Miss Eliza's Book Review - Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber

 

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Published by: Penguin Classics
Publication Date: 1979
Format: Paperback, 176 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

A young and blushing bride is rushed by her new husband to his isolated castle. She doesn't love him, but he is wealthy, and that decides her mother. Once in his domain he subjects her to humiliations and sexual sadism. Yet this is just his character. A character that will test his new wife beyond sanity. For he purposefully leaves her alone to her own devices and she finds that which brings her husband joy. Torture. Murder. Death. All his previous wives' corpses in the cellar. All brutally slain at her new husband's hand. Man's baser desires and his ability to overcome or embrace them run thematically through these ten classic stories which are reinterpretations and retellings of some of the most famous of fairy tales. Or distillations if you will, as Carter said, "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories." Beasts from vampires to werewolves stride across the pages of Carter's collection. Some of the beasts look dangerous but are truly kind, while man may look harmless yet he can be the most dangerous of all. And while they are adult, brutal and sensual, they aren't just versions, despite Carter not wanting them to be labelled as such she can't escape the classification, but they are something more. They are subversive, they are feminine, they are something entirely new that spawned many imitations and inspired many authors with her magical realism. They are their own thing, but the beginning of something new is often not the best or the final version of what was attempted.

There is no doubt in my mind that The Bloody Chamber is a classic. Female empowerment through the retelling and restructuring of fairy tales was at the time it was written original and has now evolved into a subgenre all it's own thanks to the groundwork laid by Carter. Yet because something is a classic doesn't mean it's enjoyable. Yes, you can have admiration for something that you just don't quite like, and that's how I feel about this collection of short stories. I feel as if they were written to be studied, not enjoyed. Carter was pushing boundaries, establishing ideas that would development into today's literary tropes, but these stories come across as experiments, some failing and some succeeding. As a whole they are overly written with obscure words meant to be studied for hidden and double meanings. This style of writing doesn't really flow. It has meaning but that doesn't mean it's fun to read. Of the ten short stories the titular story is the strongest. Based on "Bluebeard" this overly sexual story plays with the underpinnings of the original tale of a beastly marriage and allows it to become somehow modern with the introduction of technology and also feminist with the bride being saved by her mother instead of her brothers. Yet what I was forcibly struck by is how this story has effected other storytellers. You can see how it influenced Susan Hill's writing of The Woman in Black. But more importantly, I defy you to think of any world in which Guillermo del Toro could have made Crimson Peak without The Bloody Chamber having existed first.

Despite how groundbreaking a collection this is there is a repetitive quality that just grinds on you. Carter is in several instances taking the same source material and trying to spin it into a different interpretation. Of the ten stories two are based on "Beauty and the Beast" while three, almost a third of the book, are based on "Little Red Riding Hood," though one of them, in a way I can not fathom, supposedly incorporates Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Was it the mirror? Please someone explain this to me! So when you get to the end of the book and you have three stories all coming out of the same source, you might like the first, by the second you feel as if you've already read it, and by the third you are just sick of the story. It doesn't help that she literally uses the same turn of phrase again and again. Observations, words, structure, they add to the repetitive feeling. Yet if we were to take a bigger view, using the same theme, the same story, the same language over and over is like an artist creating a series of paintings. There's a unifying theme. There's a similarity. There's something undefinable that the artist is bringing to the work that makes them all a unit. So while the stories in The Bloody Chamber might repeat, might make clunky transitions from one story to the next, I find it fascinating how you are looking at her process. You are seeing her develop a series of ideas. Like the visual artist, she is working through shit, and as I've said previously, that is why this collection is interesting. You can studying it, you can break it down, and you can see how she's working through it.

Carter isn't just working through concepts, she's also working through ways in which to tell a story. So yes, occasionally the stories can end up feeling like writing exercises watching how she plays with narrating the story, but never once did it slip into that smugness that defined the "codas" in John Scalzi's Redshirts. There it felt like pretension, here it feels like experimentation, and that is the saving grace. The two stories that play with this the most are "Puss-in-Boots" and "The Erl-King." The later story is almost incomprehensibly dense and there's a weird disconnect with the narration slipping between second and third person, and yes, I will always have issues with second person narration, there's something about it that rubs me the wrong way. Yet "Puss-in-Boots" works in switching between first and third person. The slipping between the two from personal to detached just becomes the personality of a cat. Through this little narrative slip she is able to make her whole story imbued with the personality of her protagonist. So while I may criticize this roughness to the stories, this literary exercise feel, sometimes it works so well that I can not fault her for trying something again and again until she got it right. I guess what I just find most interesting about this book is that it's an author willing to show their flaws. Their process is on display and once again I come back to the importance of this work, not as a book you sit down and read for fun, but one you sit down and study. You embrace the lessons you learn. Though not this time through fairy tale morality, but through the tricks of the storyteller.

