Love by Angela Carter – #NovNov Day 25

It is very brave to call your novella something so broad and essential as Love – as Angela Carter did in this book from 1971 – because it necessarily seems to give a grand universality to something specific. In the case of this story, the bizarre relationships between Annabel, Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz. (This cover isn’t the one I read – it’s one on Wikipedia that I rather love, though I’m not sure how representative it is of the novella.)

Like Magnus Mills’ Three To See The King I read yesterday, Carter writes a surreal and unnerving world – but where his is told sparely, Carter’s prose is luscious and almost ornate, even when she is describing unpleasant things. This excerpt isn’t unpleasant, but it is near the beginning of the book and seems to offer a symbolic sense of being drawn to two opposites – when she sees sun and moon simultaneously.

On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above the spires and skyscrapers of the city itself, the rising moon hung motionless in a rift of absolute night. Though one was setting while the other rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so the heavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to see such a dreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself the helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.

The ‘love triangle’ isn’t quite that – Buzz is just obsessed with his brother and Annabel, who have their own overwrought and dangerous relationship. The depiction of Buzz is quite odd. He is introduced in a voluminous dark cape, and seems to live in it; the other characters call him a freak, though without being exactly clear what they mean by that.

Throughout the novel, these three tussle with love and power and violence – drawing others into their web, while also playing at some distorted version of the domestic. It’s all rather strange, like a portrait that – once you look closer – has features that can’t possibly be true, or that unnerve on examination.

This is the third or fourth Carter novel[la] I’ve read, and I certainly admire her writing. In something like Wise Children it is also a bit fey and even joyful. Love has funny moments (”It is like screwing the woman’s page of the Guardian”) and moments of neat insight (‘the false cheerfulness of five in the morning’), but overall it is not a joyful book by any means. Carter is perhaps one of those writers I recognise as great, but don’t especially relish spending time in the company of. It’s undeniably good, but leaves me with a feeling of having a bit sullied.