The greatest challenge for a reviewer lies in a work that he doesn’t care for… but which is recognisably an excellent achievement of art. That, for me, is the dilemma of The Magic Toyshop: so let’s see what I can do with it.
All the people I’ve known personally who like Angela Carter’s writing are women. This may be significant. It’s not that Carter can be dismissed as chick-lit fluff – far from it; and bear in mind that this potentially sexist observation is coming from a man who grew up reading Louisa May Alcott and teen girls’ romances along with his Arthur Conan Doyle and Tolkien. All the same, the lush sensuality of Carter’s prose carries a weight of associations that remain something of a foreign country for me, like peering through a peep-hole into a girl’s bedroom.
Which is, in fact, one of the key images in this novel.
Melanie, a privileged fifteen, finds herself an orphan the morning after she has tried on (and ruined) her mother’s wedding dress. While she’s still trying to let go of the obsessive belief that her actions have been responsible for her parents’ deaths overseas, she is sent (along with her younger brother and sister) to live with an uncle she has never met.
The transition from country estate to seedy urban working-class life is a predictable one, but Carter wastes no time on clichés of social commentary and class consciousness. The changes she traces in Melanie’s life are stranger and wilder things by far. Philip Flower is a toymaker, a puppeteer, a master artisan, a monster. His Irish wife and her two brothers share a tangled and confusing intimacy of music and perhaps something more than strictly familial fondness. Margaret Flowers is mute, communicating with chalk notes on a board; a superb cook and giving heart to the children and her brothers, but nothing more than a drab seamstress and house slave to her husband, allowed no money and shopping only at stores where her husband has established accounts; she is thin and perpetually desperate, but her flute playing is exquisite. Her brother Francie plays fiddle professionally; Finn, the youngest, is a mixed-media painter and a step-dancer, possessed of a physical presence that disturbs Melanie profoundly. You can soon see where this is going, and so does Melanie. That, too, is not where this novel’s surprises lie.
Melanie, like most teens, spends a good deal of time as her own narrator, regarding her life from an imagined outside perspective: and Carter handles this as deftly as she does everything, balancing Melanie’s own adolescent self-awareness with a mature writer’s insights into the youth’s character, and the author pulls this off seamlessly, without breaking stride or changing voice. Throughout this novel, Melanie tries to put a good, or at least an ordinary, face on things, to describe events to herself in a light that renders them consistent with the sane, well-to-do normalcy of her childhood. But there’s precious little that’s sane in Philip Flower’s house, and the lines of reality itself get a little blurred. There is one shocking image, for instance, never explained, that can probably best be described as either a) a hallucination brought on by grief and stress, or b) a bit of magic realism; but from another point of view it could also be seen as c) the book’s weakest moment, as the murder-mystery suspense it generates is never resolved in a rational sense But the surety of Carter’s hand is such that I’ll give her the benefit of the artistic doubt. Nevertheless, it’s the sort of thing I don’t care for in my novels, like a detective novel that leaves one corpse unexplained in the parlour, having been a shocking discovery in Chapter VI but somewhat inconsistent with the final revelation and more convenient to overlook entirely by the conclusion.
Melanie’s detached emotional tone is disturbing, and it is another of the things I don’t personally care for in the novel. But it is one of the novel’s strengths all the same, convincing and consistent, and it is entirely in keeping with both the traumatic guilt associated with her parents’ death and with her youth and inexperience. In her uncle’s house she is continually looking for parallels with her previous life, trying to find reason in an irrational world. And her sheltered childhood, followed by the particular circumstances of her parents’ death, have left her very vulnerable indeed to the abusive atmosphere of Philip Flowers’ toyshop.
P.G. Wodehouse used to write of characters saying that So-and-So’s latest novel laid bare the soul of Woman as with a trowel. Sans sarcasm, I had a little of that feeling with The Magic Toyshop. It is a novel whose symbolic language probably communicates a certain aspect of a young woman’s sexual awakening with eloquent accuracy; it is certainly a mood piece of ominous effectiveness, a gorgeous prose poem, a veritable piece of Literature. I admire it, I respect it, I love the language, I don’t much care for the book. But that’s no fit final word on which to close this subject; let me give you one sentence from the first chapter, just about the point where I became aware that despite the itchy feeling it gave me, however much or little I might like it, this was an excellent novel. “Melanie let herself into the night and it snuffed out her daytime self at once, between two of its dark fingers.”
A journey out of innocence into experience, a parable of abuse, a tour de force of artistic storytelling, I suggest to you that The Magic Toyshop is worth your attention… whether you like it or not.
(Heinemann, 1967)
And on behalf of the ‘Edge’og, many thanks to you.