Wise Children

Despite being an admirer of Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus and The Bloody Chamber are two of my favourite books - this, her last novel, had completely passed me by. I was recently drawn to its lurid cover at Foyle's and, as a resident of tube-less, downtrodden South London, the joke it opens with sold me: "Q: Why is London like Budapest? A: Because it is two cities divided by a river." Narrator Dora Chance goes on to explain the "bastard side of the Old Father Thames": "If you're from the States think of Manhattan. Then think of Brooklyn. See what I mean?"

The North and South London divide is a good device to start with. Dora and twin sister Nora are from the wrong side of the tracks in a way; they are the illegitimate, barely acknowledged daughters of an Olivier-like grand old man of British theatre. The book begins on the sisters' 75th birthday, and their father's 100th, with Dora looking back on their lives. The story's main arc covers the glory days of British music hall (Dora and Nora followed their father into the show business) and Hollywood.

It is a bit more linear and grounded than a lot of Carter's stuff, but still there are coincidences and improbabilities, flights of magic realist fancy. But you are not necessarily supposed to believe Dora, she acknowledges herself a number of times that she is an unreliable narrator. Reading it is like sitting down in a slightly seedy London boozer to listen to a tispsy, jolly old bird tell her tale. You know she is embellishing it, and she knows you know, but you go along for the ride because you are enjoying it so.

I first came upon Carter in university in one of the many courses in the comparative literature department which seemed to have the phrase "the feminine" in the title, preceded by a verb like exploring, unleashing or concealing. I gather Carter remains a darling of the academy as some people still are apparently able to make careers wittering on about intertextuality. I admit I often still read with my theory hat on (like Catholicism, once drilled into you, it is difficult to shake) and I can spew po-mo lit crit bullshit as well as any one. The other day I went to Hitchcock's Notorious at the BFI Southbank with an art house film group. Afterwards we were having discussion about the Freudian overtones, how it has Hitchcock's auteur fingerprints, whether it is an allegory for US post-WWII policy towards West Germany, etc. And this woman at the end of the table with this broad Glaswegian accent piped up with: 'Och, isn't it just a really good story? What are you all on about?' And that, was the wisest thing anyone said all night.