All the tricks and twists and literary play mean that while some stories are long others are brutally short and brutally violent. While "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" could fall under the brutally short descriptor, a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" at top speed, only one story falls under both categories, "The Snow Child," which even Wikipedia deems nothing more than a vignette. After I read this story my only thoughts were "WTF did I just read!?!" The story is literally only two pages long and involves a Count wishing a child, a "young woman" into being who dies and he then rapes her corpse and she turns into snow! What the hell is this story supposed to be about? What is the moral? Most versions of "The Snow-child" are about infidelity and desire, so sure, we've got that here what with the Count raping a young girl in front of his wife... but I just don't know how to handle this. Fairy Tales have always been about subjugation, teaching lessons so children and wives will behave, yet Carter has made her stories more about empowerment and belonging, finding you place in the world even if it's amongst the beasts. What does the rape of anyone, let alone a snow corpse, have to do with any of the messages and themes she's been toying with? Why didn't anyone go, you know, your stories, they can be a bit brutal, but this one, well this one is a step too far, so let's just nix it and move onto the moody vampire? OK? Seriously, MOODY VAMPIRE no more rape! I'd even take a fourth retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" than to EVER have to think of Carter's version of "The Snow Child" ever again.

Miss Eliza's Book Review - Arthur Phillips's Angelica

 

Angelica by Arthur Phillips
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: April 3rd, 2007
Format: Paperback, 331 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

The Barton household is about to be violently upset. Whether it's of a supernatural nature or a more prosaic nature is dependent on who you are listening to. The simple facts are these. Constance Barton and her husband Joseph had a hard time having a child. Two painful miscarriages and finally Angelica was born. In an attempt to thwart her husband's sexual advantages Angelica has been living in their bedroom for four years. Constance couldn't handle more disappointments and Angelica is enough for her. Angelica is her everything. But things are changing and Joseph finally imposes his will, which is a rare occurrence, and Angelica is removed to her nursery and the master bedroom is once more home to the martial bed. That is when the trouble starts. Constance views it as a haunting. There are smells and spectres and while Joseph points out that it could all be due to her high strung nature, she is convinced something more is at play; and is Angelica playing along? Could the child actually be scared or is she feeding off her mother's emotions? When Joseph claims his martial rights with Constance the spectre takes on physical form and something must be done. The maid Nora has heard of a spiritualist who specializes in cleansing houses, Anne Montague, a failed actress who is supplementing her income via overwrought housewives. But Anne sees something in the Barton household to change her mind about her "calling" and helps Constance. As for Joseph, he is easily taken care of... and as for Angelica? It turns out this is her story in more ways than one.    

If you're looking for a book strewn with contradictory stories and lack of resolution, than this here is the book for you! If instead you're looking for a psychological thriller that has supernatural elements, then I'd suggest you walk away. Or at the very least only read Constance's viewpoint, because the only thing going for this book was, aside from Phillips's ability to capture the language of the time period heavily reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, the first section with it's paranormal activities. Because this book isn't about the supernatural it's about unreliable narrators and the fallibility of memory and how each and every person sees the world differently. Which is all fine and good, it's just not the book I thought I was signing up to read and therefore I was a very dissatisfied reader. But more on my complete dissatisfaction later, with spoilers aplenty, so you've been warned. The problem with having four distinct perspectives is that they will never agree, add to this that Angelica is technically the vehicle for the other three narrators, and it's a jumbled mess. Yes, it's interesting to see the different interpretations of the same events, but overall it needed some grounding. There needed to be some character that you could connect to over the others, someone needed to be a little more believable so that you could take that away as what you believe is the truth. Instead, by not having this element the inconclusive ending makes for dissatisfied reading.

