Love

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Angela Carter

  Title Page

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Love is Angela Carter’s fifth novel and was first published in 1971. With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and broken connections. This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter’s haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age.

  About the Author

  Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and Wise Children (1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published: Fireworks (1974), The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award), Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). She was the author of The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), and two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992). She died in February 1992.

  ALSO BY ANGELA CARTER

  Short Stories

  Fireworks

  The Bloody Chamber

  Black Venus

  American Ghosts and Old World Wonders

  Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

  The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

  The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

  Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (editor)

  Novels

  Shadow Dance

  The Magic Toyshop

  Several Perceptions

  Heroes and Villains

  The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

  The Passion of New Eve

  Nights at the Circus

  Wise Children

  Non-fiction

  The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise

  in Cultural History

  Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings

  Expletives Deleted

  Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings

  Drama

  Come unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays

  The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works

  ANGELA CARTER

  Love

  WITH A PREFACE BY

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Preface

  WHEN THE MONOTONES posed the musical question ‘(Who Wrote) The Book of Love?’ in 1958 they did not have Angela Carter in mind; her third novel, Love, came out in 1971. But even if they had been able to look into the future they probably would not have chosen her to be Love’s author. Carter’s vision of love is bohemian and bleak and fundamentally incompatible with doo-wop. Her Love leaves out all the gentle beguiling aspects of the thing in favor of a love that is guilty, mad, perverse, sort of incestuous, and dangerous to those who stray within reach of its claws.

  This won’t surprise you if you’ve read any of Angela Carter’s other books. The Bloody Chamber is just that, and to be a character in an Angela Carter story is to suffer the attentions of rapacious emotion. In Love the sufferings are triangular, the protagonists awkward, instinctual and artistic in the way that Venus flytraps might be artistic if they were human.

  Love is a brilliant and often overlooked novel; it is overshadowed by Carter’s even more brilliant later work. Although everything that happens in Love is possible in the real world, it has the feeling of the impossible which permeates her other novels, and the intensities of observation and invention which are her trademarks.

  I started reading Angela Carter’s work around the same time I discovered the writing of Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt, two writers of her generation whose prose is also richly allusive and packed with willful characters who struggle with the expectations of society. Often these characters give up the effort of attempting to fit in – which was never too sincere to begin with – and are transformed into their true selves; difficult and different and full of surprises. Carter’s work teems with such people, and Annabel, Love’s anti-heroine, is one of her best. She is cryptic, sly, emotionally deranged and yet fatally attractive. Annabel, her husband Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz perform a minuet of betrayal, jealousy, and self-destruction. In the book’s opening scene we meet Annabel cowering under a sky in which the sun and the moon are simultaneously visible, and this theme is repeated in the couplings of all the characters: things that shouldn’t be together, are. Love is a chronicle of attraction and repulsion within this tiny world of three people.

  In 1987 Carter added a wry afterword which extends and comments on the lives of the characters; without this the book is extraordinarily gothic and dark. All that she does in her later work with the aid of the supernatural and special effects she accomplishes in Love by simply dwelling in the odd minds of Annabel, Lee and Buzz, by letting their mutual incomprehension take its toll.

  Angela Carter died of cancer in 1992. In his obituary for her in the New York Times, Salman Rushdie wrote that she was ‘a thumber of noses, a defiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low. They are without equal, and without rival.’ Her work is like a dream house in which every room lets onto every other room; it doesn’t matter where you enter, you will eventually find yourself exploring every nook and cranny. Whether you are holding one of her books in your hands for the first time or are a long-time devotee, when you turn this page you are entering the complete and boundless world of Angela Carter.

