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Heroes and Villains
After the apocalypse the world is neatly divided.
Rational civilization rests with the Professors in their steel and concrete villages; marauding tribes of Barbarians roam the surrounding jungles; mutilated Out People inhabit the burnt scars of cities.
But Marianne, a Professor's daughter, is carried away into the jungle--a grotesque vegetable paradise--where she will become the captive bride of Jewel, the proud and beautiful Barbarian. There she will witness the savage rituals of the snake worshippers, indulge her voluptuous, virginal fantasies, taste the forbidden fruit of chaos...
Erotic, exotic, and bizarre, HEROES AND VILLAINS is a post-apocalyptic romance, a gripping adventure story, a colourful embroidery of religion and magic and, not least, a dispassionate vision of life beyond our brave nuclear world.
Rational civilization rests with the Professors in their steel and concrete villages; marauding tribes of Barbarians roam the surrounding jungles; mutilated Out People inhabit the burnt scars of cities.
But Marianne, a Professor's daughter, is carried away into the jungle--a grotesque vegetable paradise--where she will become the captive bride of Jewel, the proud and beautiful Barbarian. There she will witness the savage rituals of the snake worshippers, indulge her voluptuous, virginal fantasies, taste the forbidden fruit of chaos...
Erotic, exotic, and bizarre, HEROES AND VILLAINS is a post-apocalyptic romance, a gripping adventure story, a colourful embroidery of religion and magic and, not least, a dispassionate vision of life beyond our brave nuclear world.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
About the author
Angela Carter
194 books3,500 followersBorn Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).
She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."
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December 2, 2018
A Truly Gothic Novel Full of Dread and Glamour and Passion
Angela Carter enjoyed a major period of imaginative stimulation and production immediately before and then when she resided in Japan for several years at the cusp of the sixties/seventies.
According to the British Library, this was the first of two novels she wrote in Japan (the other being "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", still my favourite of her novels) in addition to her first collection of short stories, "Fireworks". However, it appears that she actually wrote this novel before her trip, while still living in Bristol.
Published in 1969, "Heroes and Villains" is a Gothic domestic drama set in a post-apocalyptic world where much of civilisation has been wiped out by some type of "blast" in a war. We don't learn what happened exactly. It might have been a nuclear bomb. All we learn is that the people who live in the world described in the novel have been splintered into several groups - the Soldiers (the remnants of the army), the Workers, the Professors, the Barbarians, and the outcast mutant Out People (she describes one as a "not-man", "what seemed to her a cruel parody of life").
The Surviving White Tower
The protagonist Marianne is the daughter of a Professor of History, who lives in a white (metaphorically ivory?) tower made of steel and concrete ("it stood among some other steel and concrete blocks" that survived the blast):
"Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her."
Father and daughter live in an academic community that is much like a rural village near where there are farms of corn, and apple orchards, beyond which there was nothing but marshlands and the "tumbled stone" of ruined buildings. "Here even the briars refused to grow and pools of water from the encroaching swampland contained nothing but viscid darkness."
Henri Rousseau - "The Sleeping Gypsy"
The Barbarians
Marianne was not allowed to go outside the outer wire fence surrounding the community. It was out there that the Barbarians lived:
"If you're not a good little girl, the Barbarians will eat you."
The son of the Professor of Mathematics tells her, "The Soldiers are heroes but the Barbarians are villains."
Marianne is not averted by this old wives' tale. Rather, she is allured by the Barbarians. She doesn't play by the rules. "She was a skinny and angular child." (Like Angular Carter herself perhaps?) "She was very wiry and agile."
The Arbitrary Children of Calamity
Marianne's father explains to her:
"Before the war, there were places called Universities where men did nothing but read books and conduct experiments. These men had certain privileges...some Professors were allowed in the deep shelters with their families, during the war, and they proved to be the only ones left who could resurrect the gone world in a gentler shape, and try to keep destruction outside, this time."
Her father, being a Professor of History, "reconstructed the past; that was his profession." The survivors were "the arbitrary children of calamity...If the Barbarians inherit the earth, they will finally destroy it, they won't know what to do with it."
Francisco Goya - "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
All Was Chaos
Marianne first witnessed an attack on the Professorial community by the Barbarians, when she was six years old. Many Soldiers died, and then "all was chaos...The rabble came to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill." A Barbarian boy stabs her brother and then holds him with "a strange, terrible tenderness until he was still and dead." The Barbarian then looks up to Marianne's tower and realises she has been watching him. The two obsess about each other for much of the rest of their lives, until they meet each other when Marianne absconds from the village after the brutal axe murder of her father. The Barbarian's name is Jewel: "Perhaps he was called Jewel because he was so beautiful, though also very strange."
The Barbarians are described in much the same way as Gypsies ("Gypsy is a corruption of the word, 'Egyptian'). Marianne says:
"The Professors think you have reverted to beasthood. You are a perfect illustration of the breakdown of social interaction and the death of social systems."
The Prince of Darkness
Nevertheless, Jewel is "one of its aristocrats", "the ragged king of nowhere", "the Messiah of the Yahoos" and "the prince of darkness", is interested in books, and has a tutor, Doctor Donally, who is "a bit mad...The Doctor is a practical man and believes religion is a social necessity." (He seems to be a precursor of Doctor Hoffman.) Donally proclaims:
"It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion."
He then quotes Hobbes:
"The passion to be reckoned upon is fear; whereof there be two very general objects: one, the power of spirits invisible, the other, the power of those men they shall therein offend."
The Sophisticated Groom
Jewel and Donally live in a large Gothic house, "a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot."
Donally's room is an old chapel, "everywhere a litter of books, bottles, vessels, strangely shaped utensils and bundles of dried plants."
Marianne escapes back to the wood, where Jewel finds her, rapes her and brings her back with him. It had been his plan to marry her the following day. Marriage proves little better, it being a succession of rapes: "Marianne must reconcile herself to everything from rape to mortality."
Donally inks an absurdist sign that says, "MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING."
Marianne subsequently concludes:
"I think that in the long run, I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I was a little girl, we would play heroes and villains, but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?"
Donally advises her, "Gather yourself together, young lady. Marry the Prince of Darkness. You'll find him very sophisticated."
Sophistication, in this world, is supposed to be enough to warrant a relationship, or even a marriage.
The Savage Husband
Marianne acknowledges, "Our Jewel is more savage than he is barbarous." Like the Parisians of old, she worshipped the goddess Reason. Her white tower kept "unreason at bay outside, beyond the barbed wire". Though on her wedding day, she realised "her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear and she turned into a mute, furious doll which allowed itself to be totally engulfed."
She describes their relationship as a composite of signs:
"He had become the sign of an idea of a hero; and she herself had been forced to impersonate the sign of a memory of a bride."
She thinks of him as "an icon of otherness...The Barbarians are Yahoos but the Professors are Laputans."
The Infernal Pit of Their Embraces
There is no rational reason that explains their relationship and "the infernal pit of their embraces":
"You are the most remarkable thing I ever saw in all my life...You're nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights..."
"They lay upon the narrow mattress and, involuntarily, by a compulsion that had nothing to do with reason, will or conscious desire, she found she moved closer and closer to him."
"She defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel."
Another Metaphysical Proposition
By the end of the novel, she concludes, "You're not a human being at all, you're a metaphysical proposition."
And then, having negated each other, they "relapsed into silence".
An Astonishing Juicy, Overblown, Exploding Gothic Lollipop
The execution of this novel is astonishing. It consists of just seven chapters that total 164 pages in length. The plot is minimal, but efficient. The chapters flow together like a stream of romantic consciousnesses. A world is built beautifully and imaginatively, in the manner of a Gothic surrealism. The characters are drawn sympathetically, even when they are villains, not heroes. The heroes are real, complex people, not just angelic personae or delicate caricatures.
Robert Coover contributes (dials in?) a perfunctory three page introduction that does little more than quote Angela Carter’s essay “Notes on the Gothic Mode”. This novel exceeds in brilliance those maximalist tomes of Coover’s fellow American post-modernists Alexander Theroux (“Darconville’s Cat”), Joseph McElroy (“Women and Men”) and William T. Vollmann (“The Royal Family”).
Carter herself described it as "a juicy, overblown, exploding Gothic lollipop.
Suck it and see!
SOUNDTRACK:
Angela Carter enjoyed a major period of imaginative stimulation and production immediately before and then when she resided in Japan for several years at the cusp of the sixties/seventies.
According to the British Library, this was the first of two novels she wrote in Japan (the other being "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman", still my favourite of her novels) in addition to her first collection of short stories, "Fireworks". However, it appears that she actually wrote this novel before her trip, while still living in Bristol.
Published in 1969, "Heroes and Villains" is a Gothic domestic drama set in a post-apocalyptic world where much of civilisation has been wiped out by some type of "blast" in a war. We don't learn what happened exactly. It might have been a nuclear bomb. All we learn is that the people who live in the world described in the novel have been splintered into several groups - the Soldiers (the remnants of the army), the Workers, the Professors, the Barbarians, and the outcast mutant Out People (she describes one as a "not-man", "what seemed to her a cruel parody of life").
The Surviving White Tower
The protagonist Marianne is the daughter of a Professor of History, who lives in a white (metaphorically ivory?) tower made of steel and concrete ("it stood among some other steel and concrete blocks" that survived the blast):
"Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her."
Father and daughter live in an academic community that is much like a rural village near where there are farms of corn, and apple orchards, beyond which there was nothing but marshlands and the "tumbled stone" of ruined buildings. "Here even the briars refused to grow and pools of water from the encroaching swampland contained nothing but viscid darkness."
Henri Rousseau - "The Sleeping Gypsy"
The Barbarians
Marianne was not allowed to go outside the outer wire fence surrounding the community. It was out there that the Barbarians lived:
"If you're not a good little girl, the Barbarians will eat you."
