The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of fairy tales.  But not fairy tales as you would remember them from your childhood; grown-up fairytales full of violence, horror and sexuality.  From Bluebeard to Beauty and the Beast to Puss in Boots, Carter reinvents the traditional tales in haunting ways.  

I'm never quite sure how to review short story collections.  Novels are easier as they tend to have one over-arching plot to comment on, where as short story collections have so many.  I think I will mention some of the stories that made the most impact on me, before offering general thoughts on Carter's writing.

Without a doubt, the most powerful story was the titular one, The Bloody Chamber.  In this retelling of the Bluebeard legend, a young woman journeys by train to the castle owned by her wealthy new husband, a Marquis.  The Marquis has been widowed three times and his castle is truly a gothic masterpiece set against a roaring and angry sea.  When he has to leave on a business trip, he hands his new wife the keys to all of the rooms in the castle, including one that he forbids her to enter.  Of course, her curiosity gets the better of her, and what she sees in the forbidden room hints at a terrible fate waiting for her.  I loved this stoy the most as it was so genuinely thrilling; I had guessed what would be in the room, but Carter still weaves this wonderful web of suspense, that made me feel genuinely scared for the woman, yet unable to stop turning the pages.  The writing is so rich and full of sensuality as the sexual awakening of the main character mingles and becomes confused with the danger she is in.

I also loved The Erl-King, which was just so atmospheric.  A young woman is drawn into the dark heart of a sinister forest by the mysterious sprite-like Erl King, who seems to be made from the forest itself.  He has total power over all living creatures and she is completely under his spell.  But as her visits continue, the young woman realises that she is trapped, and that the Erl-King only means her harm.  I enjoyed this story in particular as it was just so haunting, Carter conjures up what it is about deep, dark forests that speaks to us somewhere buried inside, and puts all of the that into the character of the Erl-King.  As with The Bloody Chamber, sex and danger are two elements of the tale, and the main character also takes steps to get herself out of a threatening situation.

To be honest, there wasn't a single tale in The Bloody Chamber that I didn't enjoy and savour.  In fact, I had to force myself to slow down whilst reading it and appreciate each individual story, as my initial impulse was to devour the book in one sitting.  Carter's writing is just so rich and descriptive, so full of atmosphere that it simply sweeps you away.  I fell in love with it within a few days and didn't stop admiring it all the way through.  She completely reinvents familiar tales in ways I would never have thought of and personalises them, so the characters actually feel emotion and respond appropriately (something that you don't get to see in the original stories).  Carter's characters think and feel in this wonderfully lush setting and the result is simply wonderful.  I can't think of enough glowing sentences to describe just how fantastic this book is, you're just going to have to trust me when I say it's simply brilliant.

If you haven't read it, you need to go and get yourself a copy.  It's the best thing I've read all year.

Source: Personal copy

First Published: 1979

Edition Read: Penguin, 1986

Score: 5 out of 5

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Philip Pullman

I requested this book from Netgalley purely because I love Philip Pullman.  I like fairy tales well enough but I'm not someone who grew up with them or who adores them.  To be honest, most of my exposure to them comes from Disney films, which are most certainly not true to the originals!   But Philip Pullman is another matter; I was captivated by the His Dark Materials trilogy as a teenager and very impressed by The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ a few years ago (my review).  So I had high hopes for the writing quality in this collection, which retells fifty stories from the originals by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

One of the parts I actually enjoyed the most about this book was the introduction.  As I said, I'm not that familiar with the history of fairy tales so I was interested to read about the attempts to create a German 'nationalism' at the time and how the collection of tales could feed into that.  I always imagine the source of fairy tales to be poor people living in the forests so it was also interesting to realise that most tales came from the middle classes.  There's a decent analysis of the pace of fairy tales and how this can only be achieved at the expense of creating three dimensional characters.  In fact, you could question whether the characters are conscious beings at all.  The introduction was just the right length and importantly, made it clear that Pullman wasn't trying to put a twist on the tales - they are straight-forward re-tellings.

I enjoyed the actual tales a lot more than I expected to.  Pullman does a great job of creating an overarching atmosphere or setting that links all the stories.  There's plenty of ominous forests, tricky magical beings, men named Hans and evil step-mothers.  The writing was as good as I anticipated, simple but with just the right amount of irony to bring a touch of humour to the collection ("Well, what else did you expect?  That's just the sort of thing that happens in this world.").  Interestingly enough, it wasn't always the popular tales (Cinderella, Rumplestiltksin etc.,) that I enjoyed the most, part of the fun was discovering new to me tales such as the second part of the Elves, where a girl spends what she thinks of as three days in the mountain with the elves, only to discover it was actually seven years.  At the end of each story, there's a brief commentary by Pullman with information about the source and some analysis.  I found these too short to be really informative.

