Introduction-2

It is Carters genius, in this collection, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" it is for the Beauty to save the Beasts life, while in "The Tigers Bride", Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: ". . . each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur." As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new ("animal" in the sense of spiritual as well as tigerish) world. In "The Erl-King", however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reconciled. Here there is neither healing, nor submission, but revenge.

The collection expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, always proximate, underlie and unify them all. In "The Lady of the House of Love" love and blood unite in the person of a vampire: Beauty grown monstrous, Beastly. In "The Snow Child" we are in the fairy-tale territory of white snow, red blood, black bird, and a girl, white, red and black, born of a Counts wishes; but Carters modern imagination knows that for every Count there is a Countess, who will not tolerate her fantasy-rival. The battle of the sexes is fought between women, too.

The arrival of Red Riding Hood completes and perfects Carters brilliant, reinventing synthesis of Kinderund Hausm?rchen. Now we are offered the radical, shocking suggestion that Grandmother might actually be the Wolf ("The Werewolf"); or equally radical, equally shocking, the thought that the girl (Red Riding Hood, Beauty) might easily be as amoral, as savage as the Wolf/Beast; that she might conquer the Wolf by the power of her own predatory sexuality, her erotic wolfishness. This is the theme of "The Company of Wolves", and to watch The Company of Wolves, the film Angela Carter made with Neil Jordan, weaving together several of her wolf-narratives, is to long for the full-scale wolf-novel she never wrote.

"Wolf-Alice" offers final metamorphoses. Now there is no Beauty, only two Beasts: a cannibal Duke, and a girl reared by wolves, who thinks of herself as a wolf, and who, arriving at womanhood, is drawn towards self-knowledge by the mystery of her own bloody chamber; that is, her menstrual flow. By blood, and by what she sees in mirrors, that make a house uncosy.

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes

monotonous. . . He turned and stared at the mountain

for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years

but he had never seen it before as it might look

to someone who had not known it as almost a part

of the self. . . As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into

so much scenery, into the wonderful backcloth for

an old country tale, tale of a child suckled by

wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman.

Carters farewell to her mountain-country, at the end of her last wolf-story, "Peter and the Wolf" in Black Venus, signals that, like her hero, she has "tramped onwards, into a different story".

There is one other out-and-out fantasy in this third collection, a meditation on A Midsummer Nights Dream that prefigures (and is better than) a passage in Wise Children. In this story Carters linguistic exoticism is in full flight -- here are "breezes, juicy as mangoes, that mythopoeically caress the Coast of Coromandel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian Shore". But, as usual, her sarcastic common-sense yanks the story back to earth before it disappears in an exquisite puff of smoke. This dream-wood -- "no where near Athens. . . (it) is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley" -- is damp and waterlogged and the fairies all have colds. Also, it has, since the date of the story, been chopped down to make room for a motorway. Carters elegant fugue on Shakespearean themes is lifted towards brilliance by her exposition of the difference between the Dreams wood and the "dark necromantic forest" of the Grimms. The forest, she finely reminds us, is a scary place; to be lost in it is to fall prey to monsters and witches. But in a wood, "you purposely mislay your way"; there are no wolves, and the wood "is kind to lovers". Here is the difference between the English and European fairy tale precisely and unforgettably defined.

Mostly, however, Black Venus and its successor, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, eschew fantasy worlds; Carters revisionist imagination has turned towards the real, her interest towards portraiture rather than narrative. The best pieces in these later books are portraits -- of Baudelaires black mistress Jeanne Duval, of Edgar Allan Poe, and, in two stories, of Lizzie Borden long before she "took an axe", and the same Lizzie on the day of her crimes, a day described with slow, languorous precision and attention to detail -- the consequences of overdressing in a heat-wave, and of eating twice-cooked fish, both play a part. Beneath the hyper-realism, however, there is an echo of The Bloody Chamber, for Lizzies is a bloody deed, and she is, in addition, menstruating. Her own life-blood flows, while the angel of death waits on a nearby tree. (Once again, as with the wolf-stories, one hankers for more; for the Lizzie Borden novel that we cannot have.)

Baudelaire, Poe, Dream-Shakespeare, Hollywood, panto, fairy tale: Carter wears her influences openly, for she is their deconstructionist, their saboteur. She takes what we know and, having broken it, puts it together in her own spiky, courteous way; her words are new and not-new, like our own. In her hands Cinderella, given back her original name of Ashputtle, is the fire-scarred heroine of a tale of horrid mutilations wrought by mother-love; John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore becomes a movie directed by a very different Ford; and the hidden meanings -- perhaps one should say the hidden natures -- of pantomime characters are revealed.

She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the now-story we want to hear, within.

No such thing as a perfect writer. Carters high-wire act takes place over a swamp of preciousness, over quicksands of the arch and twee; and theres no denying that she sometimes falls off, no getting away from odd outbreaks of fol-de-rol, and some of her puddings, her most ardent admirers will concede, are excessively egged. Too much use of words like "eldritch", too many men who are rich "as Croesus", too much porphyry and lapis lazuli to please a certain sort of purist. But the miracle is how often she pulls it off; how often she pirouettes without falling, or juggles without dropping a ball.

Accused by lazy pens of political correctness, she was the most individual, independent and idiosyncratic of writers; dismissed by many in her lifetime as a marginal, cultish figure, an exotic hothouse flower, she has become the contemporary writer most studied at British universities -- a victory over the mainstream she would have enjoyed.

She hadnt finished. Like Italo Calvino, like Bruce Chatwin, like Raymond Carver, she died at the height of her powers. For writers, these are the cruellest deaths: in mid-sentence, so to speak. The stories in this volume are the measure of our loss. But they are also our treasure, to savour and to hoard.

Raymond Carver is said to have told his wife before he died (also of lung cancer), "Were out there now. Were out there in Literature". Carver was the most modest of men, but this is the remark of a man who knew, and who had often been told, how much his work was worth. Angela received less confirmation, in her lifetime, of the value of her unique oeuvre; but she, too, is out there now, out there in Literature, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day.

Salman Rushdie, May 1995