  Audrey Niffenegger, 2006

  ONE DAY, ANNABEL saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

  It had happened as she walked home through the park. In the system of correspondences by which she interpreted the world around her, this park had a special significance and she walked along its overgrown paths with nervous pleasure, especially in certain yellow, tarnished lights of winter when the trees were bare and the sun, as it set, rimmed the branches with cold fire. An eighteenth-century landscape gardener planned the park to surround a mansion which had been pulled down long ago and now the once harmonious artificial wilderness, randomly dishevelled by time, spread its green tangles across the high shoulder of a hill only a stone’s throw from a busy road that ran through the city dockland. All that remained of the former mansion were a few architectural accessories now the property of the city museum. There was a stable built on the lines of a miniature Parthenon, housing for Houyhnhnms rather than natural horses; the pillared portico, especially effective under the light of a full moon, never to be entered again by any horse, functioned only as a pure piece of design, a focal point in the green composition on the south side of the hill where Annabel rarely ventured for serenity bored her and the Mediterranean aspect of this part of the park held no excitements for her. She preferred the Gothic north,
where an ivy-covered tower with leaded ogive windows skulked among the trees. Both these pretty whimsies were kept securely locked for fear of the despoliation of vandals but their presence still performed its original role, transforming the park into a premeditated theatre where the romantic imagination could act out any performance it chose amongst settings of classic harmony or crabbed quaintness. And the magic strangeness of the park was enhanced by its curious silence. Footfalls fell softly on the long grass and few birds sang there, but the presence all around of the sprawling, turbulent city, however muffled its noises, lent such haunted, breathless quiet an unnatural quality.

  The park maintained only a single, still impressive entrance, a massive pair of wrought-iron gates decorated with cherubs, masks of beasts, stylized reptiles and spearheads from which the gilding flaked, but these gates were never either open or closed. They hung always a little ajar and drooped from their hinges with age; they served a function no longer for all the railings round the park were gone long ago and access everywhere was free and easy. The park was on such high ground it seemed to hang in the air above a vast, misty model of a city and those who walked through it always felt excessively exposed to the weather. At times, all seemed nothing but a playground for the winds and, at others, an immense drain for all the rain the heavens could pour forth.

  Annabel went through the park in a season of high winds and lurid weather, early one winter’s evening, and happened to look up at the sky.

  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.

  At that, she bolted from the path through the long grass, seeking cover from the sky. Wholly at the mercy of the elements, she lurched and zig-zagged and her movements were so erratic, apparently at the whim of the roaring winds, and her colours so ill-defined, blurred by the approaching dusk, that she might herself have been no more than an emanation of the place or time of year.

  At the crest of the hill, she flung up her hands in a furious gesture of surrender and pitched herself sideways off the path, concealing herself behind a clump of gorse where she lay moaning and breathless for a few moments. The wind tied strands of her hair to spikes of gorse and thus confirmed her intuition that she should not budge one inch until the dreadful, ambiguous hour resolved itself entirely to night. So there she stayed, a mad girl plastered in fear and trembling against a thorn bush suffering an anguish which also visited her when pressed just as close to the blond flesh of the young husband who slept beside her and did not know her dreams, although he was a beautiful boy whom anybody else would have thought well worth the effort of loving.

  She suffered from nightmares too terrible to reveal to him, especially since he himself was often the principal actor in them and appeared in many hideous dream disguises. Sometimes, during the day, she stopped, startled, before some familiar object because it seemed to have just changed its form back to the one she remembered after a brief, private period impersonating something quite strange, for she had the capacity for changing the appearance of the real world which is the price paid by those who take too subjective a view of it. All she apprehended through her senses she took only as objects for interpretation in the expressionist style and she saw, in everyday things, a world of mythic, fearful shapes of whose existence she was convinced although she never spoke of it to anyone; nor had she ever suspected that everyday, sensuous human practice might shape the real world. When she did discover that such a thing was possible, it proved the beginning of the end for her for how could she possess any notion of the ordinary?

  Her brother-in-law once gave her a set of pornographic photographs. She accepted the gift absently, without doing him the courtesy of investigating the complex motives behind it, and she examined the pictures one by one with a certain impersonal curiosity. A glum, painted young woman, the principal actress (torso and legs sheathed in black leather, sex exposed) eyed the camera indifferently as though it were no business of hers she was blocked at every orifice; she went about her obscene business with neither relish nor disgust, rather with the abstract precision of the geometrician so that these stark juxtapositions of genitalia, the antithesis of the erotic, were cold as Russia when nights are coldest there and possessed chiefly the power to affront. Annabel, comforted and reassured by these indifferent arrangements of bizarre intersecting lines, became convinced they told a true story. For herself, all she wanted in life was a bland, white, motionless face like that of the photographic whore so she could live a quiet life behind it, because she was so often terrified when the pictures around her began to move, as she thought, of their own accord and she could not control them.