Seeing the story in order from the POVs of Constance, Anne, Joseph, and finally Angelica, who we've really been hearing from all along because this is her therapy session, Phillips seemed to want to discount the previous POV. Yes, everyone sees the world in their own unique way, but he seems determined to lessen the book in each section by paving over what came before and making it unbelievable. Therefore instead of being able to pick apart the POVs and find some thread of truth, we have each subsequent narrator totally disproving what came before. With Constance it's a ghost, but then Anne comes along and it's not a ghost it's sexual abuse, though she still lets Constance think it's a ghost. Then along comes Joseph and it's not sexual abuse it's that women be crazy yo. As for Angelica... she confirms nor denies any of these stories. So all is plausible. Say what!?! All is true and nothing is true? I know you can mimic the writing of Carroll, but please, no. Phillips you are no Carroll when it comes to nonsense and riddles. Unreliable narrators are really popular at the moment from Gone Girl to The Girl on the Train, heck this book technically has the ever popular "girl" in the title with Angelica's name, but these books succeed, and I really can't believe I'm saying there's something successful in Gone Girl, but they succeed because you get closure, not some supposedly deep yet ultimately aggravating non-ending.   

But then again, this is a book that basically writes itself off in the end. In fact, rarely have I hated a book so much in it's last few sentences that I grew to despise it and wanted to throw it more than anything."Flames, on the side of my face, breathing-breathl- heaving breaths. Heaving breaths... Heathing..." So let's break down that ending. At the conclusion of the book Angelica, the gimmicky narrator/manipulative bitch we've been hearing from tells her therapist to just ignore everything she's said, he will never understand her and he should just bring on the next "pretty hysteric." Now I've had long talks with one of my friends over this abrupt ending, seeing as we read this book for book club. Her conclusion, in as simplified a manner as I can make it, is that Angelica realizes that the therapist will never understand her, a complex modern woman, and the slight is to the therapist. Whereas I think it's the exact opposite. I think it's the author not bothering to understand women but just flipping them off at the end. They're women, they aren't worth figuring out because this wasn't Angelica's story it was Joseph's story all along. And why do I think this? Because Phillips, while writing so much about women here can't help that he is a male and as evidenced strongly in Joseph's section all his sympathies are with the male of the species so he's just writing from his entitled white male POV. Yeah, so let's throw this book out a window shall we?  

Going back to Joseph's section, not only does it discount everything that Constance and Anne have said, it makes Joseph this tragic figure who isn't understood at work or at home and he just has no friends and blah blah blah blah. I'm sorry your wife doesn't want to sleep with you, could it be because there is no birth control and she doesn't want to almost die having a stillborn child again? Every aspect of Constance's life is put under the microscope, every thing she does, says, feels, is up for debate, whereas Joseph, well, it's just poor Joseph don't pick on him, he's having a bad day, so let's let him be. Why not scrutinize Joseph? Put him under the harsh lights he uses in experimenting on animals, a job that is noble and not at all amoral! The true theme of this book isn't about memory and differing POVs, in Joseph's section we see Phillips's true motive, everything comes down to "poor men." Because obviously, like the recent Portlandia sketch, men have been pushed aside and marginalized too long. All women want from them is to trick them into marriage so they can have babies. Yeah, that's right. This very modern and topical view that women are out there to trick men into baby making is thrust into this Victorian period piece. I just kept thinking, yes, things are cyclical and men could have felt that way then, but more I kept thinking, is the author's girlfriend trying to get him to put a ring on it and a bun in the oven?

So as you can imagine by this point, I'd sworn off the book. Whatever good had happened with Constance and Anne, all was washed away by the modern hypocrisy just screaming at me from these pages that made up Joseph's section. Was there hope that Angelica could redeem the book? As you've read already. No. There wasn't. In fact Angelica's section is so slight it barely deserves a mention, except for one point; Constance and Anne hooking up. This is an issue I have with many male authors, they think that women will just randomly be lesbians if it suits the needs of the men. George R. R. Martin might be the worst, but can't they get that people are born who they are and that's that? You can see why Constance and Anne might be drawn to each other, Constance hasn't fared well at the hands of men, especially in regard to reproduction, and Anne is a wonderful protector and provider. But like the male entitlement that just oozed off the pages earlier, this just seems to be another nail in the coffin of women as manipulators. They got the child they wanted, killed Joseph, and now can live happily ever after. Or you could look at it as Constance doesn't like Joseph or his attentions so therefore she must be gay. In other words, everything in this book is seen through male entitlement glasses, I wouldn't say they're rose colored, they're more shit colored, because what makes you think that it's OK to think like this? Women are people too. I know many men are trying to change this, and reading a book that thinks that way... it just enrages me.

Miss Eliza's Book Review - Joseph Heller's Catch-22

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: 1955
Format: Paperback, 453 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Yossarian is stationed on the small island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean west of Italy. He's on a bombing raid, he's on leave in Italy, he's in hospital, he's out of hospital, he's in the mess, he's not welcome in the mess, his friends are dying, he might die, he just wants to go home. He knows he's in real and immediate danger, which is the thought of a rational mind. If he asks to go home he's admitting that he knows he's in danger and therefore sane. If he wants to stay he is obviously insane and must be grounded. Yossarian is trapped in a frustrating situation by contradictory regulations because of a non-existent clause. But the genius is the simplicity of this clause that controls everyone's life, it is Catch-22.

Sometimes a book just isn't for you. You read it, you give it a try, and it's not that you hate it, you just don't like it. There are many books I love which some of my best friends dislike and a few they outright hate. I let them have that hate because it's an educated hate. They read the book or books and decided it wasn't for them. I'm not here to judge, it happens, and it is a two way street. I just didn't like Catch-22. I tried, I really wanted to like it knowing how special a place it holds in some of my friend's hearts, but it just wasn't for me. Like Austen tends to alienate a good portion of the male population, I felt that Heller alienated a good portion of the female population. This book is a guy book, and that's the clearest way I have of saying it wasn't for me.

And I don't think it's the war aspect that makes it a guy book, but more that the depiction of the women alienates women readers. In fairness, not many of the characters are likable. They can be fascinating and compelling, but likable, not at all. The problem I had was that Heller depicted all women as whores who have a love of money or as wanton sluts. OK, this can be the starting point of a character, but you need to build beyond that. Don't make this a cookie cutter stereotype that applies to every single woman in your story. There's this misogynistic undertone that carries through the book and finds it's outlet in the rape and murder of the innocent Michaela, the one realistic woman. I can ascribe many what ifs to justify Heller's writing that he was parodying the way soldiers denigrate women or that he was trying to make women on a lower par with his men, but whatever I say or whatever is true, it still made me, as a woman reader, uncomfortable and not wanting to finish the book.

Though the content of the story bothered me far less then the literary techniques that Heller used. I didn't take issues with the non-linear narration, I only mention it because I have a feeling that this technique makes the book a better re-read then initial read, so I have that working against me. My main problem was that the book doesn't feel of it's time. How can I explain this? The book is about World War II but it was published in 1961. It feels like a book from the sixties instead of a book from the forties. The unattributed dialogue, the narrative structure, even the narrative tense felt more in line with writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, and Kurt Vonnegut.

This disassociation between the time the book is set and this later writing style jarred my sensibilities and never meshed into a cohesive book for me. The best comparison I can give is between Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five. I love the later book while disliking the former. The reason this newer writing style works for Vonnegut where it doesn't work for Heller is that Vonnegut's story goes forward and backward in time, it isn't just about World War II, so it is able to accept these new literary techniques, whereas Catch-22 is fighting against them every step of the way. A book needs to have harmony with itself to work. And a book really needs harmony to be an enjoyable reading experience.

The unattributed dialogue is on of the techniques that annoyed me the most. I know I'm not alone in being against this stylistic wordplay. I distinctly remember in one of my high school English classes that we had to read this short story that was all unattributed dialogue. Whomever had the book before me was obviously not a fan of this style either because they had gone through the entire story and written who was talking when, like in a screenplay. I was almost annoyed enough to do this here, but I really got to a why bother phase with this book rather fast. The writing would veer between being lugubrious to nonsensical, like an unsuccessful Lewis Carroll parody. At times it felt unoriginal and derivative or the worst and most repetitive of vaudeville sketches. Vaudeville can work, but think clearly, it works because there are actors delivering the lines and therefore keeping you away from the unattributed dialogue trap. This was like reading a vaudeville sketch; who's on first? Who knows, and really, do I care?

Miss Eliza's Book Review - Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game

 

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Published by: Starscape
Publication Date: 1985
Format: Paperback, 324 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Ender Wiggin is the shame of his family. He is a Third. On an Earth where the population is still reeling countless years later from the last alien "Bugger" invasion, children are limited to two... unless there is a government mandate or the parents live outside the laws of decency. Ender was government mandated. In order to save humanity, the government has decided that children who are gifted should be trained to be their saviours. Ender's siblings, Peter and Valentine, both showed potential as being the most gifted children ever to be monitored for training. Yet Peter's violence and Valentine's empathy ultimately doomed them to a life on Earth. Still, the potential was so great that Ender Wiggin was "commissioned."

