Wise Children

This is a gloriously ribald carnivalesque adventure, with deeper themes.

It is the life story of identical twin musical hall performers, Dora and (Leo)Nora and their complex family, as remembered by Dora on their 75th birthday. Dora is a wonderful raconteur, though hardly a reliable narrator. She's more of a chatty old biddy, rambling away, enthusiastically, and suddenly remembering little asides. She would be great fun to meet, and I really felt I did.

There are many twins in the story: contrasts, duality, uniqueness, and mistaken identity are the most obvious themes, all in a theatrical setting, with many Shakespearean references.

THEMES
As well as duality/twins (and related themes) and the theatre, uncertain parentage, absent fathers, show more decline and fall, comedy and tragedy, all feature strongly, and in fact most of them come back to duality and contrast. The performers range from the most revered Shakespearean thespians down to presenters on the trashiest sort of TV game show.

Twinship sometimes reduces a pair to a single entity, but also enhances to more than the sum of its parts: "Neither of us is anything special on our own... but put us together, people blinked... we turned heads." The trouble is, "This night of all nights I wanted to look like myself, whoever that was."

There are even similarities among those who are not twins, the same circumstances and actions recurring: romances arising from productions of King Lear, consensual incest (actual, presumed (but not certain, where paternity is not definite), and fictional (Lear and Cordelia, a pantomime goose and its gosling!)), and "to die for love runs in the family" - as does being long-lived (another contrast/contradiction).

Legitimacy and illegitimacy is another aspect, both in the literal sense of people's parentage, but also in terms of "proper" theatre versus lower forms of entertainment. Randolph, the patriarch, toured the world, evangelising Shakespeare, to the point where "the touring was turning into a kind of madness".

Performance is the background of everything, even real life: Grandma Chance's boarding house - on Bard Road "never looked plausible. It looked like a stage set of a boarding house, as if Grandma had done it up to suite a role she'd chosen on purpose", which was almost true. She even created her family out of scraps.

Fate is a strong thread, too, even in the main surnames, Hazard and Chance. "Ambition, the curse and glory of the Hazards, who'll risk everything they've got and a little bit more on a throw of the dice."

If you like spotting such things, also look out for mirrors, the grandfather's Grandfather clock (and indirect references, e.g. "we stopped, short..." re the menopause!), Shakespearean-style potions and poisons, and Melchior's obsessive attachment to a cardboard crown.

FAMILY TREE
This is rather complicated, as there are lots of twins, as well as partner-swapping, resulting in children being raised by their uncles. Other children, including Dora and Nora, are raised by people who are not their parents or uncles. There is a Dramatis Personae listed at the back, but this family tree is more useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wise_Children_Family_Tree.png

The title becomes clear towards, the end, "I may never have known my father in the sense of an intimate acquaintance, but I know who he was. I was a wise child."

INCEST
This should be a troubling issue, but it's all glossed over in such a jolly way (no gory details), it's hard to be as outraged as one should be. Just the thought of it makes one character say, "Dread and delight coursed through my veins".

TRUTH
Parts of it are a little far-fetched, but whether that's Angela Carter's fantasy, or embroidered by Dora, we don't always know, though at times, doubts are explicit: "Over the years, Perry offered us a Chinese banquet of options as to what happened to him. He gave us all his histories, we could choose which ones we wanted - but they kept on changing." Another time, she admits, "I always misremember. It never seems the same twice, each time that I remember it, it distorts."

Similarly, "Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand... she created it out of sheer force of personality."

There is a scene where a comedian tells an old joke about multiple illegitimacy (http://goodriddlesnow.com/jokes/view/1117), but it becomes a rather meta joke within the novel, as the fiction has so many parallels in the story.

The conclusion is that children invent their own histories, and Nora wonders if much of their own memory (especially of Peregrine) is "just a collection of our hopes and dreams... Something to set our lives by, like the old [grandfather] clock in the hall."

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE
For their seventh birthday, Dora and Nora are given a beautiful toy theatre, and Dora comments (perhaps only with hindsight) that it's "just like life". They, like another pair of twins in the story, were born on Shakespeare's birthday.

"The priest and the game-show presenter. Not so different... Both of them in show business. Both, in their different ways, carrying on the great tradition of the Hazard family - the willing suspension of disbelief. Both of them promise you a free gift if you play the game."

"I... have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn't matter if what happens next spoils everything: the anticipation itself is always pure."

When one pair of twins meet their real father, he denies parentage by quoting the Bard - ouch!

Dora describes the experience of watching film of her and Nora in their youth as "batty old tarts with their eyes glued on their own ghosts... When I was young, I'd wanted to be ephemeral... to live on just the glorious moment... But if you put your past on celluloid, it keeps."