The son of the Professor of Mathematics tells her, "The Soldiers are heroes but the Barbarians are villains."
Marianne is not averted by this old wives' tale. Rather, she is allured by the Barbarians. She doesn't play by the rules. "She was a skinny and angular child." (Like Angular Carter herself perhaps?) "She was very wiry and agile."
The Arbitrary Children of Calamity
Marianne's father explains to her:
"Before the war, there were places called Universities where men did nothing but read books and conduct experiments. These men had certain privileges...some Professors were allowed in the deep shelters with their families, during the war, and they proved to be the only ones left who could resurrect the gone world in a gentler shape, and try to keep destruction outside, this time."
Her father, being a Professor of History, "reconstructed the past; that was his profession." The survivors were "the arbitrary children of calamity...If the Barbarians inherit the earth, they will finally destroy it, they won't know what to do with it."
Francisco Goya - "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"
All Was Chaos
Marianne first witnessed an attack on the Professorial community by the Barbarians, when she was six years old. Many Soldiers died, and then "all was chaos...The rabble came to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill." A Barbarian boy stabs her brother and then holds him with "a strange, terrible tenderness until he was still and dead." The Barbarian then looks up to Marianne's tower and realises she has been watching him. The two obsess about each other for much of the rest of their lives, until they meet each other when Marianne absconds from the village after the brutal axe murder of her father. The Barbarian's name is Jewel: "Perhaps he was called Jewel because he was so beautiful, though also very strange."
The Barbarians are described in much the same way as Gypsies ("Gypsy is a corruption of the word, 'Egyptian'). Marianne says:
"The Professors think you have reverted to beasthood. You are a perfect illustration of the breakdown of social interaction and the death of social systems."
The Prince of Darkness
Nevertheless, Jewel is "one of its aristocrats", "the ragged king of nowhere", "the Messiah of the Yahoos" and "the prince of darkness", is interested in books, and has a tutor, Doctor Donally, who is "a bit mad...The Doctor is a practical man and believes religion is a social necessity." (He seems to be a precursor of Doctor Hoffman.) Donally proclaims:
"It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion."
He then quotes Hobbes:
"The passion to be reckoned upon is fear; whereof there be two very general objects: one, the power of spirits invisible, the other, the power of those men they shall therein offend."
The Sophisticated Groom
Jewel and Donally live in a large Gothic house, "a gigantic memory of rotten stone, a compilation of innumerable forgotten styles now given some green unity by the devouring web of creeper, fur of moss and fungoid growth of rot."
Donally's room is an old chapel, "everywhere a litter of books, bottles, vessels, strangely shaped utensils and bundles of dried plants."
Marianne escapes back to the wood, where Jewel finds her, rapes her and brings her back with him. It had been his plan to marry her the following day. Marriage proves little better, it being a succession of rapes: "Marianne must reconcile herself to everything from rape to mortality."
Donally inks an absurdist sign that says, "MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING."
Marianne subsequently concludes:
"I think that in the long run, I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I was a little girl, we would play heroes and villains, but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?"
Donally advises her, "Gather yourself together, young lady. Marry the Prince of Darkness. You'll find him very sophisticated."
Sophistication, in this world, is supposed to be enough to warrant a relationship, or even a marriage.
The Savage Husband
Marianne acknowledges, "Our Jewel is more savage than he is barbarous." Like the Parisians of old, she worshipped the goddess Reason. Her white tower kept "unreason at bay outside, beyond the barbed wire". Though on her wedding day, she realised "her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear and she turned into a mute, furious doll which allowed itself to be totally engulfed."
She describes their relationship as a composite of signs:
"He had become the sign of an idea of a hero; and she herself had been forced to impersonate the sign of a memory of a bride."
She thinks of him as "an icon of otherness...The Barbarians are Yahoos but the Professors are Laputans."
The Infernal Pit of Their Embraces
There is no rational reason that explains their relationship and "the infernal pit of their embraces":
"You are the most remarkable thing I ever saw in all my life...You're nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights..."
"They lay upon the narrow mattress and, involuntarily, by a compulsion that had nothing to do with reason, will or conscious desire, she found she moved closer and closer to him."
"She defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel."
Another Metaphysical Proposition
By the end of the novel, she concludes, "You're not a human being at all, you're a metaphysical proposition."
And then, having negated each other, they "relapsed into silence".
An Astonishing Juicy, Overblown, Exploding Gothic Lollipop
The execution of this novel is astonishing. It consists of just seven chapters that total 164 pages in length. The plot is minimal, but efficient. The chapters flow together like a stream of romantic consciousnesses. A world is built beautifully and imaginatively, in the manner of a Gothic surrealism. The characters are drawn sympathetically, even when they are villains, not heroes. The heroes are real, complex people, not just angelic personae or delicate caricatures.
Robert Coover contributes (dials in?) a perfunctory three page introduction that does little more than quote Angela Carter’s essay “Notes on the Gothic Mode”. This novel exceeds in brilliance those maximalist tomes of Coover’s fellow American post-modernists Alexander Theroux (“Darconville’s Cat”), Joseph McElroy (“Women and Men”) and William T. Vollmann (“The Royal Family”).
Carter herself described it as "a juicy, overblown, exploding Gothic lollipop.
Suck it and see!
SOUNDTRACK:
September 16, 2014
Gods.
I can't properly review Angela Carter - her books just seem to reach into my subconscious, grasp hold of me, and refuse to let go. It's always a strange experience to read others' reviews of her work, which debate symbolism and characterization and political message. All those things are very clear to me when reading, but I feel so little need to comment on them, because the book itself feels so true. This is how the world is; or, more properly, this is how the world is for me. Every other sentence is a great truth that I have just been waiting for Carter to articulate to me. Yes, it is hyper-intellectual, witty metaphor, but we live in metaphors. Our minds are paved, wallpapered, founded upon the texts we take into ourselves. Conscious heteroglossia.
Heroes and Villains has the hazy contours of a dream but, within those contours, the rich detail of memory. It takes place in a sharply divided post-apocalyptic world, but mostly within the mind of the heroine Marianne, a child of the privileged and sequestered Professor class, who runs away and joins the Barbarians. Carter does not shy away from the grittiness of her premise - more even than the vivid, matter-of-fact violence and appreciated her attention to dirt, to unpleasant smells, to the diseases that result from such conditions. The power of the choice between safety and freedom, between order and chaos is given more weight because the freedom/chaos is unromanticized (though, it other ways, it is a deeply romantic, fantastical image - gothic, in the truest sense of the word. I hope Mario Praz would approve).
Like all of Carter's works, it does not benefit from being summarized (the one exception is The Passion of New Eve, because summarizing that one to a naive audience is absolutely hilarious. Try it some time). It is a deeply erotic, and a deeply devastating book. Grief and mental illness run through it like a vein of sulfur. I expect that most survivors of sexual violence will find it triggering, but it also feels very much as though it was written for us survivors, whispering truths into our ears that the outside world will never understand. Inside the wild, bright colored images there is always this hard, brutal truth, like a heartbeat - This is how it is.
I don't know if this is just me. It very well might be.
I can't properly review Angela Carter - her books just seem to reach into my subconscious, grasp hold of me, and refuse to let go. It's always a strange experience to read others' reviews of her work, which debate symbolism and characterization and political message. All those things are very clear to me when reading, but I feel so little need to comment on them, because the book itself feels so true. This is how the world is; or, more properly, this is how the world is for me. Every other sentence is a great truth that I have just been waiting for Carter to articulate to me. Yes, it is hyper-intellectual, witty metaphor, but we live in metaphors. Our minds are paved, wallpapered, founded upon the texts we take into ourselves. Conscious heteroglossia.
Heroes and Villains has the hazy contours of a dream but, within those contours, the rich detail of memory. It takes place in a sharply divided post-apocalyptic world, but mostly within the mind of the heroine Marianne, a child of the privileged and sequestered Professor class, who runs away and joins the Barbarians. Carter does not shy away from the grittiness of her premise - more even than the vivid, matter-of-fact violence and appreciated her attention to dirt, to unpleasant smells, to the diseases that result from such conditions. The power of the choice between safety and freedom, between order and chaos is given more weight because the freedom/chaos is unromanticized (though, it other ways, it is a deeply romantic, fantastical image - gothic, in the truest sense of the word. I hope Mario Praz would approve).
Like all of Carter's works, it does not benefit from being summarized (the one exception is The Passion of New Eve, because summarizing that one to a naive audience is absolutely hilarious. Try it some time). It is a deeply erotic, and a deeply devastating book. Grief and mental illness run through it like a vein of sulfur. I expect that most survivors of sexual violence will find it triggering, but it also feels very much as though it was written for us survivors, whispering truths into our ears that the outside world will never understand. Inside the wild, bright colored images there is always this hard, brutal truth, like a heartbeat - This is how it is.
I don't know if this is just me. It very well might be.
April 25, 2013
This book made me so angry I went out and picked a fight with someone after reading it because I couldn't yell at the characters. I haven't had a book piss me off this much in a long, long time. I ended up dropping it down a storm drain to prevent another innocent person from reading this drek.
Let's start with the minor annoyances first. This is a post-apocalyptic novel published in the late 1960s. There are certain aspects of this genre that I was fully prepared for, one of which is the passive-voice flowery language that clouds the reality of the world the characters are living in. This book took it to extremes by adding a layer of pseudo-intellectualism. Maybe it was real intellectualism, maybe I just don't know enough about sociology to recognize the Really Deep Insights I was supposed to be getting about decaying societies (I've heard of Levi-Strauss, a name that the characters kept throwing around, but I know nothing of his work), but all I know is that it was getting annoyingly pretentious after a while. Pretentiousness is one of the worst offenses any novel can commit in my world so this book is already starting off on a low bar.