The only other book I can compare this collection to is Arabian Nights.  Whilst I very much enjoyed the tales and thought that Pullman did a great job on the retellings, the stories themselves didn't compare to Arabian Nights. They feel too familiar.  But that's not a criticism of this edition at all, just a personal preference - I'm the sort of person who will always choose the unfamiliar over the familiar.

I'm glad I requested and read this volume of fairy tales and I've got some interesting titles for my reading list from the introduction (particularly Maria Tatar).  If you like fairy tales, you'll enjoy this collection.

Source: From the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
First Published: November 2012
Score: 4 out of 5

Homeland by Barbara Kingsolver

I tend to only read short story collections if I am already a fan of the author through reading their novels.  I've read and enjoyed both The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna by Kingsolver, so I was excited to see this collection available at the library.  It contains twelve stories, all very different from each other but all united by their strong sense of place. 

The stand out piece of the collection was the title story, Homeland.  Gloria's Great-Grandmother is dying and her parents become convinced that Great Mam would like nothing more than to visit Cherokee as she is a Native American who once belonged to the Bird Clan.  But when they get there, the commercialism and misrepresentation of the culture breaks Great Mam's heart and Gloria can't bear to watch.  Other stories that I appreciated were Rose-Johnny, about prejudice towards those associated with mixed race families, Stone Dreams, about having the courage to move on in your life if you need to, and Blueprints, about loneliness within marriage.

In fact, all of the stories in this collection were well written and Kingsolver was able to hook me into each one very quickly, something essential for short story writing.  But the best thing about the stories was the vivid backdrop that the setting for each provided.  From the desert to hippie trailer parks to the deep South to St Lucia, Kingsolver bought each place alive and made it as much of a character as the actual humans in her stories.  Thinking about it, this is exactly what I loved about The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna too - that experience of being transported to somewhere new. 

As with any short story collection, there were some stories that weren't as strong as the others.  Occasionally the female characters felt a bit too introspective and a bit too similar to each other but as a collection as a whole it's one of the strongest I've read.  Recommended especially for armchair travellers.

Source: Library

First Published: 1989

Score: 3.5 out of 5

The Apple: Crimson Petal Stories by Michel Faber

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and The White is one of my favourite books (see my review).  It's a Victorian-style gothic tale about Sugar, an angry prostitute that manages to rise through society by making a wealthy man fall in love with her.  But it's more than that too - it's a panoramic of London in the Victorian times, in all its squalor, filth and inequality.  When I closed the book back in December 2010, I wanted more as Faber's style was just so distinctive and captivating.  So I was excited to read The Apple, a collection of short stories set before, during and after Crimson Petal, featuring both main and secondary characters from the original novel.

Once again, the best thing about this collection was the way Faber wrote about Victorian London and the people on the seedier side of it.  I knew I was going to love the writing from the very first lines;

"Close your eyes.  Lose track of time for a moment - just long enough to be overtaken by a hundred and thirty years.  It's December 1872.  Feathery snow is falling on that dubious part of London between Regent Street and Soho, a hodgepodge of shops and houses crammed between the opulent avenues of the well-to-do and the festering warrens of the poor."

Aside from the vividness of the writing, it was nice to be able to read from the point of view of some of the more minor characters from Crimson Petal.  For that reason, my favourite story in the collection was 'Clara and the Rat Man', about a maid who, having lost her job, is forced into prostitution and must deal with a very unusual client.  As I read each of the stories, I found myself mainly wishing that I had read this collection soon after finishing Crimson Petal, and I also found myself wanting to reread it.  I was happy to find out a little bit about what happened to Sugar and Sophie after the end of the novel.

My only criticism of the book was concerning the longest story, 'A Mighty Horde of Women in Very Big Hats, Advancing'.  It takes place quite some time after the events of the novel and the setting of quite wealthy women in Edwardian time fighting for women's rights didn't click as well with Faber's writing as Victorian London.  But I still enjoyed the story for the element of finding out what happened to certain characters.  I think that only people that have read Crimson Petal would enjoy this collection, as it would lack a lot of emotional impact and connection to the characters without that background.

Verdict: Good collection, go and read Crimson Petal first if you haven't already!