Ender has spent years being monitored to see if he would fulfil the potential of his siblings. Despite appearances to the contrary, the government decides that Ender is indeed their ideal savior. Yet, in order to achieve this end result, the rules will be broken. Battle School has been run in a space station orbiting Earth and training the youths in a very set curriculum of schoolwork and mock battles. Divided into armies and platoons, the students fight each other in a safe environment to hone their skills that will be used against the Buggers. When Ender arrives, all the rules are changed. By isolating Ender and promoting him beyond his age group, they hope to create the greatest military mind the universe has ever seen. He is a tactical genius, thinking outside the box and is able to embrace concepts that other students can't even understand on the most rudimentary level.

Soon Ender is promoted out of Battle School before even reaching his teens and sent out to the far reaches of the galaxy to Command School, where he is trained by the greatest military mind ever, before him that is. Put in a simulator, Ender is virtually learning how to control a fleet and fellow commanders who must answer to him. Yet, deep in his mind he starts to question if the Buggers are the real threat. While back on Earth, his siblings might pose a far greater threat because they have realized something that Ender has only guessed at. They are spurned geniuses, and they have the world at their feet.

A space age Lord of the Flies, a tale of justified violence and uncompromising brutality. This are the criticisms that are often written about this book. Yet... this was not what bothered me. Growing up when I have, the world around me has desensitized me to violence. Not to say that I didn't consider this book violent, I just considered that to be the least of it's flaws. I have never read a book by Orson Scott Card previously, nor will I ever again. While many believe this book to be the pinnacle of science fiction, I personally was left, not only scratching my head, but with the taste of bile in my mouth.

If not for the fact that this was for my book club I would not have finished it. If Card isn't spewing hatred, he is plodding along with his mind numbingly boring plot. This book is very much a battle movie, in that, you can see Michael Bay loving getting to set children into combat with lots of gore and death. This did not make for a good book. Moving past the fact that it is badly written, you really have to give me this, it's clunky, awkward and the little "omniscient narrations" before each chapter where laughable, the language and hatred that spilled out of the book just shocked me. The racism and bigotry floored me. I don't believe in censorship or taking away free speech. But the fact that there are children out there reading this book and thinking this language is acceptable, chills me to the marrow of my bones. From homophobic slurs against a little boy Shen, who comes to be called worm because of his effeminate walk, to racial anti-Semitic language used against Ender's first army leader because he is Jewish, and not only that, having Rose himself "self deprecatingly" joke about it himself shows even more that it's acceptable to children who don't know better! The book just compounds hatred and bile into this big mess that I wanted to fling out the window.

For many years I have tried to come to grips with the fact you sometimes have to separate the artist from their art. A beautiful painting might have been painted by a horrible bigot. A classic of literature might have been written by a pervert, ie, the Lewis Carroll/J.M. Barrie conundrum. Yet this is impossible when the views and opinions of the author are so a part of the text that they are inescapable. After a few chapters I realized that Orson Scott Card must be one of the biggest homophobes the world has seen. Therefore I did some goodreads trawling. Going past all my friends who mysterious loved this book (they are going to have a lot to answer for at book club!) I went to those reviews who gave the book a star. Or as I call these reviewers, "my people." There a found a link to an online article where he railed against homosexuality saying that homosexuals are allowed to marry, so long as they marry the opposite sex, not where their heart lies. Not that Card believes that homosexuals have hearts... because "the dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally." WHAT!?!

Card, you can believe what you want to believe, just like anyone who is reading my blog can, just, don't do it around me. I'm not trying to preach here or anything. I was raised to believe in love. But to spew this bile and not be called out on it. To be lauded with awards for this hate spewing work? You have an amazing mind, you where able to envision how technology would evolve. In the eighties, you saw the rise of the Internet, the rise of bloggers like me and the power we would have. You saw children working on desks that are quite literally our tablets, such as the iPad. You pre-saged all this amazing technology, yet your belief system lives in the dark ages. I'm calling you out on it. Hopefully one day people will realize that your book is nothing more than a platform for your hate.

*If you would care to read the full article referenced above, it can be found here. I will warn you though that it has many inflammatory opinions, none of which I hold with.