Here's an example of the pretentious language that set me off so much:
Apart from these stray contacts, she defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel. This third thing, this erotic beast, was eyeless, formless and equipped with one single mouth. It was amphibious and swam in black, brackish waters, subsisting only upon night and silence; she closed her eyes in case she glimpsed it by moonlight and there were no words of endearment in common, anyway, nor any reason to use them. The beast had teeth and claws. It was sometimes an instrument solely of vengefulness, though often its own impetus carried it beyond this function. When it separated out to themselves, again, they woke to the mutual distrust of the morning.
That, dear readers, is a sex scene.
I was prepared for the importance of sex to the plot after reading the back cover blurb and checking the publication date (1969). In one of Anne McCaffrey's books, (I think it was Get Off the Unicorn) she prefaces one of her short stories with a note that in the late 1960s you had to include a sex scene if you wanted to get published in the science fiction world. The blurb mentions Marianne's "virginal fantasies," so I knew going in that she was going to have lots of hot barbarian sex. What I did not know was that it was going to be hot barbarian rape fantasies.
Here's a good indicator of how the times, they are a-changin': when Marianne tries to escape from the barbarian camp, she is easily tracked down by Jewel. She sits in a tree while he mocks her until she gets mad enough to jump down and fight him. He pins her down, rapes her, and then tells her that now they have to get married. She's more angry than anything after this, but it's okay because deep down she really wanted him to rape her. After their marriage, she goes into a kind of fugue state where she only really comes alive at night when they're having another bout of rough sex (see the above quote). It gets so obvious that she really loves being raped that at one point, when she's arguing with Jewel, he looks at her and says "You're creaming for me now, this very minute." I, personally, found that to be unnecessarily vulgar. Marianne totally gets off on it, though. She's always telling Jewel "I hate you," but it becomes clear near the end that she really means "love" instead of "hate." Because, you know, a semi-abusive sexual relationship is just so romantic.
Eventually Marianne gets pregnant and tries to cheat on Jewel by raping the thirteen-year-old "half-wit" of the tribe (I guess it's contagious). At this point I gave up on any hope of this book ever making any kind of good sense. Jewel hits Marianne a couple of times and this is portrayed as worse than any of the raping. The third time he hits her, she puts a "curse" on him and he dies in a suicide rescue mission. When she learns that Jewel is dead, Marianne declares that she will become the "Tiger Queen" and rule the tribe with an iron fist. Suuuuuuuuuure she is. The girl that everyone in the tribe hates, the girl that has people making signs to ward off the evil eye whenever they see her, the girl who can't even take care of herself in the wild, she is going to be the next leader of the tribe. She's going to be left for the mutants to eat in a week.
Let's start with the minor annoyances first. This is a post-apocalyptic novel published in the late 1960s. There are certain aspects of this genre that I was fully prepared for, one of which is the passive-voice flowery language that clouds the reality of the world the characters are living in. This book took it to extremes by adding a layer of pseudo-intellectualism. Maybe it was real intellectualism, maybe I just don't know enough about sociology to recognize the Really Deep Insights I was supposed to be getting about decaying societies (I've heard of Levi-Strauss, a name that the characters kept throwing around, but I know nothing of his work), but all I know is that it was getting annoyingly pretentious after a while. Pretentiousness is one of the worst offenses any novel can commit in my world so this book is already starting off on a low bar.
Here's an example of the pretentious language that set me off so much:
Apart from these stray contacts, she defended herself by denying him an existence outside the dual being they made while owls pounced on velvet mice in the forest, the moon passed through its phases and the idiot boy howled disconsolately in his kennel. This third thing, this erotic beast, was eyeless, formless and equipped with one single mouth. It was amphibious and swam in black, brackish waters, subsisting only upon night and silence; she closed her eyes in case she glimpsed it by moonlight and there were no words of endearment in common, anyway, nor any reason to use them. The beast had teeth and claws. It was sometimes an instrument solely of vengefulness, though often its own impetus carried it beyond this function. When it separated out to themselves, again, they woke to the mutual distrust of the morning.
That, dear readers, is a sex scene.
I was prepared for the importance of sex to the plot after reading the back cover blurb and checking the publication date (1969). In one of Anne McCaffrey's books, (I think it was Get Off the Unicorn) she prefaces one of her short stories with a note that in the late 1960s you had to include a sex scene if you wanted to get published in the science fiction world. The blurb mentions Marianne's "virginal fantasies," so I knew going in that she was going to have lots of hot barbarian sex. What I did not know was that it was going to be hot barbarian rape fantasies.
Here's a good indicator of how the times, they are a-changin': when Marianne tries to escape from the barbarian camp, she is easily tracked down by Jewel. She sits in a tree while he mocks her until she gets mad enough to jump down and fight him. He pins her down, rapes her, and then tells her that now they have to get married. She's more angry than anything after this, but it's okay because deep down she really wanted him to rape her. After their marriage, she goes into a kind of fugue state where she only really comes alive at night when they're having another bout of rough sex (see the above quote). It gets so obvious that she really loves being raped that at one point, when she's arguing with Jewel, he looks at her and says "You're creaming for me now, this very minute." I, personally, found that to be unnecessarily vulgar. Marianne totally gets off on it, though. She's always telling Jewel "I hate you," but it becomes clear near the end that she really means "love" instead of "hate." Because, you know, a semi-abusive sexual relationship is just so romantic.
Eventually Marianne gets pregnant and tries to cheat on Jewel by raping the thirteen-year-old "half-wit" of the tribe (I guess it's contagious). At this point I gave up on any hope of this book ever making any kind of good sense. Jewel hits Marianne a couple of times and this is portrayed as worse than any of the raping. The third time he hits her, she puts a "curse" on him and he dies in a suicide rescue mission. When she learns that Jewel is dead, Marianne declares that she will become the "Tiger Queen" and rule the tribe with an iron fist. Suuuuuuuuuure she is. The girl that everyone in the tribe hates, the girl that has people making signs to ward off the evil eye whenever they see her, the girl who can't even take care of herself in the wild, she is going to be the next leader of the tribe. She's going to be left for the mutants to eat in a week.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 3, 2022
This book started out interesting. The post-apocalyptic world where some people live in civilized towers with Professors, the last custodians of science and religion and are protected by soldiers. And then there're outsiders, Barbarians, nomads, who plunder and kill. Marianne is the daughter of professor, she's bored and curious about the world, so one day she leaves her tower and gets herself abducted by the barbarian leader Jewel.
So this is a novel that is not interesting as a story, at least not to me, but only as a vessel for ideas. And there's a lot. I mean, we have a lot of apple trees, a real serpent and Jewel has a huge tattoo on his back with the scene from Eden with Adam and Eve. There's something about misogyny as a reaction of patriarchy to the fear of female. Jewel rapes Marianne because he's scared of her, then he impregnates her because he's scared of her and as a way to dominate her. He never does and he keeps being afraid of her till the end.
Marianne keeps reiterating that everything she does, she choses to do. But it's a self-delusion, nothing is her choice. She's been raped, married to her rapist, impregnated, all against her will. Except for her making a choice to have sex with a slow 13 year old to rebel against her husband's control. Truly a story of self-discovery and empowerment.
I don't know, this book is way too 1960s for me.
So this is a novel that is not interesting as a story, at least not to me, but only as a vessel for ideas. And there's a lot. I mean, we have a lot of apple trees, a real serpent and Jewel has a huge tattoo on his back with the scene from Eden with Adam and Eve. There's something about misogyny as a reaction of patriarchy to the fear of female. Jewel rapes Marianne because he's scared of her, then he impregnates her because he's scared of her and as a way to dominate her. He never does and he keeps being afraid of her till the end.
Marianne keeps reiterating that everything she does, she choses to do. But it's a self-delusion, nothing is her choice. She's been raped, married to her rapist, impregnated, all against her will. Except for her making a choice to have sex with a slow 13 year old to rebel against her husband's control. Truly a story of self-discovery and empowerment.
I don't know, this book is way too 1960s for me.
June 17, 2021
Well that was just as dark and strange as I had been hoping it would be. One of those 'perfect books' -- the ones that seem to put a spell on you, and you fall into a hypnotic trance while you read them.
I went into this knowing nothing about it, and if possible, I'd suggest trying to do the same. I wanted to read it because Angela Carter was an author I'd never read, but whose name always jumped out at me. Saying it seemed to hold significance, despite me being unfamiliar with her work. This is often the way I discover favourite writers, musicians or actors. Just an intuitive pull towards them.
Heroes and Villains is rather dreamlike, brutal and romantic. Gothic fantasy storytelling. Marianne and Jewel are two incredibly compelling characters, who I loved, despite not really liking them very much. I would have followed them through any journey that Angela Carter took them on. Part of me would have loved for this to be a 1000 page epic, just so I could spend more time with them in their violent, post-apocalyptic world, but I'll just have to be content with rereading this in the future. Really, it's the perfect length, every single word utilized. Seven perfect chapters.
I have to admit I frequently had to look up words that I didn't know the meaning of, or hadn't realised could be used in the context she used them in. So aside from being a story I adored, it expanded my vocabulary!
While I know this won't be for everyone (though what book really is?) for me, this was one of those particularly special books, one of those ones that feel like they were maybe written just for you. When you see someone else loves it too, and you instantly feel a sense of kinship with them. I love books in general, but these books are especially valued.
I went into this knowing nothing about it, and if possible, I'd suggest trying to do the same. I wanted to read it because Angela Carter was an author I'd never read, but whose name always jumped out at me. Saying it seemed to hold significance, despite me being unfamiliar with her work. This is often the way I discover favourite writers, musicians or actors. Just an intuitive pull towards them.
