American Ghosts and Old World Wonders was published after Angela Carter’s death from lung cancer in 1992 according to directions that she left.  The book is a collection of nine stories, four set in the new world of America and five in the old world of Europe.  Part one contains ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’, ‘John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, ‘Gun for the Devil’ and ‘The Merchant of Shadows’ and part two comprises ‘The Ghost Ships’, ‘In Pantoland’, ‘Ashputtle, or The Mother’s Ghost’, ‘Alice in Prague, or The Curious Room’ and ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’.  The new world stories have a more defined story to them, while the old world stories are more abstract and bizarre, although nowhere near as odd as I found Fireworks when I read it last year.  The balance between the two halves of the book and the two different styles works well and it forms a good, coherent collection (unsurprising given how specifically Carter planned the contents of the book).

Two stories stick out in my mind from this short story collection and they are, interestingly, the first two in the book.  ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’ is about a young Lizzie Borden, who became famous for allegedly killing her father and stepmother, escaping for one evening from her poverty-stricken home to go to visit a nearby fairground.  Lizzie is depicted as a serious little girl and Carter uses a wonderful phrase to describe her, saying that she has ‘a whim of iron’.  It’s just perfect because it encapsulates the arbitrary nature and forcefulness of childhood desires, and I’m sure anyone who has ever met a child will be able to picture exactly what Carter means.  It is impossible to read the story without it being shadowed by the knowledge that this isn’t an ordinary little girl but one who later possibly commits a double murder with a hatchet, and Carter plays on that to change a story of a girl visiting a fairground and seeing a caged tiger into something altogether more sinister and unsettling.  Although the story follows Lizzie she never speaks, but only observes in a way that becomes increasingly eerie as the tale progresses, so by the time she encounters the tiger there are obvious parallels between the two of them: both caged, whether literally or figuratively, both potentially lethal and both biding their time for now.  I think Carter has written at least one other story about Lizzie Borden, so I’ll definitely be investigating that to see what she does with the interesting character that she has created.

My other favourite was the story which caused me to buy the collection in the first place: ‘John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore’.  In this contribution, which is part story, part playscript, Carter plays on the fact that John Ford is the name of both a Jacobean dramatist and a maker of 20th century western films, combining the two forms to relocate Jacobean Ford’s Italian play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ to the prairies of North America, using setting and characters more at home in one of 20th century Ford’s westerns.  It’s such a simple idea but so clever and effective and I loved it just as much this time as I did when I first read it sat in that lecture hall.  If you read anything by Angela Carter, read this story.

American Ghosts and Old World Wonders by Angela Carter.  Published by Vintage, 1994, pp. 146.  Originally published 1993.

Title:

Author: Angela Carter

Published: Penguin, 1987, pp. 133.  Originally published 1974

Genre: Short stories

Blurb: In each of these mesmerising tales is a search for heightened sensitivity.  Reality is left behind.  Filtering ordinary experience through her hallucinatory imagination, Angela Carter exposes the subterranean desires and obsessive fears lurking in the unconscious.  Her characters are haunting, often sinister: an expatriate Englishwoman who takes a Japanese lover, a white hunter who finds pleasure in killing, a puppet who murders her master.  With a voluptuous and elegant style uniquely her own, Angela Carter evokes atmospheres at once erotic and disturbing.

When, where and why: After I was introduced to Angela Carter’s writing at university, I bought everything of hers that I came across. I started reading this one while I was struggling through Pillars of the Earth as it’s a nice, small book and easy to read on the tube, unlike Ken Follet’s huge volume.  It counts as book 27/50 for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.

What I thought: Fireworks is a very apt name for this collection of stories: like fireworks, they are short, sharp bursts of concentrated but brief beauty, all with an underlying element of danger.  However, while Angela Carter always writes excellently, this was definitely not my favourite of her short story collections as, although her prose is rich and full it sometimes feels a little stifling in this book and I often caught myself committing the sacrilege of wishing for fewer words and more plot.

In the story ‘A Souvenier of Japan’ Angela Carter’s fictional self says:

But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us.  I do not want to practise such sleight of hand.  You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else’s house as you passed by the window. (p. 10)

This is a fair illustration of how these stories work: they don’t provide full narratives with fleshed out characters, but give tantalising glimpses into worlds where you can never be quite certain of anything.  There is a dream-like quality to the stories which makes them feel uncanny and remote and just a little bit too odd for me, I think.  Carter’s epilogue explains exactly what she was doing in this collection and I found that very helpful, illuminating some of the more bizarre elements of these madcap stories (particularly the incest; I swear incest has been a theme in almost everything I’ve read by Carter now).  I always enjoy it when an author decides to let their readers in on their thought processes, particularly when they are as patently oddball as Carter’s, so this provided a welcome opportunity to help untangle some of my thoughts on the book.

Even though I found Fireworks just a smidgen too off the wall for my tastes, it still bears Angela Carter’s wonderful writing style.  One of my favourite examples in this book is her description of London in the story ‘Elegy for a Freelance’:

London lay below me with her legs wide open; she was a whore sufficiently accommodating to find room for us in her embraces, even though she cost so much to love. (p. 115)

This perfectly illustrates why I love Angela Carter’s writing and will definitely continue to seek out and read her books.

Where this book goes: This book has been slipped back onto the shelf with the rest of my Angela Carter collection.  I’m looking forward to the next time I pick up one of her books, although I like to leave a fair while in between them so that she always seems fresh and new.

Tea talk: As I picked up this book specifically to read on the tube there was definitely no tea drunk while reading.  I’m lucky to have space to get my book out, never mind a travel mug as well.

This collection of stories, about bad girls and wicked women, extols the female virtues of discontent, sexual disruptiveness and bad manners. The authors featured include Ama Ata Aidoo, Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Colette, Bessie Head, Katherine Mansfield and Jamaica Kincaid. 

Although I really enjoy Angela Carter’s own short stories, evidently I’m not as keen on her choice of those of other writers. Perhaps it was the collection of so many female-centred stories in one book, but I did feel that I was being beaten over the head with conspicious feminism a lot of the time, as strings of women were driven to the titular ‘wickedness’ through the opressive situations in which they found themselves rather than any real fault of their own. The tone of the book seems to ask “but what else could they have done?” which, while it’s an interesting perspective to read from, did get a little wearing.

That complaint aside, there were some stories that I really enjoyed. The folk tale style of the story of Lena and Una, complete with typical folk justice, was particularly good and the haunting story of the Okes of Okehampton reminded me of Daphne du Maurier. All in all, an interesting collection, but not one I think I’m likely to read again.

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women ed. Angela Carter.  Published by Virago, 2004, pp. 339.  Originally published in 1986.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.