[Immusaatmonna]

Fifteen-year-old Melanie loses her parents when they?re travelling in America. Without resources, she and her younger brothers, Jonathon and five-year-old Victoria, move to London and get used to living in Uncle Philip?s home.

This is Angela Carter?s basic plot for her novel about the transition from adolescence to maturity and the basic struggle for independence and happiness. Uncle Philip?s home is a sad, sinister place. A toymaker by trade, they live below his badly-lit shop. Creepy toys and unsettling cuckoo clocks abound. There?s no hot water. Living there are also the lovely Aunt Margaret, who can?t speak, and her brothers, the fiddle-player Francis, and the grubby and smelly Finn, Uncle Philip?s apprentice. They try to make the orphans welcome, but it?s not easy.

Uncle Philip has killed all the joy in the place. He?s forbidden Christmas, he doesn?t allow women to wear trousers; he controls all the money in the house. He barely talks to anyone, and prefers his life-size puppets to people. He enjoys putting on puppet shows for the family. But what he really likes is to control people as if they were puppets. Defiance is usually met with physical violence.

Melanie upsets this status quo, as Finn falls in love with her and starts challenging Uncle Philip more and more.

In her first novel, Angela Carter demonstrates a boundless imagination. Although never stepping away from stark realism, her writing has a dreamy quality that gives the impression the characters live in a magical world. She also has a great talent for writing about the adolescent?s confused state of mind just before moving to adulthood. In the end, some of the characters may come across as one-dimensional: Aunt Margaret is full of sweetness, and Uncle Philip just revels in tormenting people. But I think this works on a symbolic level with that dreamy quality I talked about.

[phenterminediett]

Your impressions are similar to mine. Read it a long time ago but images and even phrases are still fresh in my mind. Literally unforgettable. I do not often use the word erotic in cold blood, but I remember it having that quality also. Not quite sure why.

[Cd9JfGHR]

Wonderful book. The epitome of what I call "creepy sexy".

[Immusaatmonna]

Oh absolutely: the relationship between Uncle Philip and Melanie just oozes with twisted sexuality. But I never throught he luster after her. That spectacle he puts on where he forces her to play Leda being raped by the Zeus swan shows he just has an inner need to turn people into puppets so he can control them. It's all very asexual, I think;or maybe he just gets off after he's turned people into one of his precious puppets.

This novel is all kinds of messed up.

On the other hand, I thought Melanie's relationship with Finn was beautiful; the way she initially dislikes him but slowly comes to love him seemed to real to me.

[Cd9JfGHR]

Oh absolutely: the relationship between Uncle Philip and Melanie just oozes with twisted sexuality. But I never throught he luster after her. That spectacle he puts on where he forces her to play Leda being raped by the Zeus swan shows he just has an inner need to turn people into puppets so he can control them. It's all very asexual, I think;or maybe he just gets off after he's turned people into one of his precious puppets.

This novel is all kinds of messed up.

On the other hand, I thought Melanie's relationship with Finn was beautiful; the way she initially dislikes him but slowly comes to love him seemed to real to me.

Oooh, I didn't mean Uncle Philip! I meant Finn (I think - it's a long time since I read the book). Finn is, to me, the epitome of creepy-sexy.

[phenterminediett]

Now that I've read the last two posts (DreamQueen and H) I recall my thoughts while reading it. It is more sensual than erotic in that the effect is built up by images that are very real and speak to all the senses as experienced by Melanie: touch, smell, etc. - although this has an erotic dimension. This is done cunningly to also allow a sense of ureality to grow.The poems of Keats has this senual quality (and unreality as in the Eve of St Agnes) and the writing of Tolstoy, for two examples. Other writers seem more deatched form their senses or one sense dominates. Better stop scribbling - I am boring even myself.