly Theodora Goss is a writer to watch; if, for me, this didn’t quite match up to her stories, it’s entertaining and bodes well for future novels. (Meanwhile, you can find some of her work online here.)