Heroes and Villains is rather dreamlike, brutal and romantic. Gothic fantasy storytelling. Marianne and Jewel are two incredibly compelling characters, who I loved, despite not really liking them very much. I would have followed them through any journey that Angela Carter took them on. Part of me would have loved for this to be a 1000 page epic, just so I could spend more time with them in their violent, post-apocalyptic world, but I'll just have to be content with rereading this in the future. Really, it's the perfect length, every single word utilized. Seven perfect chapters.
I have to admit I frequently had to look up words that I didn't know the meaning of, or hadn't realised could be used in the context she used them in. So aside from being a story I adored, it expanded my vocabulary!
While I know this won't be for everyone (though what book really is?) for me, this was one of those particularly special books, one of those ones that feel like they were maybe written just for you. When you see someone else loves it too, and you instantly feel a sense of kinship with them. I love books in general, but these books are especially valued.
July 6, 2012
I am now pretty certain that no one ever really gets used to Angela Carter's brand of vitriolic love or her genre-defying characters. I mean, when I try to figure out 'Heroes and Villains', I really struggle to put a label on what I have just read. Instead I come up with crazy statements like: it's a futuristic fairytale with elements of creation mythology that registers roughly on the ultraviolet section of the story-telling rainbow. Yeah. It's like THAT.
The main ingredients of a typical Carter novel are a fistful of folktale blueprints, which are then stripped from all the pretty 'Perrault' restraints and marched at gunpoint into the roiling, ascerbic crucible of the author's mind. And from this magician's melting pot which consists of a curious alchemy of brains, barbarism and wily femininity come out twisted versions of the tales themselves; genetically spliced monsters that would and could turn upon themselves at the slightest provocation. Actually, imagine the cannibalistic fairies that feature in 'Pan's Labyrinth' and you're more than halfway there to figuring out just how brutal Carter can be in her own re-telling of events.
Take our main character for example, one bony slip of a girl called Marianne, who quite literally grows up in an ivory tower surrounded by luxuries. The tower and her social status as a professor's daughter places her as the 'princess' of the story. A quick glance outside those castle walls and we instantly see how privileged she really is; as only two other caste systems remain in this bleak post-apocalyptic world. The dreaded barbarians are the 'noble savages' made up of wandering gypsies, thieves and vagabonds. Then there are the Out-People; a genetically corrupt version of humanity that have devolved into monsters. From these Carter makes up the misunderstood 'other' who are not as intellectually inferior as they seem and the half-man, half-monster types that would rank among the minotaurs and Centaurs of ancient mythology. The sad irony of this is that even though the latter group emulate the glory of demi-gods, the reality is quite the opposite as Carter marks their existence as unnatural and the undoing of man.
Marianne therefore surprises us when she tires from her closeted upbringing and decides to defect into the wilderness with a dangerous barbarian who is held captive in the fortress. Even worse is the fact that she runs away with the very boy who murdered her own brother. So begins a very strange tale of love (if love it can be called) between a savage and a professor's daughter as they form an odd alliance that can only be described as a type of Stockholm Syndrome.
Within the span of the story, Marianne shows her true colours, as her life with the savage tribe exposes her to vulgarity and sexual assault. Male/ female relationships are brought down to their bare primal essentials and we realise how Marianne is made of much, much sterner stuff. As the story progresses we see how Marianne by instinct has finally found the place where she is most happy; beside the beautiful but violent raven-haired Jewel.
As a reader I enjoyed the progression of their relationship, this unlikely romance that would go sour in some places and then pick up again when you least expected it. There story is underpinned by the Adam and Eve mythos, and this also handsomely features in the form of a grotesque tattoo on Jewels torso of the scene where Eve offers Adam the forbidden fruit. In fact, Jewel is somewhat of a synthetic messiah; a puppet controlled by the ominous 'Doctor'; a madman who is trying to fabricate his own religion using members of the savage tribe. Jewel with his imposing physique and handsome looks doubles as Adam, Jesus and other religious characters.
So, dystopian fiction or post-apocalyptic nightmare; barbaric romance or feminist literature, you read and decide.
The main ingredients of a typical Carter novel are a fistful of folktale blueprints, which are then stripped from all the pretty 'Perrault' restraints and marched at gunpoint into the roiling, ascerbic crucible of the author's mind. And from this magician's melting pot which consists of a curious alchemy of brains, barbarism and wily femininity come out twisted versions of the tales themselves; genetically spliced monsters that would and could turn upon themselves at the slightest provocation. Actually, imagine the cannibalistic fairies that feature in 'Pan's Labyrinth' and you're more than halfway there to figuring out just how brutal Carter can be in her own re-telling of events.
Take our main character for example, one bony slip of a girl called Marianne, who quite literally grows up in an ivory tower surrounded by luxuries. The tower and her social status as a professor's daughter places her as the 'princess' of the story. A quick glance outside those castle walls and we instantly see how privileged she really is; as only two other caste systems remain in this bleak post-apocalyptic world. The dreaded barbarians are the 'noble savages' made up of wandering gypsies, thieves and vagabonds. Then there are the Out-People; a genetically corrupt version of humanity that have devolved into monsters. From these Carter makes up the misunderstood 'other' who are not as intellectually inferior as they seem and the half-man, half-monster types that would rank among the minotaurs and Centaurs of ancient mythology. The sad irony of this is that even though the latter group emulate the glory of demi-gods, the reality is quite the opposite as Carter marks their existence as unnatural and the undoing of man.
Marianne therefore surprises us when she tires from her closeted upbringing and decides to defect into the wilderness with a dangerous barbarian who is held captive in the fortress. Even worse is the fact that she runs away with the very boy who murdered her own brother. So begins a very strange tale of love (if love it can be called) between a savage and a professor's daughter as they form an odd alliance that can only be described as a type of Stockholm Syndrome.
Within the span of the story, Marianne shows her true colours, as her life with the savage tribe exposes her to vulgarity and sexual assault. Male/ female relationships are brought down to their bare primal essentials and we realise how Marianne is made of much, much sterner stuff. As the story progresses we see how Marianne by instinct has finally found the place where she is most happy; beside the beautiful but violent raven-haired Jewel.
As a reader I enjoyed the progression of their relationship, this unlikely romance that would go sour in some places and then pick up again when you least expected it. There story is underpinned by the Adam and Eve mythos, and this also handsomely features in the form of a grotesque tattoo on Jewels torso of the scene where Eve offers Adam the forbidden fruit. In fact, Jewel is somewhat of a synthetic messiah; a puppet controlled by the ominous 'Doctor'; a madman who is trying to fabricate his own religion using members of the savage tribe. Jewel with his imposing physique and handsome looks doubles as Adam, Jesus and other religious characters.
So, dystopian fiction or post-apocalyptic nightmare; barbaric romance or feminist literature, you read and decide.
May 23, 2013
At times great, at times muddled, Carter's post-apocalyptic fairytale [that is, minus any fairies] manages to both dazzle and sometimes bore, if only because its initially-strong-heroine [Marianne] becomes strangely passive-aggressive as the novel and the adversity wears on. The climax is replaced by a wind-down, the best part of which is a nightly stroll by a seaside resort, unfortunately capped with the disappointing off-page exit of its lead male character; a young man named Jewel who is strangely ennui-ridden and verges on being a villian himself [he kills the brother of the lead character and later rapes her]. The characters have a habit of waxing on, addressing and attacking one another in elaborate ways, and it is in dialogue that Carter stumbles. This world of Professors and Barbarians and Out-People is a mixed bag of interesting concepts, brilliant poetic writing, and oft-muddled metaphors and descriptions that tend to go astray.
EDIT: May, 2013.
Re-reading does a lot to help the novel. My initial disappointment with, say, the ending, may have been tempered by contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, which tends to require that the hero cast out the villain in a climatic duel. Going back to it, the ending seems quite sobering, realistic (concerning the wordless and off-page exit of Jewel) and the 'meandering' of the prose simply vanishes when you know in advance that this isn't a story that is heading towards one central conflict, but is rather a meditation on civilisation vs. barbarism. Jewel's ennui still grates somewhat, but his role as a living social experiment is better defined. His role as a 'grey' character is more appreciated. Marianne's dialogue still seems strangely formal, but makes sense in the light of her education and upbringing; same with Jewel.
I've either grown more patient since 2011, or have become a more rounded reader. Hopefully both.
EDIT: May, 2013.
Re-reading does a lot to help the novel. My initial disappointment with, say, the ending, may have been tempered by contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, which tends to require that the hero cast out the villain in a climatic duel. Going back to it, the ending seems quite sobering, realistic (concerning the wordless and off-page exit of Jewel) and the 'meandering' of the prose simply vanishes when you know in advance that this isn't a story that is heading towards one central conflict, but is rather a meditation on civilisation vs. barbarism. Jewel's ennui still grates somewhat, but his role as a living social experiment is better defined. His role as a 'grey' character is more appreciated. Marianne's dialogue still seems strangely formal, but makes sense in the light of her education and upbringing; same with Jewel.
I've either grown more patient since 2011, or have become a more rounded reader. Hopefully both.
December 2, 2017
A little heavy handed at times, and showing its age a little (published in 1969), but great fun nonetheless.
Complete Review review here http://www.complete-review.com/review...
Complete Review review here http://www.complete-review.com/review...
December 20, 2019
Heroes and Villains is like the literary equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Strange, oddly fascinating, unnerving and probably quite exhausting if you look at it for too long. I can't say that I liked it, yet at the same time I couldn't stop reading.
This is one of those books where either everything means something, or nothing means anything at all. I suspect Angela Carter was trying to achieve the former. I'm not sure she succeeded at it. She kept me wondering throughout the novel though - and maybe that's the point?
I feel like there's a lot more that I could say about it but my thoughts are pretty disjointed right now, so maybe I'll revisit it later.
This is one of those books where either everything means something, or nothing means anything at all. I suspect Angela Carter was trying to achieve the former. I'm not sure she succeeded at it. She kept me wondering throughout the novel though - and maybe that's the point?
