Customer Reviews

Passion of New Eve

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In this, one of Carter's boldest and most subversive novels, the protagonist undergoes an excrutiating exercise in de-masculinization. As a female, he realizes that women truly are "made" into nurturers, into mothers, into objects of sexual desire. Carter's prose is richly--chillingly--beautiful, as she describes one man's confusing transformation from being the "hunter" into the "hunted." Quite possibly Angela Carter's finest work--as well as one of the most provocative studies of gender construction in the Western world.

This is the most outrageous Angela Carter novel I've read. Just when you begin to settle into one bizarre plot, Carter turns everything upside down and takes the story down a completely different avenue. She still manages, however, to bring all of her seemingly disparate plot elements together at the novel's satisfying close.

Evelyn's transformation from loathesome creep into a protagonist the reader actually cares about is a riotous roller-coaster ride, punctuated by Carter's beautiful prose and embellished by her perverse sense of humor. As always with Angela Carter, a satisfying, thought-provoking read!

My only previous exposure to Carter's work has been through her short-story collection, "The Bloody Chamber". I'd highly recommend that over this; while TBC included some stories that were hard to grasp, it also contained many witty, dark, brilliant stories that blew the classic versions out of the water.

"The Passion of New Eve" is interesting, but all I could conclude at the end was that Carter was trying very hard not to get pigeonholed into any category of writing. You can't call it a feminist piece, nor can you call it satire. Evelyn, a man who gets surgically transformed into Eve (and if transition was as easy as the sci-fi operation makes it, there would be many elated trans persons in the world) isn't a pleasant protagonist; he's at first arrogant and self-serving, then whiny, then self-serving yet again. Tristessa, his love interest, is a more fascinating character, but plays a relatively minor part. There's also plenty of rape and, for lack of more eloquent terms, nastiness that goes on before the end; I wouldn't call this light reading by any stretch of the imagination.

The writing itself is stunning, though; Carter's use of imagery and verbal texture is fantastic, and her way with detail (choosing where to include it and where to omit it, in particular) is superb.

Everyone knows what the word "passion" means in ordinary usage; it's a strong feeling, often of sexual desire, and generally considered to be the opposite of reason. It means something quite different in religious terms, though. The word comes from a Latin root that means "suffering" and originally referred to the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Later, it came to mean the suffering that would lead a person to sainthood, the sensation of leaving one's body and joining with God for a time. You can see the resemblance to eroticism there. Angela Carter certainly did; the protagonist of "The Passion of New Eve" goes through both suffering and ecstasy at various junctures.

And yes, that means a certain amount of bloody sexual violence, although it stops well short of pornography. This novel isn't about sex and violence anyway; it's mostly about sin, forgiveness, self-image, and the possibility of happiness once you've learned acceptance. All for under 200 pages.

You might call "Passion" a work of science fiction, since it takes place in some not-too-distant future, but then you might as well call it a Western because most of it takes place in the southwestern desert of the United States. A young professor named Evelyn (which is a man's first name in England when pronounced EVE-linn) comes to New York for a college job, only to find that black revolutionaries are about to burn the college to the ground. These same revolutionaries then build a wall around Harlem while feminist revolutionaries take random potshots at miscellaneous men. Good times.

Evelyn begins an affair with an underage black exotic dancer, whom he abandons when she gets pregnant. Hoping in the vaguest way for some kind of renewal, he flees New York for the aforementioned desert and gets captured by a group of those feminist revolutionaries. These women live underground and worship a former plastic surgeon who has, by her art, transformed herself into a grotesque goddess-form. She takes a sperm sample from Evelyn and then surgically transforms him into a fully-functioning woman (uterus and all) named Eve. She intends to impregnate Eve with Evelyn's seed and thus transform the mythological underpinnings of Western civilization as it collapses under its own weight, whatever that means. We're about halfway through the book. Stay tuned.

All of this is revealed on the book jacket, so I have no qualms about revealing it here. I assure you, the rest of this little adventure is even more bizarre. Someone asked me a little while ago if "The Passion of New Eve" is surrealistic - that's putting it mildly. Some people enjoy creative work that goes off the deep end like this and others prefer something that deals with more recognizable events. You'll have to judge for yourself if this novel is for you.

