The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter

It was this excellent review of The Magic Toyshop over at Another Cookie Crumbles, which finally persuaded me to try Angela Carter.  Although, and this was also pointed out by Uncertain Principles, the book once seen becomes instantly an object of desire, for the sake of the fabulous cover…

I’m at something of a loss to categorise this novel; ‘literary fiction’ is not sufficiently precise. Perhaps ‘coming of age meets dark fairytale.’

Initially Melanie and her siblings live in the lap of luxury, maintained materially by their parents, and nurtured by a kind housekeeper. But in a tragic reversal of fortune the children learn that their parents have died penniless, and that they are to live with their Uncle Philip, his wife and her two brothers, of whom they know nothing.

Wonderful descriptions introduce the brothers:

‘His face was that of Simple Ivan in a folk-tale, high cheek-bones, slanting eyes. There was a slight cast in the right eye, so that his glance was disturbing and oblique.’

or:

‘Maybe his legs were hairy under the worn-out trousers, coarse-pelted goat legs and neat, cloven hooves. Only he was too dirty for a satyr, who would probably wash frequently in mountain streams.’

And Aunt Margaret, with her tragic and cursed other-worldy presence:

‘On Sundays, she did her hair with far more care than usual, arranging it in smooth red coils and loops, and, with her uncustomary neatness and her grand necklace and her look of youth, she acquired a startling, hare-like, fleeting beauty, pared to the bone; a weird beauty that lasted until bedtime, when she took the necklace off and put it away again. Because she possessed this eldritch beauty so briefly each week, it was almost shocking.’

It’s a little difficult to pin down exactly wherein lies the charm of this book. It may in part originate from the rich and startling imagery…

‘Since she was thirteen, when her periods began, she had felt she was pregnant with herself, bearing the slowly ripening embryo of Melanie-grown-up inside herself for a gestation time the length of which she was not precisely aware. And, during this time, to climb a tree might provoke a miscarriage and she would remain forever stranded in childhood, a crop-haired tomboy.’

…or the symbolism and foreshadowing…

‘She parcelled up the dress and stuck it in the fork of the tree. She could carry it up with her and put it away again in the trunk and no-one would know it had been worn if they did not see the blood on the hem, and there was only a little blood. The cat put its head on one side and turned its sequin regard on the parcel; it stretched out its paddy paw and stroked the dress. Its paw was tipped with curved, cunning meat hooks. It had a cruel stroke. There was a ripping sound.’

…but maybe it is more in the allegorical nature of the story, which is, I suspect, univerally adaptable to the philosophy of the reader. I am reluctant to return to the pages, lest they no longer convey the sense which I initially perceived, but it may be that the first impression is the essential thing, regardless of revelations thrown up by a more analytical approach.

I was struck most strongly by the way that the story revolves around sex, is told in terms of sex, and yet the pervasive theme, loss of innocence, has little, if anything, to do with sex. There is also a very strong puppet motif. Whilst Uncle Philip is literally and metaphorically a puppet master, there are larger puppetry issues which must also be considered. These are emphasised by the insular and timeless nature of the family home.

‘The puppets clung together as if they would never part. Tension began to mount. They were like a needle stuck in a gramophone record, inexorably repeating embrace after embrace. Uncle Philip began to rumble again. Still entwined, the puppets threshed violently against each other as if overcome with concupiscence. Melanie saw, with a sinking of the heart, that this was not written into the script. The clapping petered out. She saw how Bothwell’s strings had become hopelessly entangled with those of his royal mistress; bound in a true lover’s knot, the puppets wrestled.’

The boundary between human and puppet is imperfectly delineated. The range of Uncle Philip’s awareness seems to be limited to the differentiation between good, biddable puppets and bad, unpredictable puppets. The characters feel like puppets to the reader also, as indeed in a sense they are. The subtle puppet imagery seems largely inapplicable to Uncle Philip for a great deal of the story, granting him a disturbing reality denied the other characters. In the above quote, in addition to the imagery which pleasingly ties together the main themes of the novel, there is also foreshadowing, and a hint of the presence of a shadowy uber-puppeteer in the person of the author. By which point we have more or less arrived at Shakespeare:

‘All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;’

I don’t want to spoil the conclusion, but I think by the end it becomes apparent that Uncle Philip also has strings which are being pulled on various levels. Melanie has lost her innocence in all but the obvious way; experienced loss and responsibility and guilt, and helplessness in the face of unwarranted and irrational cruelty. I think the ending would have been extremely disturbing were it not for the strong allegorical tone of the book. The characters are strongly written and vivid, but they live in a story where anything is possible.

 

read for The All Women Challenge & Never More Than Three Books Away from a Rat