I feel like there's a lot more that I could say about it but my thoughts are pretty disjointed right now, so maybe I'll revisit it later.
June 29, 2022
You ever read a book and be plagued by that timeless question: what does Ted Nugent think about this?
Huh. Just me?
Huh. Just me?
October 25, 2023
At the heart of this novel lies the relationship between Marianne and Jewel. The relationship between Jewel and Dr. Donally, while intriguing, is not satisfactorily explicated. More detail on past events leading up to the current situation would also have been welcome, but alas the book is so short. It's also a little uneven at times. There were two or three times where Carter reveals fairly significant plot points in a brief sentence or two prior to expanding on them. That technique, if one can call it that, has always irked me as a reader.
Carter introduces a number of themes and/or symbols that remain largely unexamined. One that does pervade, though, is suggested by the title, which Marianne alludes to late in the book:
At times the novel feels like a pot of stew not left to simmer long enough, leaving chunks of uncooked potatoes and carrots floating in the broth. What about the Out People? How do they figure into this? They're discussed fairly superficially in the text but in my mind merit further consideration. Do they represent degeneration or evolution- a step backward or a step forward in humanity's attempts to navigate this post-apocalyptic world? And what of Dr. Donally? Is he good or evil? Truly diabolical or simply an outsider charlatan looking for a place to belong? Then there are the many allusions, which at times can be blunt. Jewel's scarred tattoo of Adam and Eve is one whopper of an example.
It's still a pretty good novel, but questions remain. Sometimes I consider this is a good thing when I finish a novel, but in this case I think there are just too many.
Carter introduces a number of themes and/or symbols that remain largely unexamined. One that does pervade, though, is suggested by the title, which Marianne alludes to late in the book:
When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances? Because nobody can teach me which is which nor who is who because my father is dead.All of the characters, including both Marianne and Jewel, exhibit behaviors one could consider both 'bad' and 'good', playing out the understanding that all people, no matter their status or upbringing, are fallible. Certain characters exaggerate this dichotomy more so than others. For Jewel and Marianne, it is perhaps most heightened for they are in close, intimate relationship together. As Nate suggests in his review, Carter seems to be attempting relationship analysis here. A central struggle in a relationship might be the tension born of criticizing a behavior in one's significant other while rationalizing it in one's own self. How can this not be hypocrisy? And how do we deal with it without driving a wedge between us?
At times the novel feels like a pot of stew not left to simmer long enough, leaving chunks of uncooked potatoes and carrots floating in the broth. What about the Out People? How do they figure into this? They're discussed fairly superficially in the text but in my mind merit further consideration. Do they represent degeneration or evolution- a step backward or a step forward in humanity's attempts to navigate this post-apocalyptic world? And what of Dr. Donally? Is he good or evil? Truly diabolical or simply an outsider charlatan looking for a place to belong? Then there are the many allusions, which at times can be blunt. Jewel's scarred tattoo of Adam and Eve is one whopper of an example.
It's still a pretty good novel, but questions remain. Sometimes I consider this is a good thing when I finish a novel, but in this case I think there are just too many.
March 1, 2019
Marianne is a 16 girl who grew up in a literal ivory tower, in a town of Professors, where society is clinging to its knowledge and tech despite some sort of apocalypse that happened at some point in the past. She's privileged and lives a good life, but she's bored of it all. Outside the town roam barbarian tribes of hunter-gatherers (well, they're gathering by raiding Professors, so there's that), and monstrosities descended from the human race.
Marianne runs off with her brother's killer, a barbarian. Because... I don't know. She wanted to.
When I started reading this, I was rather worried this would be another "Ape and Essence" (Aldous Huxley's), a post-apocalyptic tale full of symbolism and people revealing ultimate philosophical truths.
Instead, I don't think "Heroes and Villains" has a point. I'm not sure it has a plot, really. Everything feels like it might be significant and symbolic, but then again, it might not be. There's a sense of irony throughout, in the very intellectual lines of the characters, who speak quite pretentiously, but somehow never get anywhere with their philosophical stances. Nothing gets resolved. It's all odd, dirty, violent and unpleasant. I'm not sure any of it is supposed to mean anything, and I'm actually quite good with that, because I've had it up to here with post-apocalyptic tales trying to teach me things.
I'd rate it three stars, but honestly, I'm so happy about the non-didactic tone of this that it gets an extra star from me.
Marianne runs off with her brother's killer, a barbarian. Because... I don't know. She wanted to.
When I started reading this, I was rather worried this would be another "Ape and Essence" (Aldous Huxley's), a post-apocalyptic tale full of symbolism and people revealing ultimate philosophical truths.
Instead, I don't think "Heroes and Villains" has a point. I'm not sure it has a plot, really. Everything feels like it might be significant and symbolic, but then again, it might not be. There's a sense of irony throughout, in the very intellectual lines of the characters, who speak quite pretentiously, but somehow never get anywhere with their philosophical stances. Nothing gets resolved. It's all odd, dirty, violent and unpleasant. I'm not sure any of it is supposed to mean anything, and I'm actually quite good with that, because I've had it up to here with post-apocalyptic tales trying to teach me things.
I'd rate it three stars, but honestly, I'm so happy about the non-didactic tone of this that it gets an extra star from me.
March 2, 2021
A very British dystopia.
Heroes and Villains is a disturbing Gothic pastiche, a novel of dichotomies set amidst a violently imagined post-nuclear world. An almost sociopathic heroine, bored with her existence, finds love (of a sort) amongst the savages and undergoes a perilous journey of self-discovery.
Carter writes with daemonic energy. The end of days is described beautifully and vividly, with that unexpected burst of sensibility Carter uses amidst acts of the most grotesque and twisted nature. Her powerful critique of patriarchy is deeply symbolic, though, at times, a little cryptic. Her characters are acutely aware of their own metaphorical existence in a very bizarre way, and her handling of rape and assault is startlingly insensitive. But then the emotional detachment of the novel is imperative to the tone of allegory and lends to its didactic power.
The Marianne/Jewel relationship is fascinating; Carter examines a destructive relationship that combines abhorrence and violent desire. (It goes about as well as you might imagine.) Through this vessel, however, Carter interrogates the conflict between civilisation and barbarism, need and desire – and who gets to decide which is which.
This all culminates in a deliciously ambiguous ending; the reader is unsure as to whether Marianne has forged that new identity she was craving. A weird, weird (or quirky?) novel, very characteristic of Angela Carter’s earlier works. Intelligent and gripping, but not exactly enjoyable.
Heroes and Villains is a disturbing Gothic pastiche, a novel of dichotomies set amidst a violently imagined post-nuclear world. An almost sociopathic heroine, bored with her existence, finds love (of a sort) amongst the savages and undergoes a perilous journey of self-discovery.
Carter writes with daemonic energy. The end of days is described beautifully and vividly, with that unexpected burst of sensibility Carter uses amidst acts of the most grotesque and twisted nature. Her powerful critique of patriarchy is deeply symbolic, though, at times, a little cryptic. Her characters are acutely aware of their own metaphorical existence in a very bizarre way, and her handling of rape and assault is startlingly insensitive. But then the emotional detachment of the novel is imperative to the tone of allegory and lends to its didactic power.
The Marianne/Jewel relationship is fascinating; Carter examines a destructive relationship that combines abhorrence and violent desire. (It goes about as well as you might imagine.) Through this vessel, however, Carter interrogates the conflict between civilisation and barbarism, need and desire – and who gets to decide which is which.
This all culminates in a deliciously ambiguous ending; the reader is unsure as to whether Marianne has forged that new identity she was craving. A weird, weird (or quirky?) novel, very characteristic of Angela Carter’s earlier works. Intelligent and gripping, but not exactly enjoyable.
June 29, 2013
I hate rating these kinds of books. Extremely well-written, but a little too strange and disturbing for me to "enjoy" reading. It's the kind of novel I'd probably enjoy dissecting for a literature class, but for day-to-day reading, not so much. In other words, intellectually, I'd give it a higher rating, but on a personal level, nothing stuck.
Set in a dystopian future, where humans now either live among the Professors (men of reason), Barbarians (primitives), or the Out People (mutant aggressives). Marianne, a child of one of the Professors, runs away to join the Barbarians out of boredom but only finds rampant filth, disease, violence and ignorance. She is forced to marry Jewel, a Barbarian who has been educated to a degree, but they hate each other and she constantly thinks of escape. The group is led by a former Professor who acts as sort of a tyrannical medicine man, conducting social experiments for what seems to be only his amusement and desire for power. The characters and their relationships in the novel are highly complex, so much so that I'm still unsure of some of the motivations for the primary characters.
Set in a dystopian future, where humans now either live among the Professors (men of reason), Barbarians (primitives), or the Out People (mutant aggressives). Marianne, a child of one of the Professors, runs away to join the Barbarians out of boredom but only finds rampant filth, disease, violence and ignorance. She is forced to marry Jewel, a Barbarian who has been educated to a degree, but they hate each other and she constantly thinks of escape. The group is led by a former Professor who acts as sort of a tyrannical medicine man, conducting social experiments for what seems to be only his amusement and desire for power. The characters and their relationships in the novel are highly complex, so much so that I'm still unsure of some of the motivations for the primary characters.
February 8, 2022
Not Her Best: Pales vs Infernal Desire Machines, Passion of New Eve
If this weren't Angela Carter, it could easily count as a lushly written, gothic post-apocalyptic romance of a young woman from the Professor's camp (civilization) who ends up with a rough young man from the Barbarians. However, having just read her far superior and mind-stretching books The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve, it really pales in comparison.
The story itself is simple and not particularly interesting, the two main characters are surprisingly flat, and the skillful writing seems wasted on the subject matter. This was written before the two later books she wrote during/after her transformative time in Japan, so can be considered an earlier and lesser work.
