The Magic Toyshop
Two images below, based on the novel The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter (not for publication or anything, I just love the book). It's always seemed to me to be kind of a spin on the old "orphans in wartime sent to live with eccentric relatives, have rural adventures away from Hitler's gaze" kind of story we seemed to get fed a lot of in school. In this case, though, there is no war, and the journey is reversed: three children (Melanie, Victoria and Jonathon) lose their parents in an accident, and are exiled from their loving, well-to-do family home, with its apple-tree and housekeeper and church on Sundays, to be sent to live with their mother's estranged brother in darkest London.
Angela Carter's prose style is extraordinarily florid - like Nabokov, she never would use one word where ten would do. Orwell's old line "Good prose is like a window pane" falls apart, for me, with a book like this - yes, it's like a window-pane, but it's a stained-glass window in a great cathedral, dazzling and distracting, rather than simply a clear hole for looking through. The language is its own reward, the most extraordinary imagery spilling out in waves. The story is comparatively simple, but the web of allusion and metaphor is so dense it demands that the reader unravel it: as much as Carter gives the reader, she nevertheless leaves it to you to fathom the meaning.
When, at the conclusion, the house burns down beneath Melanie's feet (oh - SPOILER ALERT, I suppose) and leaves us abandoned in darkness, it makes the same kind of elliptical sense as any children's story, though the book is certainly not intended for children. Fairytales stop when a parent stops reading, and the last page of The Magic Toyshop rings with the same questioning silence: a child demands to know "but what happened to them next?" and is only told that it's time for bed. We get no further answers unless we invent them.
Anyway.
This first picture was based on the scene in which Melanie, enraptured with her own new sexuality and trying on identities for fun, steals her mother's wedding dress. She ends up snagged in the apple tree at midnight, the dress shredded and filthy, the flowered headdress lost in the branches. (In a later scene, she will be forced to wear a similar dress and perform in her uncle's puppet show, hence the doll-like pose - or what's supposed to be a doll-like pose. Looking at it now there's a whiff of the YMCA about it.)
In a later scene, feeling trapped in the home of her tyrannical Uncle Philip Flower, Melanie opens a kitchen drawer to find the severed hand of a small child sitting with the cutlery. She decides she is going insane and faints: "Bluebeard was here" is the comment she makes before passing out. (Her brother is obsessed with ships and sailing, and at one point she dreams that the house is a ship, and his topmost room the crow's nest: her uncle looks favourably upon her brother for his skills as a modelmaker. In her daze, it seems not unreasonable that her uncle is therefore a pirate.)
The pictures were done for fun, in ink/charcoal/pastel, and then comprehensively messed about with in Photoshop. And you should read the book, if you haven't already, and thank me later.
Angela Carter's prose style is extraordinarily florid - like Nabokov, she never would use one word where ten would do. Orwell's old line "Good prose is like a window pane" falls apart, for me, with a book like this - yes, it's like a window-pane, but it's a stained-glass window in a great cathedral, dazzling and distracting, rather than simply a clear hole for looking through. The language is its own reward, the most extraordinary imagery spilling out in waves. The story is comparatively simple, but the web of allusion and metaphor is so dense it demands that the reader unravel it: as much as Carter gives the reader, she nevertheless leaves it to you to fathom the meaning.
When, at the conclusion, the house burns down beneath Melanie's feet (oh - SPOILER ALERT, I suppose) and leaves us abandoned in darkness, it makes the same kind of elliptical sense as any children's story, though the book is certainly not intended for children. Fairytales stop when a parent stops reading, and the last page of The Magic Toyshop rings with the same questioning silence: a child demands to know "but what happened to them next?" and is only told that it's time for bed. We get no further answers unless we invent them.
Anyway.
This first picture was based on the scene in which Melanie, enraptured with her own new sexuality and trying on identities for fun, steals her mother's wedding dress. She ends up snagged in the apple tree at midnight, the dress shredded and filthy, the flowered headdress lost in the branches. (In a later scene, she will be forced to wear a similar dress and perform in her uncle's puppet show, hence the doll-like pose - or what's supposed to be a doll-like pose. Looking at it now there's a whiff of the YMCA about it.)
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| Melanie |
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| Bluebeard Was Here, 2004 |
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All text and images copyright © Marleen Lowe - please do not reproduce without permission
All text and images copyright © Marleen Lowe - please do not reproduce without permission
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