Source: Kindle

Score: 4 out of 5

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection by one of my favourite authors, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  Having previously read and loved Purple Hibiscus (my review) and especially Half of a Yellow Sun (my review - go and get a copy now if you haven't read it), I couldn't wait to get my hands on this collection, her only work published in book form that I had yet to read.  And I wasn't disappointed.

The Thing Around Your Neck is a short story collection about women, the immigrant experience, things not working out the way they should and homesickness.  All of the women in the stories have a connection of some kind with Nigeria; some are on their way to America to marry Nigerian men who have already made it, some are caught up in violence, some are writing about it and some are missing it with every bone in their body.  Nigeria appears as almost a character in it's own right -  a whirl of colours, smells, sound and vibrancy compared with a grey, bland, tasteless America.

Aside from that, the other major theme that I could identify was disappointment and expectations not being met.  The stories are full of Nigerian women who have moved to America anticipating a land of milk and honey and found themselves disappointed, both with their new country and their new husbands.  In The Arrangers of Marriage, Chinaza is encouraged by her husband to cook only American food, change her name and be as American as possible, resulting in a deep homesickness.  She can't write home about her misery as her relatives all assume she will have a big house, a car and all the perks of living in America.

I had several favourite stories from the collection.  One was A Private Experience, a story of an unlikely friendship between a Hausa Muslim and Igbo Christian during race riots in Nigeria.  Another was On Monday of Last Week, about the loneliness of a woman working as a nanny for an American family.  Although Tomorrow is Too Far didn't really fit in with the themes of the rest of the collection, it was a very creepy story about sibling rivalry.

But my favourite story was Jumping Monkey Hill, about a group of upcoming African writers invited to a safari lodge in South Africa for a writing seminar by a white sponsor.  It seemed as though Adichie had used this story to vent all of her frustrations about the attitude towards and labels given to African writers as most of the stories the Africans write are disparaged by the white sponsor.  He wants them only to write of war, desperation, hunger and stereotypes, not the truth of their experiences and countries.

To sum up, I would highly recommend this well written collection, especially if you are interested in the immigrant experience.

Source: Library
First published: 2009
Score: 4.5 out of 5

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is one of my favourite books of all time, so as soon as I discovered that she had also written this collection of short stories set in the same world, I had to read it.  Better four years late than never!

The stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu are all set in a green, forested England where the boundary between magic and reality is very blurred.  Before writing Jonathan Strange Clarke spent a lot of time researching English legends and folklore, and this has paid off as the stories read like authentic Grimm-style fairy tales.  Most of the stories centre on the world of Faerie and it's inhabitants, the kind of world where you might wander down a never-ending path, kill someone with embroidery or fall victim to a trickster Faerie prince.  There are eight stories in the collection.

Score: 4.5 out of 5

I had high hopes for this collection and it didn't disappoint.  I just love the world that Clarke has created and the sinister characters in it.  In some ways, the Faeries and the setting reminded me of all the Enid Blyton books I used to read as a child with fairies, goblins and dwarves (and I mean that in a good way).  Like Jonathan Strange, Clarke has made this book quasi-academic with an introduction by a "professor of faerie studies" and footnotes in some of the stories.  She also continues to copy the 19th century writing style.  Personally I enjoy these techniques, but I know they aren't for everyone.

The stories were varied in length and some were more engaging than others.  I particularly enjoyed Mr Simonelli, about a man who discovers his father was a fairy and does battle with a fairy prince.  Antickes and Frets was about Mary Queen of Scots attempting to kill Queen Elizabeth by embroidering a curse into a gift for her.  In The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a Jane Austen meets Brothers Grimm kind of tale, Jonathan Strange discovers that women have ancient magic too and The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse is set in the village of Wall, from Neil Gaiman's Stardust. There wasn't a single story in the collection I didn't enjoy, although I thought Tom Brightwind  was a touch too long.

The theme of most of the stories was humans coming up against and battling wits with fairies and other forms of magic.  The secondary themes that I could see where the role of women in society and friendship between humans and fairies.  The main problem with the collection was that the stories didn't seem particularly organised and there was no over-arching plot or links between them.  Susanna Clarke had put together seven of these stories from previous publications and added the eighth for this collection, and it did have a slightly cobbled together feel.

But that's a minor complaint.  The writing was beautiful, the book itself was beautiful and I very much enjoyed reading it.  Definitely recommended for Jonathan Strange fans, it would also serve as a good introduction to Clarke's world for those put off by how long Jonathan Strange is.