If this weren't Angela Carter, it could easily count as a lushly written, gothic post-apocalyptic romance of a young woman from the Professor's camp (civilization) who ends up with a rough young man from the Barbarians. However, having just read her far superior and mind-stretching books The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve, it really pales in comparison.
The story itself is simple and not particularly interesting, the two main characters are surprisingly flat, and the skillful writing seems wasted on the subject matter. This was written before the two later books she wrote during/after her transformative time in Japan, so can be considered an earlier and lesser work.
January 15, 2022
I can see why some wouldn’t like this – I on the other hand love pretentious writing (when done right!) n no one does it better than miss Carter herself. Spellbinding
July 21, 2010
I'd say 3.5 on this one, but would willingly bump my rating up to 4 for Angela Carter--who, even when not in tip-top shape, is simply incomparable in so many ways.
The long and short of it: Heroes & Villains is basically a novel of ideas, as is frequently the case with Carter. Here, as in something like 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman,' the ideas are more at the forefront than, say, character development or flowery prose. It's ostensibly a post-apocalyptic novel, though not in the Orwellian or even Atwoodian sense; there's no explanation, there's no flashing back to the past, there's honestly very little nostalgia for what preceded this particular incarnation of the world. It's more of an evolutionary approach to the dystopia, as if, naturally, we could regress at any time & perhaps (as seems to be the case with the Barbarians) begin again. The battle is between the Barbarians and the Professors, and neither primitivism nor intellectualism are let off the hook in Carter's biting critique (well, in fact, I suppose the primitivism at hand is more or less a construct of the intellectuals, and *that* othering process is being critiqued).
Marianne is our heroine, but almost all of the characters feel a bit like conduits (not unusual for a Carter novel), so if you're particularly attached to realistic characterization, you may want to stray from this novel. Basically, Marianne begins the novel as a typical fairytale orphan; despises the tedium of 'city' life; decides to return to the natural world; becomes entrenched in a Barbarian tribe. Adventures ensue. Violence, sexual assault, mythic structure, provocative ambiguities--all the qualities that make Carter so distinctive are at hand, but when I closed the final page, I almost felt as if it was like a super long short story rather than a novel. Not my favorite work by her, but it was a fun ride.
The long and short of it: Heroes & Villains is basically a novel of ideas, as is frequently the case with Carter. Here, as in something like 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman,' the ideas are more at the forefront than, say, character development or flowery prose. It's ostensibly a post-apocalyptic novel, though not in the Orwellian or even Atwoodian sense; there's no explanation, there's no flashing back to the past, there's honestly very little nostalgia for what preceded this particular incarnation of the world. It's more of an evolutionary approach to the dystopia, as if, naturally, we could regress at any time & perhaps (as seems to be the case with the Barbarians) begin again. The battle is between the Barbarians and the Professors, and neither primitivism nor intellectualism are let off the hook in Carter's biting critique (well, in fact, I suppose the primitivism at hand is more or less a construct of the intellectuals, and *that* othering process is being critiqued).
Marianne is our heroine, but almost all of the characters feel a bit like conduits (not unusual for a Carter novel), so if you're particularly attached to realistic characterization, you may want to stray from this novel. Basically, Marianne begins the novel as a typical fairytale orphan; despises the tedium of 'city' life; decides to return to the natural world; becomes entrenched in a Barbarian tribe. Adventures ensue. Violence, sexual assault, mythic structure, provocative ambiguities--all the qualities that make Carter so distinctive are at hand, but when I closed the final page, I almost felt as if it was like a super long short story rather than a novel. Not my favorite work by her, but it was a fun ride.
August 11, 2016
Everything signifies something here, as evidenced by references to Levi-Strauss, tattoos of biblical proportion, charcoal slogans scrawled on walls which only one character can read and folkloric myth mixed with pagan and commercial, Western marriage ritual. Carter is playing with all of these concepts and connecting them to her usual deft explorations of gender interaction/ conflict.
Carter tropes at work: the mutual hate between men & women; raped into marriage; characters who are complacent and complicit in their own physical/ spiritual downfalls; masks/ costumes that are encoded and subsequently decoded
I was pulled in by the promise of a post-apocalyptic landscape, but as other reviwers have noted, that isn't really what you're getting here. This one is certainly slow to snag my interest. It isn't until the halfway point that the book almost picks up with a reveal connecting the characters. But that revelation does little to move things along, as very little (if anything) actually happens here. It is as if plot is crushed under the big picture concept of it all. And certainly Carter has never been slave to plot, but not even the characters are sufficiently interesting here to keep my interest.
To that, the book takes a casual tone with rape, which might be troubling to some readers. There is also a "cougar" pedophile scene and numerous scenes of violence against women.
Carter tropes at work: the mutual hate between men & women; raped into marriage; characters who are complacent and complicit in their own physical/ spiritual downfalls; masks/ costumes that are encoded and subsequently decoded
I was pulled in by the promise of a post-apocalyptic landscape, but as other reviwers have noted, that isn't really what you're getting here. This one is certainly slow to snag my interest. It isn't until the halfway point that the book almost picks up with a reveal connecting the characters. But that revelation does little to move things along, as very little (if anything) actually happens here. It is as if plot is crushed under the big picture concept of it all. And certainly Carter has never been slave to plot, but not even the characters are sufficiently interesting here to keep my interest.
To that, the book takes a casual tone with rape, which might be troubling to some readers. There is also a "cougar" pedophile scene and numerous scenes of violence against women.
Read
November 19, 2016This is the story of a professor girl who chooses to exempt herself from her clan by faking her own suicide and running off with a red hot barbarian with raven plaits and a six pack. You probably won't believe me, but this hunk's name is Jewel (?!?).
It is a familiar story: headstrong girl meets headstrong boy. They come from opposite sides of the track. They butt heads until sparks fly and ignite the brittle hay that lines their foolish hearts. Then their parts are on fire! Angela Carter does her signature twisting/blurring of binaries: rapist/survivor, barbarian/professor, hero/villain, needs/desires. If you want to spice things up in your feminist book club, suggest this title. Make sure you feminist-proof your apartment. There will be infighting and things will get heinous! This book is by no means anti-feminist, it is just complicated (which is how I like it!).
A quote: "I think that in the long run, I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I was a little girl, we would play heroes and villains, but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?"
This was rather slow for me at first, but it got better and better. Fans of this brand of romcom who want something lite should check out this fave of mine: Princess Routine.
It is a familiar story: headstrong girl meets headstrong boy. They come from opposite sides of the track. They butt heads until sparks fly and ignite the brittle hay that lines their foolish hearts. Then their parts are on fire! Angela Carter does her signature twisting/blurring of binaries: rapist/survivor, barbarian/professor, hero/villain, needs/desires. If you want to spice things up in your feminist book club, suggest this title. Make sure you feminist-proof your apartment. There will be infighting and things will get heinous! This book is by no means anti-feminist, it is just complicated (which is how I like it!).
A quote: "I think that in the long run, I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I was a little girl, we would play heroes and villains, but now I don't know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?"
This was rather slow for me at first, but it got better and better. Fans of this brand of romcom who want something lite should check out this fave of mine: Princess Routine.
June 23, 2019
The thing about Angela Carter is that even when she's mediocre, she's mediocre Angela Carter, and even when you're flipping through going "meh," and "wow, this is dated," and "what exactly are you trying to do here," everything is still written in the most glorious prose. Much can be forgiven an author who writes passages like this:
and this:
(I'm not sure why all my favorite passages had to do with the passage of time, that's just how it panned out.)
But yeah, as a novel, this really didn't work for me, and went steadily downhill from its opening. As a piece of aesthetics, well. It's Angela Carter. 'nuff said.
She never felt that time was passing for time was frozen around her in this secluded place where a pastoral quiet possessed everything and the busy clock carved the hours into sculptures of ice.
and this:
She lost the very idea of time, for the Barbarians did not segment their existence into hours, nor even morning, afternoon and evening but left it raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion.
(I'm not sure why all my favorite passages had to do with the passage of time, that's just how it panned out.)
But yeah, as a novel, this really didn't work for me, and went steadily downhill from its opening. As a piece of aesthetics, well. It's Angela Carter. 'nuff said.
March 25, 2012
Can Angela Carter do anything wrong? No. That is my definitive answer.
I haven't read even half of what she has published but the very idea of Carter's death preventing her from writing anything new makes me profoundly sad. I wish I could make literally everyone read something of hers.
I haven't read even half of what she has published but the very idea of Carter's death preventing her from writing anything new makes me profoundly sad. I wish I could make literally everyone read something of hers.
May 22, 2024
ANGELA CARTER: Let’s Can This White Racist Feminist Imperialist!
Angela Carter’s alleged “modern classic” Heroes and Villains bludgeons with its racist badness, simultaneously drowning you in annoying absurdity, “artistic” pretension and unlikable characters. It should be regarded as a particularly flagrant and fragrant example of “white female privilege imperialism”—and horrible writing.
Most terribly, it’s chockablock with “white leftist feminist” visceral fear/worship/hatred of the myth of the Negro male/black cock. Blaxploitation + “white leftist feminist stuff” have never gone out of style, of course, but they were extremely chic in 1969, when this book was published (and, according to reports, are again extremely chic today).
Mostly, though, Heroes and Villains is just not funny—though, if you try hard enough, you may find it’s uproarious, a top contender in the so-bad-it’s-not-good-it’s-hilariously-bad category. (PLOT SPOILER: The finale, which finds the teenage white girl declaring herself “the Tiger Lady” who intends to rule with “a rod of iron” over the tribe of poor, foolish blacks, is fabulously LOL hilarious).
Angela Carter—we’ve had so many rhapsodic blurbs jammed down our throats! We had such high hopes!
In 2008, The Times of London ranked Carter 10th on the list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” Angela, Angela! Angela Carter: Alleged magical realist, feminist/post-feminist superheroine, deconstructionist extraordinaire. Venerated scribe of everybody’s sixth- or seventh-favorite lycanthropian horror movie, In the Company of Wolves. . . . No, Angela—there’s no more cabinet space to accommodate the stacks of prizes and accolades you collected before your untimely death at the age of 51. Angela Carter: “Best Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize” indeed!
In the dozens of reviews of Heroes and Villains I’ve perused, nobody seems to have had the courage or insight (too polite? too dim? too cowardly? low-quality readers/writers?) to say what the book’s about: A 16-year-old blond girl who’s so “bored”—Carter never gets boredof telling us how “bored” this lass is—she decides to run off with poor, stinking, murderous “barbarian” blacks, who beat and rape her as they drag her haphazardly around the post-apocalyptic outback. Eventually, these Barbarians—whose cruelty the girl’s come to kinda-sorta enjoy and play along with—self-destruct or get killed off, leaving the white girl sorta-kinda in charge. The “girl” even performs a bit of child rape of her own along the way—er, of a retarded “Barbarian” boy.
Yes, in the hands of the right director, it could be fantastic B-film shlock for a drunken Saturday night.
The setting is an unexplained scenario in which human civilization has apparently been destroyed by “fire,” alternately a “blast." The human survivors have self-selected into the Professors (the “white, scientific” group from which the protagonist, Marianne, hails), the Barbarians (the black and brown marauders whom Marianne runs off with), and the Out People (different types of biological mutants who, against the odds, have banded together in gangs that ambush and rob the Barbarian and Professor communities in this “all against all” dystopia).
Marianne, Carter informs, is “small, clean, trim, pale and sure of herself.” Oh yes, so sure of herself. She lives in a “white tower made of steel and concrete.” Ah, those fabled ivory towers of the Professor class, eh, Angela Carter? But Marianne’s so “bored” with it all—yes, everything’s so boring. Marianne wants to see what’s beyond the village walls, where she’s not supposed to roam because it’s so dangerous but perhaps less boring (PLOT SPOILER: Marianne eventually finds it all more or less boring).
Marianne’s Professor father is a “gentle man constitutionally sunk in melancholy” who likes to sit around with his books. Little girl Marianne is depicted as spiteful and severe. She writes her name on all her possessions, even her toothbrush. She trips up the other kids. She talks to birds. She breaks things “to see what they were like inside.”
It’s never made clear why Marianne should have the outlook of an upper middle-class 1960s white girl who’s become bored with the Beatles and Stones and who’s taken a fancy to Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker and the Black Panthers—but this is what we’re dealing with here.
Marianne watches her brother, who’s 10 years older, get his throat slashed by a Barbarian boy during a Barbarian raid on the village. Then her depressed mother dies after eating “poison fruit.” These things plunge daddy into even more melancholy. Father teaches Marianne reading, writing and history and orders her to study his beloved books (dictionaries and “Mumford, etc.”). Daddy also orders Marianne to read Rousseau out loud to him.
In an embarrassingly obnoxious “twist” on Rousseau, Father tells Marianne they are living in a time of “ignoble savages,” like the kind who murdered her brother. The Barbarians will surely destroy what’s left of the earth if given the chance, her father warns. Father is writing a book on the “archaeology of social theory,” but probably nobody will want to read it except Marianne (indeed, indeed!). Marianne loves her father “but he bored her,” LOL.
Marianne’s nurse, a Worker woman with six fingers on each hand, warns Marianne that Barbarians like to “slit the bellies of the women after they’ve raped them and sew up cats inside.” On May Day (the Professors apparently still celebrate this), Marianne sneaks out of the village and spends the day watching Barbarians go about their inscrutable activities in the forest.
She returns home to learn that the batty old nurse has chopped up her father with an axe and then poisoned herself. Marianne is taken to live with the Colonel, but this bores her. She burns her father’s books. She throws his treasured clock in the swamp. She cuts off her long blond hair so she “looked like a demented boy.” She spends time examining “her ugliness in mirrors with a violent pleasure.”
When Marianne is 16, the Barbarians again attack the village. Marianne is again “the audience” for the battle. She sees an injured Barbarian limp off to hide in a shed. The Soldiers can’t find him, but Marianne has a plan. Marianne “was perverse and she turned against her own people,” Carter informs. After dark, Marianne takes some bread and cheese to the Barbarian. The shed has been locked, but Marianne conveniently knows where the keys are kept. Anyway, after she sneaks into the shed, the Barbarian doesn’t immediately strangle and rape Marianne, but instead suggests they escape together.
Carter’s punchline: Marianne “had wanted to rescue him but found she was accepting his offer to rescue her.” LOL.
Marianne and the Barbarian climb into a lorry that’s parked in the shed. The Barbarian, being a Barbarian, knows how to steal ammunition and load and shoot guns and use guerrilla tactics to fight white boy Soldiers, but he doesn’t know how to drive (the Barbarians have apparently never gotten around to stealing motor vehicles and learning how to fuel, drive and fix them—this, apparently, is something only technical-minded whites can achieve, Carter suggests).
Marianne, being a Professor girl, doesn’t seem to know much about shooting guns but she sure as hell can drive a truck. Hell, yeah! Hell, the way Carter tells it, this teen girl is one of the better drivers the Professor class has produced (Carter, however, refuses to divulge whether Marianne was enrolled in a military driving course or had been a stunt driver in Professor movies.) Marianne smashes the truck out of the shed and plows through the wooden gate of the village, evading bullets fired by the Soldiers. Boom, pow! As they’re speeding down the dirt road, the frightened Barbarian pummels Marianne, imploring her to drive faster. Just as it seems they might get away, the Barbarian orders Marianne to crash the lorry into a tree. She does as commanded.
Marianne was “convinced they would both die in a few seconds”—but instead, the Barbarian (who’s apparently super hero-strong) “grabbed her shoulders, hauled her from her seat and jumped.” The lorry smashes into the tree and explodes into flames. Marianne and the Barbarian fall gently into a “marshy pool,” safe and uninjured. Soldiers arrive quickly on the scene and search for bodies but, finding nothing, they immediately determine the fire consumed whoever was in the truck and depart. Yes, convenient.
Carter’s punchline: Marianne realizes that this crafty Barbarian had, by orchestrating the fiery crash, “organized an official suicide for her.” Marianne then gets bitten by a snake, LOL.
The Barbarian’s absurd name is Jewel Lee Bradley. After sucking the poison from Marianne’s snake bite, Jewel takes her to formally meet his Barbarian tribe. Jewel, speaking pretty good English, explains that the tribe is led by a witch doctor who keeps a viper in a box. Marianne asks Jewel if it’s a “phallic cult”—that is, “she asked, or perhaps asked,” according to Carter. Perhaps asked—what, huh?
“Sometimes it’s phallic and sometimes it isn’t,” replies Jewel (er, so—apparently she did ask?). A semi-phallic Barbarian cult, is it, Jewel Lee Bradley? Anyway, the tribe is spooked by the appearance of Jewel with Marianne. They make signs against the “evil eye.” Everyone thought Jewel had died in the raid on the Professors but instead, here he is with his own Professor hostage/trophy/bride.
Marianne finds that Jewel “talked like a half-educated man and this surprised her very much.” Jewel, for example, says stuff like “hisself”—apparently, yes, because he’s a jungle Barbarian who never had no proper skoolin’. Like Marianne, Jewel is sometimes “excessively bored.” Jewel refers to hisself as both the “public executioner” and the “grave-digger.”
Because Jewel’s parents are dead, everything he knows was taught to him by Dr. Donally, a white Professor who, like Marianne, was “bored” and decided to ditch the clean, scientific, insane life of the Professors to live with the filthy, insane, non-scientific Barbarians. Donally is described as a drunken lout, a large man with a colorful beard who wears sunglasses at all times. He’s chiseled his teeth into fangs. He’s vain, has “soft, white” hands, “carefully trimmed and manicured” fingernails and plucks his eyebrows. His voice was “perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft.” He has no interest in improving the circumstances of the Barbarian tribe he rules but instead psychopathically manipulates them with music, magic and a fake snake.
Donally’s got a half-retarded Barbarian son of around 13, whom he loves to humiliate and torture mentally and physically. Donally’s got some of the same books as Marianne’s father: “Teilhard de Chardin, Lévi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim.” Donally’s jive makes Marianne feel “at home.” Donally takes leering glee at Marianne’s rape and humiliation but counsels her that she can use her whiteness to cast a spell and obtain “power” over the tribe. “I can offer you a little power,” Donally tells Marianne.
To entertain and mystify Marianne, Donally likes to scrawl inane phrases like BOREDOM IS THE HANDSOME SON OF PRIDE and MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING and I THINK, THEREFORE I EXIST; BUT IF I TAKE TIME OFF FROM THINKING, WHAT THEN? on the walls. Yes—ugh. Because he is an idiotic farker, Donally took advantage of Jewel (when he was younger) to tattoo an elaborate rendering of the Garden of Eden, complete with Adam and Eve and the Reptile, across Jewel’s back. Yes, Donally has used a Barbarian body as a canvas for his “art.”
Donally calls Marianne “the virgin of the swamp.” He calls Jewel the “Prince of Darkness.” He says he didn’t teach Jewel to read because he wants to maintain the Barbarian in a “crude state of unrefined energy.” Yes—ugh.
Make no mistake: Carter has made these Barbarians terminally half-nude black jungle brutes. One gets the impression Carter was inspired by BBC documentaries and National Geographic reports on bone-in-the-nose African tribes that don’t wear no underwear—this, combined witwith sensational 1960s reportage on the thuggishness and alleged “primitive sexuality” of Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and the modern American black male “outlaw” running amok amongst rational, educated whites.
