Love
Authors: Angela Carter
Contents
Love
is Angela Carter’s fifth novel and was first published in 1971. With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and broken connections. This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter’s haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age.
Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel,
Shadow Dance
, was published in 1965, followed by
The Magic Toyshop
(1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize),
Several Perceptions
(1968, Somerset Maugham Award),
Heroes and Villains
(1969),
Love
(1971),
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972),
The Passion of New Eve
(1977),
Nights at the Circus
(1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and
Wise Children
(1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published:
Fireworks
(1974),
The Bloody Chamber
(1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award),
Black Venus
(1985) and
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
(1993). She was the author of
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History
(1979), and two collections of journalism,
Nothing Sacred
(1982) and
Expletives Deleted
(1992). She died in February 1992.
Short Stories
Fireworks
The Bloody Chamber
Black Venus
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales
(editor)
The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales
(editor)
Wayward Girls and Wicked Women
(editor)
Novels
Shadow Dance
The Magic Toyshop
Several Perceptions
Heroes and Villains
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
The Passion of New Eve
Nights at the Circus
Wise Children
Non-fiction
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise
in Cultural History
Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings
Expletives Deleted
Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings
Drama
Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays
The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works
ANGELA CARTER
WITH A PREFACE BY
Audrey Niffenegger
WHEN THE MONOTONES
posed the musical question ‘(Who Wrote) The Book of Love?’ in 1958 they did not have Angela Carter in mind; her third novel,
Love,
came out in 1971. But even if they had been able to look into the future they probably would not have chosen her to be Love’s author. Carter’s vision of love is bohemian and bleak and fundamentally incompatible with doo-wop. Her
Love
leaves out all the gentle beguiling aspects of the thing in favor of a love that is guilty, mad, perverse, sort of incestuous, and dangerous to those who stray within reach of its claws.
This won’t surprise you if you’ve read any of Angela Carter’s other books.
The Bloody Chamber
is just that, and to be a character in an Angela Carter story is to suffer the attentions of rapacious emotion. In
Love
the sufferings are triangular, the protagonists awkward, instinctual and artistic in the way that Venus flytraps might be artistic if they were human.
Love
is a brilliant and often overlooked novel; it is overshadowed by Carter’s even more brilliant later work. Although everything that happens in
Love
is possible in the real world, it has the feeling of the impossible which permeates her other novels, and the intensities of observation and invention which are her trademarks.
I started reading Angela Carter’s work around the same time I discovered the writing of Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt, two writers of her generation whose prose is also richly allusive and packed with willful characters who struggle with the expectations of society. Often these characters give up the effort of attempting to fit in – which was never too sincere to begin with – and are transformed into their true selves; difficult and different and full of surprises. Carter’s work teems with such
people, and Annabel,
Love
’s anti-heroine, is one of her best. She is cryptic, sly, emotionally deranged and yet fatally attractive. Annabel, her husband Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz perform a minuet of betrayal, jealousy, and self-destruction. In the book’s opening scene we meet Annabel cowering under a sky in which the sun and the moon are simultaneously visible, and this theme is repeated in the couplings of all the characters: things that shouldn’t be together, are.
Love
is a chronicle of attraction and repulsion within this tiny world of three people.
In 1987 Carter added a wry afterword which extends and comments on the lives of the characters; without this the book is extraordinarily gothic and dark. All that she does in her later work with the aid of the supernatural and special effects she accomplishes in
Love
by simply dwelling in the odd minds of Annabel, Lee and Buzz, by letting their mutual incomprehension take its toll.
Angela Carter died of cancer in 1992. In his obituary for her in the
New York Times
, Salman Rushdie wrote that she was ‘a thumber of noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low. They are without equal, and without rival.’ Her work is like a dream house in which every room lets onto every other room; it doesn’t matter where you enter, you will eventually find yourself exploring every nook and cranny. Whether you are holding one of her books in your hands for the first time or are a long-time devotee, when you turn this page you are entering the complete and boundless world of Angela Carter.
Audrey Niffenegger, 2006
ONE DAY
,
ANNABEL
saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.
It had happened as she walked home through the park. In the system of correspondences by which she interpreted the world around her, this park had a special significance and she walked along its overgrown paths with nervous pleasure, especially in certain yellow, tarnished lights of winter when the trees were bare and the sun, as it set, rimmed the branches with cold fire. An eighteenth-century landscape gardener planned the park to surround a mansion which had been pulled down long ago and now the once harmonious artificial wilderness, randomly dishevelled by time, spread its green tangles across the high shoulder of a hill only a stone’s throw from a busy road that ran through the city dockland. All that remained of the former mansion were a few architectural accessories now the property of the city museum. There was a stable built on the lines of a miniature Parthenon, housing for Houyhnhnms rather than natural horses; the pillared portico, especially effective under the light of a full moon, never to be entered again by any horse, functioned only as a pure piece of design, a focal point in the green composition on the south side of the hill where Annabel rarely ventured for serenity bored her and the Mediterranean aspect of this part of the park held no excitements for her. She preferred the Gothic north, where an ivy-covered tower with leaded ogive windows skulked among the trees. Both these pretty whimsies were kept
securely locked for fear of the despoliation of vandals but their presence still performed its original role, transforming the park into a premeditated theatre where the romantic imagination could act out any performance it chose amongst settings of classic harmony or crabbed quaintness. And the magic strangeness of the park was enhanced by its curious silence. Footfalls fell softly on the long grass and few birds sang there, but the presence all around of the sprawling, turbulent city, however muffled its noises, lent such haunted, breathless quiet an unnatural quality.
The park maintained only a single, still impressive entrance, a massive pair of wrought-iron gates decorated with cherubs, masks of beasts, stylized reptiles and spearheads from which the gilding flaked, but these gates were never either open or closed. They hung always a little ajar and drooped from their hinges with age; they served a function no longer for all the railings round the park were gone long ago and access everywhere was free and easy. The park was on such high ground it seemed to hang in the air above a vast, misty model of a city and those who walked through it always felt excessively exposed to the weather. At times, all seemed nothing but a playground for the winds and, at others, an immense drain for all the rain the heavens could pour forth.
Annabel went through the park in a season of high winds and lurid weather, early one winter’s evening, and happened to look up at the sky.
On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above the spires and skyscrapers of the city itself, the rising moon hung motionless in a rift of absolute night. Though one was setting while the other rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so the heavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to see such a dreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself the helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.
At that, she bolted from the path through the long grass, seeking cover from the sky. Wholly at the mercy of the elements, she lurched and zig-zagged and her movements were so erratic, apparently at the whim of the roaring winds, and her colours so ill-defined, blurred by the approaching dusk, that she might herself have been no more than an emanation of the place or time of year.
At the crest of the hill, she flung up her hands in a furious gesture of surrender and pitched herself sideways off the path, concealing herself behind a clump of gorse where she lay moaning and breathless for a few moments. The wind tied strands of her hair to spikes of gorse and thus confirmed her intuition that she should not budge one inch until the dreadful, ambiguous hour resolved itself entirely to night. So there she stayed, a mad girl plastered in fear and trembling against a thorn bush suffering an anguish which also visited her when pressed just as close to the blond flesh of the young husband who slept beside her and did not know her dreams, although he was a beautiful boy whom anybody else would have thought well worth the effort of loving.