Customer Reviews

Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (Chivers Genre Series)

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I found the opening story, "Crocodile Tears," rather disappointing, but things soon get better. "A Lamia in the Cevennes," about an artist who finds a lovely mythical beast in his swimming pool, offers another version of the old conflict between the artist's romantic ideal and harsh reality. The artist in question refuses to make the lamia turn human, with reason, as it turns out, since the beautiful and mysterious fantastic monster turns out to be a vulgar and rather stupid woman. "Cold" is the best of the book, a fairy tale about a woman of ice and a man of the desert who fall in love, with the inevitable clash, until the two are united in a palace of glass, which unites the beauty of ice, but comes from fire. The rest are little vignettes that range from the charming to the disturbing. As a whole, a treat.

Elementals. A S Byatt. Chatto and Windus. £12 (UK)

Subtitled 'Stories of Fire and Ice', A S Byatt's latest collection are works of sensuous indulgence. Occasionally her story-telling gifts are overwhelmed by the detail of her sensory observations, yet most readers will forgive this and allow themselves to be carried away by her mission to winkle out the truth of a subject through finding exactly the right words. In a similar way, the artist in 'A Lamia in the Cevennes' becomes obsessed with capturing the exact blue of his swimming pool. The challenge makes him happy, 'in one of the ways in which human beings are happy.'

In Crocodile Tears, Patricia has lost this ability to be happy. She notes her surroundings, the heat and history of Nimes, with sublime indifference. This opening story gets off to a flying start. Having argued with her husband as to whether a painting in a London art gallery is banal or not, Patricia rounds the stairs to see him lying dead at the bottom, surrounded by concerned couriers and paramedics. Hearing them pronounce him dead, she walks straight past, gets a train to Paris then south, eventually ending up at Nimes. A fellow guest in the hotel she has picked at random tries to bring her out of her grief: "You may sit there, glass-eyed while things slip past...crocodile fountains, the stones of this city. Or you may look with curiosity and live."

The same message is given in the final story: 'Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. An artist paints fish and eggs in a kitchen where the cook bemoans her fate. The artist tells her, "the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning."

Byatt paints beautiful word pictures for the reader to admire. In 'Cold' she builds them out of snow and ice and intricate glass palaces. In Jael she takes us into a posh girl's school where a pupil colours in a biblical picture with a bright red crayon. From here she recreates every nuance of the atmosphere of the school: "whenever I remember that patch of fierce colour I remember, like an after-image, a kind of dreadful murky colour, a yellow-khaki-mustard-thick colour, that is the colour of the days of our boredom."

The lyricism of the collection is balanced by a sharp, sometimes surreal, wit, as when the Lamia (half woman half snake) appears in the artist's pool and tries to seduce him, finally making do with his friend. In 'Baglady' a well-to-do wife accompanying her husband on a business trip to the Far East finds herself lost and penniless in the nightmarish Good Fortune Shopping Mall. A policeman moves her on with a stick. Throughout the book, fairytale and mythical elements combine with insights into modern life. This is a collection to be savoured slowly.

Byatt's collection of sumptuous stories reminded me of Banana Yoshimoto, Emma Donoghue, and Jeanette Winterson. These tales seem like modern faerie tales without the classic imagery. Or rather, with the classic imagery shifted. In "Cold", an ice princess discovers true love in a desert land. In my favorite in the collection, "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary", a cook finds the meaning of art in life. These tales of extremes of emotions, temperatures, lives are full of joy and life, and make many a reader celebrate. This will certainly not be the last book by Byatt I'll read.

A.S Byatt is one of the most talented writers producing today. Elementals is an engaging collection of fairy tale-ish stories that are a delight to read. Byatt has a wonderful way with the English language. Her writing is delicate and precise without being too precious. She has such incredible range not just within this collection, but in everything she has written. Her Possession: A Romance is one of my favorite novels, but it really isn't anything like Elementals. (Which is not to say that if you like one, you won't like the other) This is not a large volume, but a wonderful way to spend a few hours transported into other worlds by an extremely talented writer. Enjoy.

Elementals is another set of thematic pieces in the same vein as The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, the Matisse Stories and Sugar. As always, the delight of reading her work comes from the wealth of cultural associations that she packs into every sentence.

I like her novels best, and so I again find that the longer stories are the most satisfying.

The book has six pieces, each quite distinct in style.

"Crocodile Tears" is probably the best, and explores similar themes to the "Djinn". It is full of familiar Byatt obsessions: Modern Art, the South of France, sudden death, crisp white sheets,a berserk Scandinavian. She says that life is the act of looking. It ends when one decides to stop looking. The subject's bathroom design business is called "Anadyomene" - this is always good for a chuckle among her afficionados. But it's more than just an in-joke. With one unexplained word (it's a by-name of Aphrodite), she encourages you to conjecture that Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" is the image used by this business in its advertising, and then to ponder the ambiguous iconography of that painting and its connection with the themes of this short story. This is typical Byatt, making you draw on all the resources of your cultural heritage.

"The Lamia in the Cevennes" continues the themes of Art and Mediterranean Light, and re-introduces the delicious and fearsome Melusina. It is about some of the ways in which human beings can be happy.

"Cold" is one of her "fairy stories" that would be tiresome if it were just that. But it includes more familiar themes and obsessions: glass, the blond ice-maiden ironically called Fiammarosa,the arrogant destructiveness of male passion. Even ice maidens have to find a way to be happy. I'm not sure this is it.

"Baglady" is a very short tale telling us how close we live to the edge. A tourist loses her identity in an Asian shopping mall. Her dead-pan account of this horror is uncannily realistic.

In "Jael", she elaborates on the feeling of disgust for Judeo-Christian religion that I share with her. But again, whether atheist or no, the language we use is as much the King James Bible as it is Chaucer or Shakespeare or Donne or Austen or Byatt, and so we serve up butter in a lordly dish.

"Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" draws together several of the previous themes. Art, food, the power of anger. Velasquez is the artist here. Sometimes her references give a flash of recognition - a line from a love-poem by John Donne - a horse-painting by Stubbs. But sometimes the references are unfamiliar, and you just have to track them down. After reading "Possession", I had to read Vico and Browning. "The Virgin in the Garden" made me look at Ovid for the first time. Velasquez has always seemed too baroque and popish for my cold northern sensibilities, but now I've got to look at some Velasquez. Because she likes the things I like, there's no better recommendation than ASB.

There's so much out there still to learn, and time's getting on.

At the behest of friends who swear by her books, I periodically return to A.S. Byatt to try and get a glimpse of what it is they find so enchanting in her work. After the weighty Babel Tower and Possession, this small volume of six stories seemed to offer a more painless approach. Once again, however, I have to confess that her dense and elaborate style, crammed full of classical and biblical references comes off the page as rather over-thought and contrived to me.

The first story, about a woman who literally runs away from her husband's death left me utterly unmoved and cold. Another story about a reclusive painter who encounters a mythical creature in his swimming pool also left me with a "so-what" emptiness. Yes, Byatt can create these dense sentences dripping with description, but it's all underpinned by a sense of ennui that I find tiresome. The longest and most conventional of the stories is a fairy tale about a princess with ice maiden blood falls in love with a desert prince, and sacrifices her health to be with him. In that context, Byatt's elaborate prose works a bit better and isn't so off-putting. However, my favorite tale is of the wife of an English businessman who gets lost in a giant Asian shopping mall. It's a funny and grotesque absurdist piece, and the only one where Byatt's style doesn't take precedence over the storytelling.

In any event, this little volume will likely appeal to Byatt's fans and do little to endear her to those-like me-who don't care for her style.

This collection of short stories is probably the best anthology I have read this year. Byatt's writing is sheer poetry and is so lush and beautiful. Byatt can really weave words together and create a tapestry of beauty. I love that these are modern fairy tales and deal with so many different topics.

But beauty aside, the main problem of this anthology was that it did run hot and cold but not in a good way. Some stories I found boring and uninteresting. "Crocodile Tears" is a fine example of a story that couldn't capture my fancy. I was also confused by "Jael" and am still trying to figure out the meaning behind it.

But my favorite story was "Lamia In The Cevennes." I loved the meaning behind this story and it made me smile.

"Elementals" is an invaluable collection of short stories, each one simple in their way but carrying with them a certain charm and personal message of their own. Many of the stories are set in the South of France, and against this beautiful background develops simple tales with complex messages. The stories are pure, peaceful and beautiful, and for anyone with a lively mind and a quick imagination.

Thomas Merton once wrote: "Art enables us to find ourselves and to lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual or spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality. This vitality lifts the mind above itself, and makes it present on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve."

There is a great spiritual vitality in A.S. Byatt's "Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice." From the first story of this collection to the last...these stories forcibly pull the reader out of the ordinary and into the wonder of life. This little book packs a wallop. Each of the stories are little masterpieces.

The first story, "Crocodile tears is a journey of self-discovery through the reawakening of a woman's curiosity. In the second story the reader looks into the life of an artist obsessed with his art. My favorite piece is the fairy tale "cold." "Baglady" is one heck of a scary story. "Jael'' is a glimpse into the soul of a woman unwilling to admit that she is haunted by her past. The final tale is a masterpiece that demonstrates how the way we see the world affects the way we live in it.

In the King James version of the Bible (which Byatt seems to have a love/hate relationship with) Paul says: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). These stories, as with all of Byatt's work, contain stunning visual imagery. One cannot read these tales and still view the everyday world through the same eyes.

If you find yourself with a chance to do some "summer reading" anytime soon, let me encourage you to start here with this book. I recommend it highly.

A.S. Byatt is a beautiful stylist. She is capable of writing sentences that are so rich and thick that they have more common ground with poetry than with traditional prose. Her ability to construct evocative scenes full of color and mystery and a sense of lyricism is unparalleled among recent literary novelists. In fact, she is so very good at what she does that on the strength of the virtues of the one Byatt novel I have read, the Booker Prize winning Possession, I was inclined to think that she was some sort of modern literary genius. But unfortunately, it turns out this is not the case.

Elementals, a collection of six short stories published in 1999, superficially has a lot in common with Possession. The writing style remains very similar. It is also immediately apparent that the themes which preoccupy Byatt- the juxtaposition of fairytale and real life, obscure literary symbolism, poetry and art- have not changed. But the six short stories in this book don't have the meaning that existed in Possession, nor the depth. They are subtle, yes- but they are preoccupied with their subtelty and so completely lose sight of their meaning.

To quote from the last story in the collection, "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary", speaking on the subject of what makes a person's life valuable one of the characters says: "The divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning." An admirable philosopy of humanity, in my opinion. But taken to its extreme, as in these stories, then all things can and will be considered of equal interest and value and every form in the multiplicity of forms worthy of equal consideration. Structured meaning disappears. It's the postmodern quandry... if there are no objective standards than there is no objective way to make value-judgements about art, in which case all "art" is equally valuable. And that's the problem that I have with this book: it's a love affair with the senses but not with the soul. The stories presented here are like Jackson Pollock paintings. They are lovely in their arrangement of color, but they are devoid of substance. I believe that literature becomes art only when it reaches the level of selective and carefully informed re-creation. Ms. Byatt selects the most banal of subjects for her pen, seemingly in haphazard fashion. She has a beautiful way with words, but unless she eventually stops merely writing and begins to actually write about something, she will never be an artist.