Wise Children By Angela Carter

Stumbling across a well-thumbed copy of Angela Carter’s 1991 novel, Wise Children, in a secondhand bookshop, I was heartened – and a little saddened – to notice that I was not alone in choosing this title as a book to share. For written inside this particular paperback was the following inscri ption:

"18.5.93

Bridget,

You often have to travel far from the self in order to truly find yourself. Your journey to these alien lands is underway now. So go out there searching for the truth and returned enriched.

You have an immense amount of talent don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise,

Happy travelling,

Love Phil"

One can’t help feeling for poor Phil. Do I detect romantic overtones? Or something more paternal? Perhaps a parting of the ways? (Certainly, at least, a parting of the ways for Bridget and this copy of Wise Children.) Whatever the true story behind Phil’s message to Bridget may be, I am not surprised that the novel inspired such an earnest and heartfelt inscri ption, because Wise Children – Carter’s last and greatest novel – is a book I have forced upon friends and family members over the years and never fail to recommend if asked. I return to it every year or so, always to find myself newly impressed by its brilliance. A fictionalised showbiz memoir charting the slings and arrows inflicted on two very different branches of a once-great theatrical dynasty in London (the legitimate Hazards and the illegitimate Chances), there is a passage early on which, for me, encapsulates the enduring appeal of this novel.

The scene is 49 Bard Road, Brixton, present day (presumably circa 1991). It is a house that, like our narrator, Dora Chance, and her twin sister, Nora, has seen better days. On this particular day the Chance sisters happen to be celebrating their 75th birthdays:

Seventy-five, today, and a topsy-turvy day of wind and sunshine. The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild!

And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.

What mainly happens is that Dora recounts her family history – one which contains all the juicy Shakespearean tropes of ambition, greed and revenge fathers and daughters brothers and sisters twins, mistaken identity, incest and adultery. But beneath all this high melodrama, Wise Children is primarily a book about family and forgiveness about love and loss failure and success. Mostly, though, it is about life and living. In fact, with its irony-free leitmotif “What a joy it is to sing and dance!” I am hard-pressed to think of another book that is quite so life-affirming.

In Dora Chance, Angela Carter bequeathed to us one of the most distinctive, original narrative voices in modern English literature. It is wise, bawdy, vulgar, eloquent and very, very funny. (Wise Children is one of the all-time great comic novels – up there with the likes of the George and Weedon Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and Martin Amis’s Money). And the writing is often breathtakingly lyrical, with passages of bravura that immediately send you back to their beginning just to make sure what you read really was just as good as first you thought:

“There was nothing so stuffy as the lives of small-time theatricals, in those days, and south London was a ghetto of chorus girls and boys and whatnot. In the semis, behind the dusty privet hedges, they rested between engagements, sitting on a piece of leatherette suite in the sitting room where the fumed oak sideboard contained a single bottle of sweet sherry and half a dozen dusty glasses stood on a tarnished silver tray inscribed, ‘To a great little trouper from the Merry Martins, Frinton-on-Sea, 1919,’ or something like that, beneath framed photographs of girls with big thighs in tights and men in crepe hair signed with Xs galore and framed colour reproductions on the walls of scenes depicting red-nosed monks eating big meals of venison and boar."

It is, of course, the saddest of ironies that such a life-affirming book was written as the author, unbeknownst to her, was dying of cancer. The book was published in 1991 Carter died in February 1992 at 51. And yet, such is the strength of the writing that Wise Children transcends this sad fact, and the comedy is never overshadowed by the tragedy. It is a masterpiece. Please share.