Being caught in this book felt a lot like being stuck in the Lizzie Borden household, as described in ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’: “The house is thickly redolent of sleep, that sweetish, clinging smell. Other verbs that come to mind are cloying and suffocating. The writing is also jungle-like in its heat – there is a great deal of heavy-breathing-life in these stories sex and blood are common themes. The prose is dense in a lot of the stories, and I found myself stumbling over it, or rather hacking away at it the way one hacks through a rainforest. Getting through this collection was harder than I expected. Many of them investigate the idea of the unconscious, in both form and content, and consequently often affect the reader on a subconscious level. But reading this comprehensive collection you start to realise that Angela Carter was first and foremost a lover of language – as Alison Lurie notes in The New York Times, “As a writer, Carter could do almost anything.” Burning Your Boats includes a number of impressionistic biographies (Edgar Allen Poe, Jeanne Duval, and – my favourite – Lizzie Borden), as well as reflections on life as an expatriate in Japan (including ‘Flesh and the Mirror’), and stories that are much more grounded in modern life, such as the previously uncollected story ‘The Quilt Maker.’ As Rushdie notes, Carter had an “addiction to all the arcana of language.” Her stories are replete with symbolism, magical realism, myth, and hints of the gothic. Angela Carter wrote nine novels but – as Salman Rushdie points out in his introduction – “the best of her … is in her stories.”Ĭarter is probably best known for her subversive fairytales (‘The Bloody Chamber,’ ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ etc) and for being something of a champion of feminism. This collection was published posthumously in 1995, and includes stories from the 1960s right up until Carter’s later work in 1993. The heat, the dark, the sweat … all felt very appropriate. I sat up late, half-naked and perspiring in the Cambodia-in-June humidity, writing my notes on the collection. Finishing felt like a sigh of relief – like I’d been through something. I kept the heavy volume on my bedside table and read it cover to cover, first story to last. I dipped into the stories here and there, and then a few months ago I finally committed. I bought this Vintage edition in a Castlemaine bookshop while I was in town for a friend’s wedding in 2013, and since then it’s crossed continents with me a number of times.

I’ve been reading this bulky collection on and off for a couple of years.

The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn’t it? Everything else is artful. Burning Your Boats (short stories) by Angela Carter

Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter