Customer Reviews

Love

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It's hard to pidgeonhole Angela Carter's "Love" into a specific genre. It has all the elements of a melodrama - love, sex, madness, violence, even a hint of incest - but the entity created by the talented Carter isn't remotely the cheap and tawdry sexploitation feast you might expect from such seemingly unpromising material. If I had to categorise this slyly mythical tale of a deadly love triangle between/among two half brothers, Lee and Buzz (one blonde and fair, the other dark with traces of foreign blood) and a girl, I'd call it a gothic love story. With great skill, Carter quickly sets the tone for the novel with an opening scene that is simply unforgettable. The picture of Annabel, crouching in the dark under the open skies, is an early hint that the cosmic powers will play their part in shaping the lives of our three protagonists. Carter seems to like writing about lowlife in 60s England - her debut novel "Shadow Dance" is another example - but in "Love", she gives the subject an off centred spin to create something unique. You'd be hard pressed to find a sympathetic character in this chilling but compact short story. They're nearly all dirty, scruffy, drunk and vile. Annabel's parents don't count because they're middle class and even they're helpless in saving their daughter. The waif like Annabel (shades of Ophelia) isn't the victim you think she is. Mentally frail and otherworldly to the point of self absorption, she has no real grasp of reality and wreaks havoc on the lives of the menfolk around her. The gorgeously written tattoo scene is especially memorable and symbolic of the nature of her relationship with Lee. It's all about possession and control, aspects of love which the brothers have no ability to respond to or cope with. You know that it can only lead to tragedy. Haunted by the memory of their mother who lost her mind and gave them over to the care of their aunt, Lee and Buzz are as debauched as their friends and as out of control as Annabel. Carter is an incredibly gifted writer. Her prose is imaginative, colourful and sparkling and always a pleasure to read. This book is a wonderful read. It comes highly recommended.

Gorgeously painful to read, impossible to forget, and inexplicably unknown, "Love" is about a crazy trust fund girl who wrecks on the shores of Bohemia, about two brothers trying to emerge from the shadow of their fundamentalist Mairxist childhood, about the inevitable punishments of heterosexuality, and since this is Carter, about the intimate connections between madness, memory, fiction, and the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. It's not a waste of time.

Love, from 1971, is a very short novel (about 40,000 words), on the face of it pretty mundane. It's the story of a doomed love triangle (of sorts) in London in the 60s. The setting is nominally ordinary, there are no explicit fantastic elements. But the telling is decidedly weird, heightened, so that it has a fantastical feel. Which is only increased by the strangeness of the characters.

Lee Collins is a young schoolteacher. His wife, Annabel, is something of an artist. His half-brother, Buzz, is a bit of a lowlife. All ordinary enough. But we soon learn the back story. Lee's father died when he was an infants, and his mother became a prostitute, then bearing Buzz to an American soldier (who Buzz thinks was an Indian). Their mother went insane when Lee was 11 or so, and their radical aunt adopted them, among other things giving Lee his new name (actually Leon, after Trotsky). After the aunt's death Lee struggled through university while Buzz drifted. Lee ran into Annabel at a party. She was an upper middle class girl who had just tried suicide, and somehow Lee ended up taking her home, where she just sort of stayed. He begins sleeping with her a few weeks later (without her seeming to care much one way or the other), and sometime later they are more or less forced into marriage when her parents discover them.

Buzz eventually shows up and moves in himself, and he and Annabel form a strange alliance, mostly against Lee. Lee ends up in an affair, driving Annabel once again to attempt suicide. Lee kicks Buzz out and brings Annabel home again, but it is not long before another crisis drives Annabel once again to a suicide attempt.

It's all extremely weird, mostly because all the characters are just plain nuts. I remained interested, but not really involved, basically because I didn't believe in any of these people. It's not that they weren't self-consistent, but they just didn't seem real. Still, very strange, quite original.

The edition I read included an afterword in which Carter described her characters' later lives. It's mostly satirical in tone, and I thought it quite ill-judged, actually, a mistake.

This is one of Angela Carter's earlier works and though it is not as adept nor as well-written as her other novels, it is still a work of beauty and well worth reading.

It is the story of a menage a trois. Three freaks in the 1960's are entangled in a relationship that is mutually destructive for all of them. The triangle includes a husband, his suicidal wife, and his very bizarre brother.

Carter writes a modern-day post-script to this early novel, putting the characters in a contemporary perspective. This is a nice touch to an otherwise limited novel.

The story is rather basic. A frail ephemeral hippy-waif despairs of her husband's infidelities. She loses her mind and takes her life. Her life is interwoven with her husband's drug-crazed, caped brother. All three are trapped in a Gothic-like environment of their own creation.