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.
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Tony617
Far ahead of its time
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Far from her best.
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