Wise Children by Angela Carter - A Final Novel and a Goodbye all in one.
The Blog of a Bookseller
I've been feeling nostalgic lately, particularly regarding my reading. I've found myself yearning to read books I love for the first time again, unable to explain why I've felt this sudden urge. While I love rereading my favourite books time and time, there is nothing quite like the first time you discover them.
The one author I am drawn back to time and time again, as though she has me in a chokehold, is Angela Carter.
I adore Angela Carter.
Like most English, I came across her in my sixth-form English Literature course when we were studying the Gothic - her collection 'The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories' was one of our set texts to be compared and contrasted to Dracula by Bram Stoker. It retells fairy tales with a horror twist, released in the 1970s. I took her short story collection on holiday with me at sixteen, using the mind-numbing day stuck on the beach (a nightmare for a natural redhead like myself) as the excuse to read uninterrupted. I finished it in record time and decided then and there I would attempt to read everything Carter had ever written.
I will talk about The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories another time. It is a modern Gothic classic, and it would be more fitting to discuss the murderous Little Red Riding Hood closer to Halloween rather than on the precipice of Summer, despite it still being dark and grey outside the window as I am writing this.
Unsurprisingly, I am discussing her final novel, Wise Children, in which Carter challenged herself to include elements of every Shakespeare play. No one should be surprised that this is the first Carter novel I read outside of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, with my personal obsession with Shakespeare and reading as many retellings of his work as I can - such as my previous posts about Enter Ghost and This is How You Lose a Time War; both Shakespearian in their inspiration.
In the only first-person novel Carter wrote, we are introduced to the narrator, Dora Chance, and her twin sister, Nora, celebrating their 75th birthday. They are Chance by name and by nature. Not only is it their birthday, but it is also their father's birthday, Melchior Hazard, who is celebrating his 100th birthday, as well as his twin brother, Peregrine Hazard, who is believed to be dead. The date is also Shakespeare's supposed birthday – 23 April.
Melchior, a high-profile theatre and film star known for putting his career before family, refuses to acknowledge the Chance Twins as his children, denying responsibility for fathering them and letting Peregrine raise them. Even though the Twins know he is not their father, all three tell people he is.
The family tree in this book is akin to Greek mythology and takes reciting to remember, but when you do, it is always committed to memory. I first read Wise Children in 2016, immediately after reading The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, but I can still recite who is related to who, who is adopted by who, and who has slept with who.
Another thing about this remarkably complicated family is that all are performers in one way or another. Melchior is an actor, and so are his parents and children, including Dora and Nora, who were dancing chorus girls.
As young girls and into adulthood, they sang and danced as part of a trope of girls in musicals, even having a stint on the big screen. However, as the profession dwindled, so did their employment, and they eventually stopped performing altogether, but both sisters looked back at the experience fondly.
Carter's writing has a fatal bliss, as though you can picture her laughing as writing it with her wild white hair and large glasses, plucking every word with careful consideration as though they were Mother Goose's feathers.
Upon Carter's death, English Literature mourned its "high sorceress, benevolent witch-queen, a burlesque artist of genius and antic grace" (Rushdie, 1992) - she knew it would be her final piece, as she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She decided she would write her final novel. She had one last thing to say.
Carter's work has always been filled with allusions to fairy tales, Shakespeare and other classical works such as Edgar Allen Poe with her novel, Love, but she went all out with Wise Children, as though sensing the impending drop of the final curtain, incorporating everything she loved into one book, incorporating magical realism, carnivalesque elements and probing twists which challenge our expectations of reality and society. Her work has always jumped off the page as though alive, kicking and breathing to be read, but Wise Children reads differently - it wasn't just written for herself, but for those she would have to leave behind - her husband and a small son.
Despite the bizarreness of the Chances and the Hazzards, the melodramatics of their feuds and the family tree which would make Zeus' eyes bulge, Wise Children is, at its core, family and forgiveness, about love and loss, failure and success.
It is a reminder about "what a joy it is to dance and sing!"