Heteronym
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Fifteen-year-old Melanie loses her parents when they’re travelling in America. Without resources, she and her younger brothers, Jonathon and five-year-old Victoria, move to London and get used to living in Uncle Philip’s home.
This is Angela Carter’s basic plot for her novel about the transition from adolescence to maturity and the basic struggle for independence and happiness. Uncle Philip’s home is a sad, sinister place. A toymaker by trade, they live below his badly-lit shop. Creepy toys and unsettling cuckoo clocks abound. There’s no hot water. Living there are also the lovely Aunt Margaret, who can’t speak, and her brothers, the fiddle-player Francis, and the grubby and smelly Finn, Uncle Philip’s apprentice. They try to make the orphans welcome, but it’s not easy.
Uncle Philip has killed all the joy in the place. He’s forbidden Christmas, he doesn’t allow women to wear trousers; he controls all the money in the house. He barely talks to anyone, and prefers his life-size puppets to people. He enjoys putting on puppet shows for the family. But what he really likes is to control people as if they were puppets. Defiance is usually met with physical violence.
Melanie upsets this status quo, as Finn falls in love with her and starts challenging Uncle Philip more and more.
In her first novel, Angela Carter demonstrates a boundless imagination. Although never stepping away from stark realism, her writing has a dreamy quality that gives the impression the characters live in a magical world. She also has a great talent for writing about the adolescent’s confused state of mind just before moving to adulthood. In the end, some of the characters may come across as one-dimensional: Aunt Margaret is full of sweetness, and Uncle Philip just revels in tormenting people. But I think this works on a symbolic level with that dreamy quality I talked about.
This is Angela Carter’s basic plot for her novel about the transition from adolescence to maturity and the basic struggle for independence and happiness. Uncle Philip’s home is a sad, sinister place. A toymaker by trade, they live below his badly-lit shop. Creepy toys and unsettling cuckoo clocks abound. There’s no hot water. Living there are also the lovely Aunt Margaret, who can’t speak, and her brothers, the fiddle-player Francis, and the grubby and smelly Finn, Uncle Philip’s apprentice. They try to make the orphans welcome, but it’s not easy.
Uncle Philip has killed all the joy in the place. He’s forbidden Christmas, he doesn’t allow women to wear trousers; he controls all the money in the house. He barely talks to anyone, and prefers his life-size puppets to people. He enjoys putting on puppet shows for the family. But what he really likes is to control people as if they were puppets. Defiance is usually met with physical violence.
Melanie upsets this status quo, as Finn falls in love with her and starts challenging Uncle Philip more and more.
In her first novel, Angela Carter demonstrates a boundless imagination. Although never stepping away from stark realism, her writing has a dreamy quality that gives the impression the characters live in a magical world. She also has a great talent for writing about the adolescent’s confused state of mind just before moving to adulthood. In the end, some of the characters may come across as one-dimensional: Aunt Margaret is full of sweetness, and Uncle Philip just revels in tormenting people. But I think this works on a symbolic level with that dreamy quality I talked about.