Subversive Once Upon a Time, They All Lived Mainly Unhappily after……………..
Michael Cunningham’s A Wild Swan is a darkly, slyly, sour and witty adaptation of some particularly potent faerie tales.
There’s more than a whiff of Angela Carteresque sumptuousness and sexual meaning out in the open, though Cunningham pulls many of these tales into the here and now.
How could I not start snickering, in a kind of wry, sophisticated fashion, at an opening like this:
Most of us are safe. If you’re not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn’t trouble the constellations, nobody’s going to cast a spell on you. No one wants to transform you into a beast or put you to sleep for a hundred years…
The middling maidens – the ones best seen by candlelight, corseted and rouged – have nothing to worry about. The pudgy, pockmarked heirs apparent, who torment their underlings and need to win at every game, are immune to curse and hex. B-list virgins do not excite the forces of ruination; callow swains don’t infuriate demons and sprites.Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings
I was immediately captivated by the authorial voice which opens out ‘what’s really going on’ displaying the often difficult world of love and marriage, and mismatch between expectation and reality, to belie the traditional ‘they all lived happily ever after’ .
These morality tales (what faerie tales often were) updated, are often beautifully upended. So, for example, the beginning of Cunningham’s version of Jack and The Beanstalk, Jacked :
This is not a smart boy we’re talking about. This is not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains.
Never mind asking him to sell the cow, when he and his mother are out of cash, and the cow is their last resort.
We’re talking about a boy who doesn’t get halfway to town with his mother’s sole remaining possession before he’s sold the cow to some stranger for a handful of beans….Jack isn’t doubtful. Jack isn’t big on questions. Jack is the boy who says, Wow, dude, magic beans, really?
I was absolutely thrilled to be offered this as a review copy by the publishers, Fourth Estate, in digital version………however, I would urge you to get the wood book, as there are stunning illustrations to each story, by the artist Yuko Shimizu, and I did long to see them on paper.
Yuko Shimizu’s illustration for the story “Beasts”
The stories are pretty well all magnificent, and it will be the readers’ pleasure to work out which fairy tales they are based on. The Hansel and Gretel tale is probably my own particular favourite. Most do not end anywhere near happiness, and one must feel grateful, therefore, for the absence of that ‘ever after’
Though, to be fair, kind, a little bit magical and hopeful , the final story, Ever/After does give us one redemptive sweet tale to take away, albeit one which starts more realistically and less under the illusion of the romantic happy ever after. In the last story, the couple have fewer stars in their eyes and are not bewitched by sprinklings of too much magic.
HIGHLY recommended; in fact magical
These are, by the way, very definitely faerie stories for ADULTS and not for children
A Wild Swan: and other tales Amazon UK
A Wild Swan: and other tales Amazon USA
And of course, she does. One of the many qualities I admire in Tremain’s writing is that she is not someone with just one book, endlessly regurgitated, in her. Other than the excellence of her writing, always present, she is capable of inhabiting many times, places, themes, characters and plots. This facility sets her up well for the short story.
I was delighted to get this as an ARC from the publisher. Having appreciated Small Island, I was curious to see how Levy handled the short story genre. Reading a selection of short stories by a writer can at times be a challenging experience, because if the reader is quite a fast reader, each story may be completed too quickly, and to read several all at once is a bit like devouring a box of chocolates in one sitting – you can end up feeling a bit overindulged, and wish you’d taken longer to truly savour each gem! Also, as far as stories, rather than chocolates go, a whole bunch of short stories leaves the reader sometimes in the position of having sussed the authorial tricks, as the trajectory of shape and structure of a short story is easier to see fairly quickly.
‘evil’ may begin, which was possibly a story which began to brew in the wake of James Bulger’s murder at the hands of two minors, and ‘That Polite Way That English People Have’, a story almost spinning off from A Small Island, which she was then writing, and based on her mother’s arrival in this country, from Jamaica, in 1948. It looks at class, race and how to survive and get on, and is both pointed, deftly painted and funny, making little needle like stabs through the light touch humour
I never thought I would want to connect the two words put together in my title, but this is what this well crafted collection of short stories offers.
‘popular literary authors’ of the first half of the twentieth century. His tone combined a certain waspishness, and indeed emotional coldness (no doubt a result of an emotionally cold childhood) with sudden, unexpected displays of heart. There is a cool precision in his writing, an absence of fussiness, that tells a narrative cleanly and simply, and describes character incisively.
main rather chilly, mildly amused urbanity does tend to hold the reader also away from emotional engagement. Having said that, this is a device which then works brilliantly in the ‘wrap’ of 2 or 3 of the stories where Ashenden’s rather emotionally inhibited, intelligent, ironic, cultured persona temporarily reveals a sombre, bleak acknowledgement that playing the undoubted game of espionage can create collateral damage in the lives of innocents. The story called ‘The Hairless Mexican’ would be an excellent fictional story, but the suspicion it may not be completely fiction delivers the killer punch to the reader.
John Wyndham’s short story collection The Seeds of Time is a masterclass in how unformulaic any genre might be in the hands of someone who is a crafted, imaginative literary writer who happens to write in the Sci-Fi genre, as opposed to someone who is a Sci-Fi writer. Yes, I know my prejudices are showing, but I do believe it must be the writing, the craft itself which comes first, and the mastery (or not) of that, rather than the field in which someone chooses to write.
and Opposite Number, which looks at ‘alternate realities’ the intriguing idea of a kind of bifurcating universe where the choices an individual didn’t make, are playing out – and then what happens if a couple of these bifurcations collide. It’s the story of ‘What If………I had done this rather than that’
Patrick McGrath’s magnificent Ghost Town is a triptych of novellas about Manhatten. The opening story, ‘The Year Of The Gibbet’ written by a man as he waits to die of cholera, in the epidemic of 1832, looks back more than 55 years, to the Revolutionary War of Independence, when he was a small boy, and his mother a Revolutionary fighting against the hated British oppressor, hanging these revolutionaries as subversive traitors.
writers explore particular cities as jumping off points for fiction
birth defect, Craniopagus parasiticus, where a baby is born with one body, but two heads. This unsettling image is dealt with, not freakishly, but to unsettle the reader (and indeed, the father of such a baby, in one of the stories) into wondering who thinks, where consciousness resides and arises. I found myself plunged, by Chaon’s writing into moments of dislocation from myself, inhabiting the uneasy world of his fragile characters, who, again and again find the boundaries between themselves and other lives, their present selves and their past (or imagined future) selves, are not as defined as our left brained, daytime selves sometimes pretends