If it helps, you might consider the fact that "Passion" has more on its mind than just getting as weird as possible. Let's put it this way; for a long time, thinkers about gender have said that bringing men and women together in understanding is difficult, since the sexes' world views and experiences are so different as to be nearly incomprehensible, one to the other. To solve this problem, Angela Carter conceives of a man who is literally turned into a woman. Well and good. Now, given that a woman's world view and experiences are so alien to a man, what experiences will this former man have? The author will not choose them at random, especially with a civil war going on in this alternate United States. And indeed, Ms. Carter chose the new Eve's experiences with a good deal of consideration, and took care to set them up right from the start of her book so as to make the impact on the character as powerful as possible.

"The Passion of New Eve", being a novel rather than a poem, does not deal in abstractions by any means. On the contrary, as I implied just now, the plot is impressively structured and logical, even though the events within it resemble nothing you've ever seen before. (This is another reason to welcome "Passion" into the science fiction pantheon - a lot of great sf does exactly the same thing - but that's a conversation for another day.) So, not abstract, but it does have at least one thing in common with great abstractionists like Jackson Pollock in painting and Ornette Coleman in jazz. Both of them disregarded the traditional formats of their art, like shape and color or key and rhythm, but did not disregard the idea of form itself or pursue chaos for its own sake. Instead, they came up with new forms and figured out the rules as they went along. That's more or less what Ms. Carter did here with traditional story form.

Having said that, it's time to get into the question of art's function. It certainly takes a kind of genius to re-invent a whole form of expression, but if the work that comes out of it leaves you cold, is it any good? Probably not.

Fortunately, if you leave yourself open to it, you can be profoundly moved by abstract painting or free jazz, and the same is true of Angela Carter and "The Passion of New Eve". Good thing, too - if you read this novel, however short, and said "So what?" at the end, it would be a waste of Ms. Carter's time and yours. Well, however goofy and/or painful this novel can be, and although there's no spectacular triumph for Evelyn/Eve at the end, believe me - this is not a waste of time.

Let's put it this way; if a selfish fool suffers terrible pain and woe, and afterwards has the chance to make a kind and charitable gesture, you might feel sad for that person, but you wouldn't call it a waste, would you?

Benshlomo says, Classic things need new shapes once in a while.

Angela Carter makes few concessions to the ordinary reader. She is abstruse, wilful, demanding, her vocabulary is immense, her intelligence daunting. She dares to make her characters one-dimensional (though colourful and believable), her story as unlikely and fantastic as possible.

The Passion Of New Eve is set in a vividly visualised, but almost unreal U.S.A. that is rapidly disintegrating into all-out civil war. 'Bizarre' might, perhaps, be an understatement when considering the plot. Amongst other things, Evelyn, a young, 'straight' young Englishman, is forced to undergo a sex-change operation that transforms him ('a change in the appearance will restructure the essence') into a perfect woman.

'Eve' is then - after an attempted escape - taken prisoner by Zero - a barbaric, one-eyed, one-legged man, and his personal harem of several 'wives', who worship him the more unquestioningly and eagerly, the more thoroughly he degrades them.

Following this, Eve - having found her true love - enjoys a sexual interlude in the desert that completes her realisation of herself as a fulfilled man-loving woman.

The best part of the novel is the beautiful ending. Here the author uses surrealistic imagery superbly in order to explore themes of time, re-birth and the inexorable power of nature. It is intensely affecting.

The whole book is held together by Carter's boldness and dazzling style. She is dreaming frightening and blackly resonant dreams, and by her artistry makes them plausible. A pity, then, that her uncompromising literary brilliance will alienate and bore those most in need of her provoking vision.

Imagine Voltaire's CANDIDE remastered and remixed with John Rechy, John Kennedy Toole, and John Waters (among others) and you begin to get a sense of this peripatetic classic; TRISTRAM SHANDY for the 20th and 21st centuries. Lurid, obscene, filled with excess of just about anything. And, to be sure, one of the most remarkable protagonists in the history of the novel: EVE/EVELYN.

An amazing book--is it still out of print? I found my copy, quite by accident, at the Strand bookstore in NYC. Its got an awful cover, so awful I picked it up just to see what it could possibly be about.

