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

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

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.

"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!

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

Wise Children was Angela Carter’s final novel. It is a glorious, bawdy extravagant novel, hilariously irreverent with more than a nod to Shakespeare. In this comic celebration of a century of show business, Carter weaves a magical story around the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families; the Hazards and the Chances. Their connections to one another are wonderfully convoluted and unreliable, their relationships frequently improbable. It is a novel of pairs, there are several sets of twins, one twin of each pair, being more extravagant than the other. Much of the action takes place in London, a city divided by a river. This duality is one of the main themes of the novel.

The novel is narrated by Dora Chance, one of a pair of show more identical twins, she and her sister Nora were The Lucky Chances, born on the wrong side of the tracks – they have spent their whole lives in the theatre, song and dance girls, and their legs are still pretty good – for their age.

“Yes, indeed; I have my memories but I prefer to keep them to myself, thank you very much. Though there are some things I never can forget. The cock that used to crow, early in the morning, in Bond Street. And I saw a zebra once, he was galloping down Camden High street, his stripes fluoresced. I was in some garret with a free Norwegian. And the purple flowers that would pop up on the bomb-sites almost before the ruins stopped smoking, as if to say, life goes on, even if you don’t.”

The sisters are devoted to one another, though Nora always wanted a child, they take some comfort in their goddaughter Tiffany, who now appears on a trashy TV game show.

The novel opens in Brixton, South London, where Dora and Nora were born, and lived with their grandmother after their mother’s death. It is their seventy-fifth birthday – it is also Shakespeare’s birthday, and it is the birthday of their one-hundred-year-old father – a giant of the theatre himself – who has never publicly acknowledged his daughters. Melchior Hazard is their famous father (although paternity is never certain in this novel) whose first wife, Lady A – now called Wheelchair by Dora and her sister – live with the Chance sisters. A Shakespearean actor, Melchior often sports a gilded cardboard crown. Melchior is himself a twin – his brother Perry adored by his nieces and assumed by many to be their father – vanished abroad many years earlier. There are two other pairs of twins, and in true Shakespearen fashion, confusions over paternity and identity abound. Dora and Nora have been told they are the product of a brief encounter between their mother Pretty Kitty and Melchior Hazard. Their grandmother wastes no time in pointing out their absent father, on their seventh birthday, during their first visit to the theatre.

Neither sister ever marries, although they both come close. Nora is the one who falls in love all the time, even sharing her boyfriend with her sister on their seventeenth birthday, but at the end of the day, the sisters can’t be separated.

“Nora was always free with it and threw her heart away as if it were a used bus ticket. Either she was head over heels in love or else she was broken-hearted. She had it off first with the pantomime goose, when we were Mother Goose’s goslings that year in Newcastle upon Tyne. The goose was old enough to be her father and Grandma would have plucked him, stuck an apple up his bum and roasted him if she’d found out and so would the goose’s wife, who happened to be principle boy.”

On this, their seventy-fifth birthday an invitation arrives for Melchior’s birthday party later that day. It is the first of a number of surprises that day. In the hours before the party, Dora tells the story of their life, a life in the theatre, a life which takes them to Hollywood with their father to make a film based on A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Her stories of love affairs and theatrical characters are told from a distance of decades. Dora is a real character, a rambling old woman who says it just like it is, a lovable teller of tales, she’s not an entirely reliable narrator. The life she describes is one of bed hopping, theatricals, long lived relatives and the great joy that it is to sing and dance.

The novel ends where it starts on the day of Dora and Nora’s seventy-fifth birthday. They get ready for the party – plenty of makeup and star spangled stockings, and they and Wheelchair arrive at the party, to be greeted by the flash of paparazzi cameras – and where they find Melchior enthroned on a great chair, wearing a purple kaftan. Dora had known it would be an eventful day, and as the party progresses there are more surprises and revelations – not to mention one more inappropriate bunk up.

Wise Children was a big success with me, thank you those people who suggested I read it – you were quite right. show less

Wise Children is my favorite novel. In the world. That I've ever read. Ever. Which actually makes it a little hard for me to speak about it rationally. It's the story of a (mostly) English show business dynasty as told by elderly former chorine Dora Chance (the rest of the family possess the surname Hazard, of course!). In the true Shakespearean tradition the book is full of twins (I think there are FIVE sets), it's besotted with Shakespeare from top to bottom (intended). Dora and Nora Chance are (probably) the illegitimate twin daughters of the great stage star and Shakespearean, Melchior Hazard. As Dora says at one point, being illegitimate, she and her twin go on the halls. And that's really the meat of the book. It's about art and show more entertainment high and low and everything between. And about family. About parents and children and people who are parents in name only and about the people who raise and love them. The cast is enormous, and nearly everyone in the book is "family" in some way or another to the two Chance sisters, either by marriage, blood, adoption or coercion. Their father, Melchior, never acknowledges them officially - his American brother, Perry, steps up, puts his name on the birth certificate and becomes their adored and adoring uncle.

I mean it when I say nearly every sort of enterprise that might hire an actor makes an appearance: Shakespeare (of course), music hall, vaudeville, burlesque, English pantomime, Hollywood movies, game shows, commercials, children's television, cooking shows, and on and on. The Chance sisters are raised in a theatrical boarding house by their beloved Grandma Chance (vegetarian, pacifist, nudist and drinker of créme de menthe). The appearances by real life luminaries are blessedly few and far between. Famous people are mentioned occasionally, but they remain off stage. There's a lovely description of a Fred and Adele Astaire routine - the girls' first show, and the first time they see their father in the flesh. There is also a whole Dan Leno routine in a seaside theater in Brighton, and he becomes an actual character in the book, playing Bottom in a disastrous movie version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I had no idea that Dan Leno was a real person until I read my always charming inamorato's book on vaudeville (No applause, Just Throw Money). I may have even said out loud, "Oh! He's real!" to an entire subway car.

One of the most wonderful things about the book is Dora's voice. She's a smart, working class dame who learned how to write from her former boyfriend, just referred to by his nickname, Irish. He's clearly drawn from a mixture of Fitzgerald and Faulkner in their Hollywood years. She's by turns hard boiled and sentimental, and the set pieces are wondrous: the winter orgy outside of a burning mansion, the set of the aforementioned film of Dream, the entire Brighton sequence. The last line of the book, after a raucous party filled with centenarians, butterflies and incest, is "what a joy it is to dance and sing".

Wise Children is cast pretty much entirely with people who until fairly recently wouldn't have been allowed to be buried in cemeteries along side so-called decent people. Self-invented actors and performers and impresarios. That is to say, my kind of people. show less