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Angel Maker: The Short Stories of Sara Maitland

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In 1995, ten years into his production of "A.I.," the film he referred to as "Pinocchio," Stanley Kubrick called in British author Sara Maitland as a script doctor. Maitland writes: "By the time I came to the project it had become enormous, unwieldy, unfocused. Kubrick needed some through-line of fairy tale, of story beneath plot. He was creating a new myth and needed someone who was at home with myth and how it works. . . . Kubrick had encountered my short stories and recognised that that is what I do. I write about the underbelly of human emotions in the framework of myth and fairy story." (Sara Maitland, "My Year with Stanley," appearing in The Independent, available on the Internet)

"Angel Maker" (1996) is the collection of Maitland's short stories that Kubrick must have known, the basis of her reputation as a reworker of ancient myths and fairy tales, and to that extent, they are stylish, mannered tales. Maitland has an ear for period dialogue, and she writes convincing interior monologues.

Thus, the title story is a sequel to the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale told from the witch's point of view. Mixing German romanticism with post-modern irony, Maitland pictures the witch as a companion-lover to the grown Gretel, a beautiful foolish woman bound to make her own choices in a world where men plainly do not matter.

Similarly, "Siren Song" is the first-person chant of the Sirens in the eons before the arrival of Odysseus. "This is what Sirens do. We wait for the coming of strong men and by the deceptive sweetness of our voices we lure them to their doom. We are Sirens, this is what we do." Like the Sirens of Ovid, Maitland's seductive singers were once playmates of Demeter's daughter Persephone, who was abducted to Hades where she rules as Queen six months out of the year. In Maitland's retelling, however, Demeter never reproached them or penalized them by changing them into creatures. Instead, destroying lustful, vicious men is simply their nature, and it is justified by the Dark One's rape of their childhood playmate and by his lust which the Sirens project, without further justification, onto all men (other than the bourgeois homebound Odysseus, of course).

As these summaries suggest, there is more - or perhaps less - at work in "Angel Maker" than depictions of human emotions, in all their complexity. This is because Maitland, it must be said, is a writer of women's tales. Either gently ("Conquistador," "Daphne," "Forceps Delivery," "The Wicked Stepmother's Lament") or leadenly ("An Edwardian Tableau," "The Tale of the Beautiful Princess Kalito"), she castigates antedeluvian conceptions of women's roles and choices. Women, in her stories, are often gay and almost always victims of insensitive, dominating men. Sometimes they are co-opted victims. Sometimes they are ironic victims. Sometimes they are poetic or heroic victims. But they are almost invariably victims.

Thus, in "The Burning Times," homosexual awakening and the desire for acceptance in an unfriendly world lead to death and madness. In "Lullaby for My Dyke and Her Cat," an author encounters a kind of writer's block attempting to tell, first by narrative and then by anecdote, why she thinks her son is turning into a cat. The cat of her lesbian friend has just died, and the perceived metamorphosis of her child apparently illustrates the transference of her affections to her friend.

As with the Lifetime channel on cable television, either you have an insatiable appetite for this type of fiction or you do not. As much as I admire Maitland's craft and feminist preoccupations, and appreciated the exceptions ("The Tale of the Valiant Demoisselle" and "Seal-Self," for example, memorably conflate sex/childbearing and death), I ultimately found most of these tales limiting and repetitious. - Robert E. Olsen

This was an amazing colection of short stories by a wonderful author. They are all stories you have heard before but taken from another character's point of view. Puts a wonderful slant on our world. Maitland should get more recognition than she does.