It's about an America in the not-so-distant future--an America in the midst of collapse and civil war. Militant blacks, radical feminists, Christian child-crusaders, the scattered remnants of the old authority are all fighting each other in a situation degenerating into an alchemical chaos. Into the midst of all this comes a vain young Englishman. He falls under the spell of a bewitching prostitute, takes up residence with her in a NYC ghetto, impregnates her, and then takes off alone across America in search of further adventure.

What he finds, in the middle of the desert, is an underground community of women who take him captive and subject him to the ultimate reconditioning...they are going to turn him into a woman. He will then be impregnated with his own sperm. He will bear his own child. He's the "new Eve."

So there, right in the middle of this stupendous story, our hero becomes a fetching, well-endowed blonde heroine and the adventures, Candide-like, continue through one deliciously sordid episode after another, each an aspect of the age-old gender war between the masculine and feminine principle, between history and mythology, phallocentrism and gynocentrism.

Is this novel just *too* politically incorrect for today's ideological climate? Is it too perverse? Why does it seem to be Angela Carter's least known work, when it's arguably her best and most provocative? The writing is phenomenal: lush, poetic, rich in metaphor, surreal and hyper-real. Each sentence is so finely crafted, so substantial, you can practically lift it off the page and hold it in your hand. Her imagination seems limitless. The eroticism is palpable, not only in the situations Carter invokes, the characters she creates, the images she employs, but in the very language she so ambidextrously manipulates.

But in the end, what makes *The Passion of New Eve* more than just an especially kinky sex-adventure are the very relevant--and controversial--things Carter is saying about gender. In many ways, she confirms all my own suspicions about the nature of Woman and femininity, about its fatal allure for the male of the species. In the hands of a male author, these insights would be considered misogynistic. But when a woman author of Carter's caliber and obvious intelligence characterizes the feminine principle as basically solipsistic, erotically infantile, and, therefore, ultimately, self-absorbed, self-possessed, and self-sufficient...well, what are the PC-police to do?

Men have suppressed women for centuries upon centuries...and for very good reason. Because once the cat is out of the bag there's no putting it back in again. Once women discovered their sexual power and sexual control, and once this is combined with political and economic freedom, what power do men have? Men have always instinctively understood--and feared--that women as equals are, in fact, their superiors. A woman always had the psychological control over a man; but a man had social control, economic control, political control. Up to now, a woman needed a man to provide a safe and acceptable, if very limited, arena for her psychological control: the traditional family within the patriarchal society. With the breakdown of the patriarchy, with the unleashing of her sexuality into the world at large, a woman comes to realize she doesn't need a man at all. She doesn't *need* him, but she can pick and choose, take and leave him, as she will. The balance shifts in her favor. What becomes evident is that as perfect equals it's a man who needs her, and thus the feminization of the culture, and of man, begins. The return to the Mother. The birth of a "new Eve."

All men, Carter insinuates, want to return to Mother, want to become what they so ardently desire, want to be reborn as that creature of endless fascination who seduces from behind a million masks, who endlessly replenishes, creates, and re-creates herself, all men want to become a woman.

If there is a `way out' for the dead end that men and the phallocentrism they historically represent, a hope for peace in the gender wars that have divided us until now, it's in the new fluidity of sexual boundaries that lies implicit in Carter's vision of the future--a world of technological and consequent psychological breakthroughs in which a man can be `reborn' as a woman, and society itself undergo a sexual revolution of alchemical proportions. Long live the hermaphrodite.

*The Passion of New Eve* is a book, oddly, who's time had come when it was first published, and now, some thirty years later, it finds itself ahead of its time. If you're lucky enough to locate a copy of this eroto-political classic, don't hesitate to pick it up. Perverse, poetic, controversial, it's one of those strange dangerous little flowers in the English garden of literature you'll be glad you didn't miss .

Rampaging feminism that bears no resemblance to any kind of reality, let alone this one. This novel puts forward literally no new ideas, and as it tries to do so succeeds at nothing but laugh-inducing ignorance. So perhaps my one-star rating is a tad too harsh, as there is quite a bit of unintentional fun to be had at Carter's expense. Read only if you enjoy self-mutilation and rather like the taste of bile rising in the back of your throat.

Had to read this book for a lit class. Unless you like really strange hard to read pointless liturature, I would strongly recommend taking a beating instead of reading this book.