Heroes and Villains

A very strange post-apocalyptic story. Margaret is the daughter of a Professor in a barricaded community. Outside roam barbarians who occasionally raid the village. The ruins of the earlier society litter the landscape. Dream like and hallucinatory Margaret's story is told. First as a child in the community and then wandering the land with Jewel, the barbarian who takes her from her home.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Angela Carter's prose is wonderful; the story is a bizarre and strangely compelling read; the ending is in some ways anticlimactic. As a picture of what might occur when society as we know it is destroyed this is a fascinating read but also vaguely unsatisfying - too dreamlike and inconclusive. It is a book I'll come show more back to again, someday, as I think it deserves a second chance. show less

I hate rating these kinds of books. Extremely well-written, but a little too strange and disturbing for me to "enjoy" reading. It's the kind of novel I'd probably enjoy dissecting for a literature class, but for day-to-day reading, not so much. In other words, intellectually, I'd give it a higher rating, but on a personal level, nothing stuck.

Set in a dystopian future, where humans now either live among the Professors (men of reason), Barbarians (primitives), or the Out People (mutant aggressives). Marianne, a child of one of the Professors, runs away to join the Barbarians out of boredom but only finds rampant filth, disease, violence and ignorance. She is forced to marry Jewel, a Barbarian who has been educated to a degree, but they show more hate each other and she constantly thinks of escape. The group is led by a former Professor who acts as sort of a tyrannical medicine man, conducting social experiments for what seems to be only his amusement and desire for power. The characters and their relationships in the novel are highly complex, so much so that I'm still unsure of some of the motivations for the primary characters. show less

Brilliant: An astonishing little book describing the throes of a woman caught up in a hopeless post-apocalyptic world. Beautifully written, in a dark, haunting, extistential style.

During the war, the Professors were safe in the deep shelters, while everyone else had to survive as best they could on the surface. Centuries later, the Professors live in fortified villages with Workers to do the farming and housework. The villages are periodically raided by nomadic barbarian tribes, who take ammunition, cloth, food, and women, some of whom go willingly. And then there are the Out People, mutants who live in holes in the ground, use bows and arrows rather than guns, and attack both of the other groups when they can.

Marianne is a Professor's daughter who leaves the safety and boredom of life in a village to live with the tribe who has just attacked her village and finds that it is not like she expected. This was Angela show more Carter's fourth novel and I hadn’t even heard of it before finding it at a BookCrossing meet-up. It was very interesting but tailed off at the end. show less

This is the first of Angela Carter's books that I've only given two stars. I was disappointed, especially since it started off so well and immediately drew me in. But the eventual weakening of the main character as well as the weird rape stuff that ran throughout the book didn't sit well with me. I wanted to like this one a lot more than I actually did.

This fascinating read felt like a warped fairy tale, and had a bit of a hallucinatory effect. It breaks down the demarcation between heroes and villains, pointing out how social distinctions are a matter of how one perceives and defines things.

A simply stunning book - written in language as measured and as evocative as the best of Cormac McCarthy.