"The Magic Toyshop" by Angela Carter

 The story is narrated by fifteen-year-old Melanie who, after the death of her parents - for which she blames herself, irrationally - goes with her little brother and her baby sister to live in suburban London with her over-bearing and miserly uncle, a toymaker, his wife, who is dumb, and her brothers, filthy Finn (the archetypal bad boy, rebellious but attractive) and fiddler Francie. It's a coming-of-age story in strange surroundings, perhaps reflecting Carter's own upbringing (having been born in Eastbourne she spent her childhood in South Yorkshire before moving to the Streatham/ Clapham area of South London for her teenage years), perhaps satirising children's novels such as The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett or the Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. 

It's a classic 'take a bunch of strange characters and see what happens' story; this makes for compelling reading. But what puts this book into a class of its own is the stunning descriptions. Chapter One, in which Melanie gets locked out of the house in the garden at night, was eye-openingly wonderful, with lines such as: "Melanie let herself into the night and it snuffed out her daytime self at once, between two of its dark fingers." 

Carter likes playing with reality. Finn and Melanie go to a park in South London where there are the remnants of "the National Exposition of 1852 ... this vast Gothic castle ... made of papier-mache" which burned down; presumably a distorted reference to the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Exhibition which was moved to South London and subsequently burned down.

It's also perfectly paced, with key insights coming at the 25%, 50% and 75% marks.

Selected quotes:

• Brilliant descriptions:
• "The curl of his wrist was a chord of music, perfect, resolved." (Ch 2)
• "Privet hedges drooped with the weary strain of keeping in green leaf at the turn of the year when all the other trees had thrown down their leaves in surrender." (Ch 5)
• "Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who always seem to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues." (Ch 5)
• Funny moments and insights:
• "He walked with a faintly discernible nautical roll but nobody ever noticed." (Ch 1) (though obviously someone - the author? the narrator? - did)
• "She examined the wedding dress more closely. It seemed a strange way to dress up just in order to lose your virginity." (Ch 1)
• "Melanie had never seen a dog belch before. It was a day of firsts." (Ch 5)
• Other moments:
• "Melanie thought of death as a room like a cellar, in which one was locked up and no light at all." (Ch 1)
• "'Look at me!' she said to the apple tree as it fattened its placid fruit in the country silence of the night. 'Look at me!' she cried passionately to the pumpkin moon, as it smiled, jovial and round-faced as a child's idea of itself." (Ch 1)
• "All this was taking place in an empty space at the end of the world." (Ch 4)
• "She watched Uncle Philip empty four green-banded cups of tea and thought of the liquid turning slowly to urine through his kidneys; it seemed like alchemy, he could transmute liquids from one thing to another." (Ch 8)
• "She splashed the shreds of the absurd night out of her eyes with cold water." (Ch 9)
• "Flocks of brown-feathered perhapses flapped ragged, witless wings against the windows." (Ch 9)

This was recommended by the author of the last book that I read (The Reading List). I have read Angela Carter books before and this is my favourite; previously I have found that the surrealism gets in the way of the story but in this book the descriptions make the story hyper-realistic while at the same time retaining that hint of strangeness.

Angela Carter is recommended by Lorna Sage, author of the brilliant biography Bad Blood, as "the boldest of English women writers". 

I think I loved it for the frequency with which I came across a perfectly-crafted sentence and thought 'I wish I'd written that'.

January 2023; 200 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books by Angela Carter that I have read and reviewed in this blog:

• The Bloody Chamber, a brilliant collection of short stories in which fairy tales are brought up to date and given a horrid, and often feminist, twist
• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman: a very sixties psychedelic romp, perhaps too surreal for me
• Heroes and Villains: a post-holocaust fantasy
• The Passion of New Eve: obsessed with mirrors and sex changes and dominatrices
• Wise Children: the reminiscences of one of a pair of show-biz twins; multiple references to twins and Shakespeare
• The Magic Toyshop: a beautifully written coming of age story