FAVOURITE QUOTES

* "The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle."
* "He loved his boys [who may not have been his]. He cast them as the princes in the tower as soon as they could toddle."
* "There he was on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare." (Nudge, nudge.)
* Of a cheating wife, whose husband murdered her, her lover and then himself, "She always had a gift for exits".
* "She didn't so much talk as elocute."
* "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive... I always preferred foreplay, too, well, not always."
* "Tragedy, eternally more class than comedy."
* "Irish had an old soul... He was a man with a great future behind him already."
* When a wife is asked if she misses her errant husband, "she had the grace to twinkle right up at the very thought of him, but she twinkled dismissively."
* "I've never known such profound silences... Silences in which the unspoken hung like fog that got into your lungs and choked you."
* "We painted the faces we always used to have onto the faces we have now."
* "The third Lady Hazard, wearing a Vivienne Westwood somewhat too witty for her years."
* "She looked a million dollars... even if in well-used notes... a stunning advertisement for hormone replacement therapy... not a line on that skin but, then, sharkskin doesn't wrinkle" and her boyfriend was so unprepossessing "I hoped for her sake he'd got hidden talents."
* "Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."

Recommended by Danielle (CUSFS) show less

Nobody does bawdy quite like Angela Carter. This is A Comedy Of Errors via South London music hall and it's as ludicrous and brilliant as that sounds.

Ribald and garish, bawdy and vulgar, this generational saga of an early 20th century British showbiz family with multiple intersecting branches, set just over two hundred pages and I loved every improbable, high-octane, soap opera drama of it all. It also helps that the story targets three of my favourite book genres: (1) generational saga of (2) a messed up showbiz family with (3) a sprinkling of magic realism.

In anyone else's hands, the plot, the prose, the characters, they would be ridiculous and overdone, but in Carter's, they are ridiculously well-crafted and overdone to perfection.

Just as with Nights at the Circus, Carter's prose is so vivid and captivating that my mind was graphic novel-ing every page as I read. If there's ever show more to be an adaptation, I sincerely think graphic novels are the only other medium that could do justice to Carter's worlds. show less

"What a joy it is to sing and dance!" And what a joy to read such a vivacious, bawdy, life-affirming book that tears through the history of theatre in London and the follies of Hollywood in the 1930s. One that also skewers the high/low cultural divide and reverence for Shakespeare. At first the frenetic pace of Dora's memories of her absurd family saga was challenging, but once I just went with the flow, it was endlessly entertaining. Laughed out loud several times and wish I could recall many of the lines, brilliant!

This is a completely over the top, coincidences and bullshit galore story, and I loved it. Probably helped that the intro gave me a strong sense of what to expect from the story, as it is outside the genres I normally read in, and I wold have missed a lot without that. The narrative voice of Dora Chance is so matter of fact and practical and I adored her.

Sat on my to-read pile for about seven years. When I finally finished it, I was honestly a little disappointed. It's all a little too crafted, full of structural patterning and surface references to Shakespeare (the sort of book that provides English undergraduates with cheap essay fodder) but ultimately it felt a little emotionally shallow.

Deeper engagement with C20th British light entertainment, and a bit less of the Magical Realism-lite family history, would have fixed it. Gorgeous George deserved a whole book to himself.

Given it extra points for being probably the only novel ever to reference Leigham Court Road in Streatham.

I should have made a note of where it was I saw this novel mentioned, only a few weeks ago, because of course I've forgotten. But it was somewhere online probably and must've been a trusted source, because I put it right on my public library list, even though I usually think of Angela Carter's work, what little I've read of it, as kind of tiresomely laden with lots of symbols and fairy-taley things. (A personal dislike.)

I also tend not to flock to books about the smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint, nor ones which are too "comic", both of which this one pretty much is, but nevermind, I got it, I read it, I was entirely engrossed and charmed, it was heaps of fun.

It's a first-person account of the life of a woman now in her show more semi-spry 70s who, with her identical twin sister, was a song-and-dance girl in music hall in London in the first half of the 20th century. She's also the unacknowledged and illegitimate daughter of Britain's greatest living Shakespearian actor.

The story she tells takes in the music hall childhood in Brixton, a chance to be in a Hollywood film spearheaded by the famous father, and, as the final set-piece (Carter's wonderful at big set-pieces), the 100th birthday of the great man, at which party all his family, both legit and illegit, cast-off or retained, gathers, and much mayhem ensues.

Carter's themes are of love and loyalty--the twin sisters never find relationships more important to them than they are to each other; the family that surrounds them is seldom directly biological. It's about life lived with great gusto, chances taken (Dora and her sister are surnamed Chance, and performed as the Lucky Chances), nostalgia, and keeping on keeping on.

This would make a smashing mini-series. show less