What I've been reading: The Bloody Chamber, Sandman, The Roses of Berlin, Dracula

How can any week be a cop out if it includes this?

This week is going to be a bit of a cop out.

Yeah, I read The Bloody Chamber, but it was probably for about the thirtieth time. It's not that I've said everything that I think about it, everything that I have to say about it elsewhere on this blog, it is simply that if I started doing so here I'd be stuck in front of my keyboard all day. Places to be! Books to read!

Still, there was a slight difference this time as I had subjected my poor book group to Angela Carter's fabulous short stories. Suffice to say we got a few converts to the cause and left a handful of people crying into their gin, or shaking their heads at my depravity. (Honestly, I love you chaps. Sorry if you didn't like it.) I consider my work there to be done, though, if only because one woman experienced the same ebullient glee reading Puss-in-Boots that it always give to me.

As to Dracula, well, I've only read until the end of chapter 5, because I'm reading it slightly ahead of real time on account of this. I should be done in October.

And I'm not going to review issue 2 of Sandman, Overture, because I want to finish the arc before I give a considered review of it. Or, you know, gush in a fangirly, obsessive fashion about its obvious superiority to everything.

So that basically leaves The Roses of Berlin, latest instalment in one of my other favourite comics, Moore and O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. When I read the first two arcs of this I got the impression that Moore and O'Neill were writing this for me - or at least, people significantly like me. With everything since The Black Dossier, I have become increasingly convinced that they are making these for no-one but themselves.

Isn't it wonderful when your partner brings you roses?

I don't actually have a problem with that.

Oh, it makes it harder to read, of course, but it also means that they are willing to go places, to do things, to please their own sense of artistry. O'Neill's art in the Nemo arc has been breathtaking, far too complex for a visual illiterate like myself to fathom without spending minutes studying each frame. The plots, perhaps, are simpler, the characters more broadly drawn, but the subtext, the implications of the stories, the moral dimension of them, becomes increasingly grey and complex. I have found myself uncomfortable with the level of violence in Nemo stories, with the motivations of the characters. Yet in the flawed world Janni Dakkar inhabits, still, I root for her more than anyone else. Why is that?

As to The Roses of Berlin, I'll need to read it a couple more times before I decide how I feel about it.Visual illiterate, remember? I've read a lot of bad reviews of it but, while I can't yell my love to the rooftops, I preferred it Heart of Ice.

I suppose I can't complete this review without saying mentioning Moore's refusal to bend to the Hollywood trope of, 'foreigners, when in private, prefer to speak in English'. Suffice to say: I respect his stance on this. It is far more authentic. I get it, I really do. But frankly, my German isn't up to the job and some subtitles might have been nice.

Forget about the baby: What's really going on in the Labyrinth.

Reading G.K Chesterton's frankly biazarre introduction of The Man who Was Thursday, I came to the realisation that I'm not much of one for slavish deference to an authorial purpose in any story-form.

It's all very well for Chesterton to insist that his work is not an allegory when the text states, with all the subtlety of a bill-hook to the throat, that it is. Likewise, Mr Lewis can declaim to the heavens that his work is purely allegorical and nothing else, but... well, we'll let the text bear its own witness to that¹. A text is an artefact which is mediated by many viewpoints. Of course the author's conscious intention, their decision of where to focus, what to show, guides the narrative and the reader along its path, but...

None of us exist in a vacuum. Culture, tradition, unconscious thoughts, will shape a story as much as a writer's intention. And when a narrative artefact – like a folk-song, like a screenplay - is passed through many, many hands which shape, change affect before it even reaches its audience, then, oh, then, we can get something really special.

So, a little while back, the brilliant i09 published a link to a rather ingenuous piece of back-engineering  which tried to lay to rest the sheer WTF the viewer is left with after watching that absolutely superb film, Labyrinth.

Now, before we go any further I should probably come clean about my credentials as one of those women. You know the ones, the kind who owe their sexual awakening to staring rapt at David Bowie prancing about in eye-liner, a fright wig and eyewateringly tight tights. So when I talk about Labyrinth, I have a tendency to.... um....

oooh....

Er... sorry.

Where was I?

Right!

Anyway, that article is followed in the comments by a bunch of (weighs word choices) sticklers who insist that we already knew what Labyrinth was about, that any good geek would, at some point, would have plugged into google 'wait – what the hell. What was actually happening there?' and come up with a nice neat little explanation².

