Book Review: "Fireworks" by Angela Carter

Angela Carter was a great author. I had a friend a few years' back that read quite a lot of Angela Carter and so, for her birthday, I got her a special edition, a beautiful copy, of "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories". It was only in university when I started reading Angela Carter because I had been told to read "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Infernal Desires" for a piece of creative writing I was doing. Nonetheless, since then, I became obsessed with her writing styles. Her plots did not much interest me but I had never seen a modern author write with such folkloric flair whilst also balancing it with this twisted, violent and graphic nature that almost sickened me.

"Fireworks" by Angela Carter is no exception. Not so much based in folklore like some of her other works, this book is one of short stories of desire, violence, obsession, passion and graphic abnormalities - one that I don't think I could ever think to write into my own works. The brilliance and simplicity of the language makes it all the more disturbing I think because of the way it portrays the ease at which something is done. Things such as emotional breakdowns, beheadings etc. have this uncomfortable dimness to them that makes the reader envision it as an act of pure humanity. It is graphic and violent but in no way impossible.

This is the one thing I have always loved about Angela Carter, no point of human nature is off limits: nothing emotional, nothing taboo, nothing criminal is off limits at all. Everything is explored as a whole part of humanity, a part of our character that we cannot ignore - the darkness of the human condition. And then at other times, the language could be a beautiful description of an object, an emotion or something even nicer. But at no times was there a description that was 100% squeaky clean, there is always a dark side to it - something that makes you uncomfortable.

"Speaking of mirrors, the Japanese have a great respect for them and, in old-fashioned inns, one often finds them hooded with fabric covers when not in use. He said, 'Mirrors make a room uncosy.' I am sure there is more to it than that although they love to be cosy. One must love cosiness if one is to live so close together. But as if in celebration of the thing they feared, they seemed to have made the entire city into a cold hall of mirrors which continually proliferated whole galleries of constantly changing appearances, all marvellous but not tangible. If they did not lock up the real looking-glasses, it would be hard to tell what was real and what was not. Even buildings one had taken for substantial had a trick of disappearing overnight. One morning, we woke to find the house next door had reduced to nothing but a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers, neatly ties with string, left out for the garbage collector."

Again, as in this quotation, it starts off all cosy and kind of positive but ends in a horrific manner in which the looking-glass is the enemy of reality and that there is a house reduced to nothing. This is a practical element of Angela Carter's style for creating the true terror within the story and honestly, between this and the executer beheading his own son in another story of the anthology - this is a collection of some of the best works I have read by her purely for these reasons. I have always loved this ability to control the description as much as she does, reducing something nice to something scary in human nature and something terrifying in their beliefs.