  So these photographs were cards in her private tarot pack and signified love.

  As she waited for the sun to set, she had ample time to refresh and embellish her initial terror and was finally seized with the conviction that this night, of all nights, it would never disappear at all but lie stranded for ever above the horizon so she would have to stay nailed to the hillside. At these times, she thought of her husband as a place of safety although, when she was face to face with him, she could find no means of telling him her fears since his brother was her only intermediary between her private experience and the common one; and, this time, it was he who rescued her so she learned to trust him a little more.

  But when she first met the boy who became her brother-in-law, he frightened her more than anything had done until that date.

  Before they were married, when she was living with Lee, who was then a student, Lee came home from a lecture one February afternoon to find his brother had returned from North Africa unannounced. The newcomer sat on the floor at right angles to the wall in the recesses of a black, hooded, Tunisian cloak which concealed every part of him but for long fingers which drummed restlessly against his knee. On the other side of the room, Annabel sat in a similar position, shielding her face with her hair. An air of mutual mistrust filled the room. Lee dropped a string bag containing groceries on the floor and went to feed the dying fire.

  ‘Hi, Alyosha,’ said Buzz.

  Lee knelt beside him to hug and kiss him.

  ‘I have a dose,’ enunciated Buzz with precision.

  ‘You want to eat?’

  Buzz padded after Lee into the adjoining kitchen and, grasping him from behind, pressed his fingertips against the base of Lee’s throat until Lee went limp.

  ‘I don’t like her,’ said Buzz and released him.

  When Lee could speak, he said: ‘Try that unarmed combat stuff on me again and I’ll smash you against the fucking wall.’

  ‘Bad . . .’ said Buzz effortfully . . . ‘vibes . . .’

  Lee shrugged and broke eggs into a pan of hot fat.

  ‘But I don’t like her!’ wailed Buzz childishly. He wound the cloak round himself to hide. ‘And you’re knocking her off, aren’t you; you’re screwing her all night.’

  Lee menaced him briefly with the breadknife and he fell back, whimpering, for knives, his favourite weapon, impressed him horribly when they were turned against him. He crouched on the floor like a dog to eat his food in the tent of the black cape and Annabel still sat where they had left her, in the dark.

  ‘That’s my brother,’ said Lee pleasantly.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Gonorrhoea.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘A venereal disease,’ explained Lee.

  ‘Apart from that.’

  �
��He’s a freak.’

  She appeared to consider this gravely for a few minutes. Then she said: ‘Come here.’

  She embraced Lee with such unexpected passion he started to shiver, murmuring her name and running his hands over her body. As they toppled sideways to the floor, the lights in the room flashed on and Buzz’s shadow fell over them like that of an avenging angel for he spread out his arms so the folds of the cloak made wings. He attacked them both impartially and, catching Lee unprepared, soon succeeded in subduing him; when he adopted the traditional pose of the victor, his knee in Lee’s belly, he snarled:

  ‘Don’t ever let me catch you at it again!’

  But time passed and Buzz and Annabel became, in a sense, accomplices and then they left Lee out of their plottings for he understood neither of them, although he loved them both.

  Buzz never went out without a camera; that night of January, when he found her on the hill, he took several photographs of her without her knowledge as soon as he saw her angular, familiar body stretched out against the bush in the strange light. Then he knelt beside her without speaking till there was nothing but honest moonlight before he led her home to the flat in a Victorian square, where they all three lived together. She stood in the dark porch fumbling for her latch-key with chilly fingers stiff with fright which could not find their way about the satchel which also contained her sketchbooks and a few things, a model soldier, three tubes of white gouache and a bar of chocolate, which she had stolen that day at lunchtime. Buzz dug into the bag and found her key, took the chocolate bar, kissed her cheek and ran off for he had arranged a party in the flat that night and had some preparatory business to do. He liked organizing parties for he always hoped something terrible would happen when so many people intersected upon one another. He was, as usual, in a state of suppressed nervous excitement.