If you want that explanation, here you go: Labyrinth is a partial adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Outside Over There. It's about how Sarah has to get over her resentment of her little step-brother and start treating him properly. The breakdown of the film plot is:

1. Sarah's actress mother abandons her to live a life of romance with a beautiful actor who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Mr Bowie.
2. Devastated by this abandonment, she retreats into a fantasy world, idolising her absent mother, romanticising her affair. In the meantime, she gets involved with drama at school, being cast in a play called 'The Labyrinth' where a beautiful princess has to rescue her step-brother from the realm of the Goblin King. While doing this, she develops a crush on her drama teacher who also has a striking likeness to a particular famous musician actor with the most amazing eyes....
   

   

   .......

3.  .... sorry. You lost me again.
4. The Goblin King – who actually exists and is in love with Sarah – wants this child for some specific reason that is VITALLY IMPORTANT TO THE PLOT, goddammit!³
5. Sarah is rehearsing the play in the park and having trouble remembering the last line.
6. Dragged away from rehearsals AGAIN, Sarah fights with her stepmother, is left to babysit. Discovering one of her toys has been nicked and the baby will not stop crying, she imitates the play and summons the Goblin King to take her brother away..
7. Enter David Bowie in a big cloak and much glitter. Terms of a mystical contest are struck.
8. Sarah navigates the Labyrinth, befriends the Goblins and, despite dangers, trickery and discouragement, ***spoilers*** rescues the baby using the lines from the play that she had trouble remembering. Before she does so the Goblin King confesses his love and offers her an eternity of magic.

9. 

   Who would not want this child?

   She arrives back home, gives the baby the toy he stole earlier, packs away her Princess music box and takes down the press clippings of her mother from around the mirror. This, it is clear, is all behind her now.
10. However, Sarah is not quite ready to leave behind all the 'good' bits of her imagination. All the goodies and baddies from the Labyrinth, minus the Goblin King, have a big party in Sarah's room.
11. Baby Toby is safe.... however, the Goblin King will return to seize this baby that he wants SO MUCH.

Now, this makes a lovely, neat little morality tale. It's all about, oh, growing up, taking responsibility and not bargaining away your younger siblings to morally dubious supernatural entities just because they've been borrowing your teddy bears. As an explanation, however, it falls short, mostly because almost none of it's in the fucking film in the first place. It's all very well for Chesterton to exclaim, “I called it The Man who was Thursday: A NIGHTMARE! It's not supposed to be taken as anything more than that!” because, well, credit where it's due, that is actually the bloody title, but to try and control the interpretation of a film based upon stuff that isn't actually in the film? Oh, go and read some Barthes.

What makes this worse is that Labyrinth, against the film maker's best intentions, against their stated desire to tell a certain story in a certain way, Labyrinth, I tell you, persisted in being one of those white-hot, cultural-narrative, finger-on-the-pulse, don't-step-too-close-or-it-will-burn-you, vital bloody stories of which we do not have enough. Labyrinth is a story about a young woman discovering her sexuality but – again, again, oh be still my beating heart – from the inside. We see it through the young woman's flesh, the young woman's eyes. We feel the male gaze, the judging, older female gaze which tells us what we should be - “Go back to your room and play with your toys,” “You should be having dates at your age”, and we feel it scald our as-yet-untouched-skin.

And, of course, again, it is white, cis, middle class, heteronormative femininity. It isn't for everyone, it isn't inclusive, but damn it, when even the most privileged of women have to make do a scant handful of stories that show us as we actually are, they they too precious, too fucking scarce not to be celebrated. So, let's get this clear Labyrinth is a woman's story, and as one woman to anyone who's listening: Toby is the King of all McGuffins.

Angela Carter: How to be a woman.

So, for reasons best known to themselves, the book group have elected to read Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman for next month, effectively throwing me into the path of a bullet I had been dodging since some time last year.

Bang. Splat.

Ouch.

I can't even be bothered to argue with it. Frankly, I'm having difficulty being bothered reading the damned thing. It's not so much inflammatory as dull. In fact to make the slog seem terminable, I have been interspersing its chapters with short stories from one of the better-loved volumes gracing my shelves, a book that must always be attended by score of superlatives, Angela Carter's incomparable The Bloody Chamber.

Its fitting, too, that it should be this book I use to re-engage my brain, restore my equilibrium and massage my affronted aesthetic sense. In part because I have, in my reading, hissed that any of Moran's factually correct statements were said, better, by Carter about thirty years before, and that the factually incorrect ones are refuted by she-who-must-not-be-contradicted with all her usual wit and perspicacity. Mostly, though, it is because I have been known to say that The Bloody Chamber should be placed before every girl in this country on her fourteenth birthday.

If I had my way, everybody would read this book anyway - as a work of literature, it is elegant, intelligent and powerfully done, its value is beyond doubt; but only to a pubescent girl is it a work whose value is beyond measure. I had always, always thought this, and I have never quite understood why. I think I get it now.

And I'm willing to admit that I have been wrong.