The Barbarians, Carter informs, live amidst “abominable refuse” and “ordure.” They cover themselves with garish war paint and tattoos. They’re “decorated with astonishing, tawdry jewelry, some of it plainly savaged from the ruins and of great age, some weirdly fashioned from animal bones and baked clay.” Unlike the Professors, whose clocks are always ticking “inscrutably,” the Barbarians don’t believe in time, according to Carter. They prefer instead to experience life “raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion.”
Featureless block of action, eh, Angela Carter? Yes, O.K., if you insist—these Barbarians are heathens and bastards, filthy rabble, primitives and heathens! And on it goes: The Barbarians are superstitious, wearers of good luck charms. They are prodigious makers of hand signs. Some believe Professor females don’t bleed and that they grow sharp teeth in their vaginas. Barbarians have piercings and braids. They festoon their clothing (which they stole) with beads and glass shards.
They have “black hair frizzed out in a cloud.” Their faces are “dark.” They are “brown with dirt.” Sometimes they’re just plain brown: “Marianne was now so dizzy the brown faces danced around her like dead leaves.” Barbarian males are “wild boys” who’ve got “eyes like dead wood and grinning mouths equipped with the whitest of teeth” (Carter is unclear on who’s responsible for Barbarian dental care).
On page 46 of my Penguin Classics paperback, Mrs. Green, a white woman who lives with the tribe as a kind of den mother, blurts out: They’re “black as pitch.”
In contrast to the Barbarians, Mrs. Green is a “clean woman,” a “dignified” lady, a “domestic matriarch” who insists on a “proper chamberpot of her own.” Mrs. Green loves to shout at her Barbarian helpers to empty “pail(s) of excrement” that are standing about the living quarters.
Angela Carter’s alleged “modern classic” Heroes and Villains bludgeons with its racist badness, simultaneously drowning you in annoying absurdity, “artistic” pretension and unlikable characters. It should be regarded as a particularly flagrant and fragrant example of “white female privilege imperialism”—and horrible writing.
Most terribly, it’s chockablock with “white leftist feminist” visceral fear/worship/hatred of the myth of the Negro male/black cock. Blaxploitation + “white leftist feminist stuff” have never gone out of style, of course, but they were extremely chic in 1969, when this book was published (and, according to reports, are again extremely chic today).
Mostly, though, Heroes and Villains is just not funny—though, if you try hard enough, you may find it’s uproarious, a top contender in the so-bad-it’s-not-good-it’s-hilariously-bad category. (PLOT SPOILER: The finale, which finds the teenage white girl declaring herself “the Tiger Lady” who intends to rule with “a rod of iron” over the tribe of poor, foolish blacks, is fabulously LOL hilarious).
Angela Carter—we’ve had so many rhapsodic blurbs jammed down our throats! We had such high hopes!
In 2008, The Times of London ranked Carter 10th on the list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.” Angela, Angela! Angela Carter: Alleged magical realist, feminist/post-feminist superheroine, deconstructionist extraordinaire. Venerated scribe of everybody’s sixth- or seventh-favorite lycanthropian horror movie, In the Company of Wolves. . . . No, Angela—there’s no more cabinet space to accommodate the stacks of prizes and accolades you collected before your untimely death at the age of 51. Angela Carter: “Best Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize” indeed!
In the dozens of reviews of Heroes and Villains I’ve perused, nobody seems to have had the courage or insight (too polite? too dim? too cowardly? low-quality readers/writers?) to say what the book’s about: A 16-year-old blond girl who’s so “bored”—Carter never gets boredof telling us how “bored” this lass is—she decides to run off with poor, stinking, murderous “barbarian” blacks, who beat and rape her as they drag her haphazardly around the post-apocalyptic outback. Eventually, these Barbarians—whose cruelty the girl’s come to kinda-sorta enjoy and play along with—self-destruct or get killed off, leaving the white girl sorta-kinda in charge. The “girl” even performs a bit of child rape of her own along the way—er, of a retarded “Barbarian” boy.
Yes, in the hands of the right director, it could be fantastic B-film shlock for a drunken Saturday night.
The setting is an unexplained scenario in which human civilization has apparently been destroyed by “fire,” alternately a “blast." The human survivors have self-selected into the Professors (the “white, scientific” group from which the protagonist, Marianne, hails), the Barbarians (the black and brown marauders whom Marianne runs off with), and the Out People (different types of biological mutants who, against the odds, have banded together in gangs that ambush and rob the Barbarian and Professor communities in this “all against all” dystopia).
Marianne, Carter informs, is “small, clean, trim, pale and sure of herself.” Oh yes, so sure of herself. She lives in a “white tower made of steel and concrete.” Ah, those fabled ivory towers of the Professor class, eh, Angela Carter? But Marianne’s so “bored” with it all—yes, everything’s so boring. Marianne wants to see what’s beyond the village walls, where she’s not supposed to roam because it’s so dangerous but perhaps less boring (PLOT SPOILER: Marianne eventually finds it all more or less boring).
Marianne’s Professor father is a “gentle man constitutionally sunk in melancholy” who likes to sit around with his books. Little girl Marianne is depicted as spiteful and severe. She writes her name on all her possessions, even her toothbrush. She trips up the other kids. She talks to birds. She breaks things “to see what they were like inside.”
It’s never made clear why Marianne should have the outlook of an upper middle-class 1960s white girl who’s become bored with the Beatles and Stones and who’s taken a fancy to Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker and the Black Panthers—but this is what we’re dealing with here.
Marianne watches her brother, who’s 10 years older, get his throat slashed by a Barbarian boy during a Barbarian raid on the village. Then her depressed mother dies after eating “poison fruit.” These things plunge daddy into even more melancholy. Father teaches Marianne reading, writing and history and orders her to study his beloved books (dictionaries and “Mumford, etc.”). Daddy also orders Marianne to read Rousseau out loud to him.
In an embarrassingly obnoxious “twist” on Rousseau, Father tells Marianne they are living in a time of “ignoble savages,” like the kind who murdered her brother. The Barbarians will surely destroy what’s left of the earth if given the chance, her father warns. Father is writing a book on the “archaeology of social theory,” but probably nobody will want to read it except Marianne (indeed, indeed!). Marianne loves her father “but he bored her,” LOL.
Marianne’s nurse, a Worker woman with six fingers on each hand, warns Marianne that Barbarians like to “slit the bellies of the women after they’ve raped them and sew up cats inside.” On May Day (the Professors apparently still celebrate this), Marianne sneaks out of the village and spends the day watching Barbarians go about their inscrutable activities in the forest.
She returns home to learn that the batty old nurse has chopped up her father with an axe and then poisoned herself. Marianne is taken to live with the Colonel, but this bores her. She burns her father’s books. She throws his treasured clock in the swamp. She cuts off her long blond hair so she “looked like a demented boy.” She spends time examining “her ugliness in mirrors with a violent pleasure.”
When Marianne is 16, the Barbarians again attack the village. Marianne is again “the audience” for the battle. She sees an injured Barbarian limp off to hide in a shed. The Soldiers can’t find him, but Marianne has a plan. Marianne “was perverse and she turned against her own people,” Carter informs. After dark, Marianne takes some bread and cheese to the Barbarian. The shed has been locked, but Marianne conveniently knows where the keys are kept. Anyway, after she sneaks into the shed, the Barbarian doesn’t immediately strangle and rape Marianne, but instead suggests they escape together.
Carter’s punchline: Marianne “had wanted to rescue him but found she was accepting his offer to rescue her.” LOL.
Marianne and the Barbarian climb into a lorry that’s parked in the shed. The Barbarian, being a Barbarian, knows how to steal ammunition and load and shoot guns and use guerrilla tactics to fight white boy Soldiers, but he doesn’t know how to drive (the Barbarians have apparently never gotten around to stealing motor vehicles and learning how to fuel, drive and fix them—this, apparently, is something only technical-minded whites can achieve, Carter suggests).
Marianne, being a Professor girl, doesn’t seem to know much about shooting guns but she sure as hell can drive a truck. Hell, yeah! Hell, the way Carter tells it, this teen girl is one of the better drivers the Professor class has produced (Carter, however, refuses to divulge whether Marianne was enrolled in a military driving course or had been a stunt driver in Professor movies.) Marianne smashes the truck out of the shed and plows through the wooden gate of the village, evading bullets fired by the Soldiers. Boom, pow! As they’re speeding down the dirt road, the frightened Barbarian pummels Marianne, imploring her to drive faster. Just as it seems they might get away, the Barbarian orders Marianne to crash the lorry into a tree. She does as commanded.
Marianne was “convinced they would both die in a few seconds”—but instead, the Barbarian (who’s apparently super hero-strong) “grabbed her shoulders, hauled her from her seat and jumped.” The lorry smashes into the tree and explodes into flames. Marianne and the Barbarian fall gently into a “marshy pool,” safe and uninjured. Soldiers arrive quickly on the scene and search for bodies but, finding nothing, they immediately determine the fire consumed whoever was in the truck and depart. Yes, convenient.
Carter’s punchline: Marianne realizes that this crafty Barbarian had, by orchestrating the fiery crash, “organized an official suicide for her.” Marianne then gets bitten by a snake, LOL.
The Barbarian’s absurd name is Jewel Lee Bradley. After sucking the poison from Marianne’s snake bite, Jewel takes her to formally meet his Barbarian tribe. Jewel, speaking pretty good English, explains that the tribe is led by a witch doctor who keeps a viper in a box. Marianne asks Jewel if it’s a “phallic cult”—that is, “she asked, or perhaps asked,” according to Carter. Perhaps asked—what, huh?
“Sometimes it’s phallic and sometimes it isn’t,” replies Jewel (er, so—apparently she did ask?). A semi-phallic Barbarian cult, is it, Jewel Lee Bradley? Anyway, the tribe is spooked by the appearance of Jewel with Marianne. They make signs against the “evil eye.” Everyone thought Jewel had died in the raid on the Professors but instead, here he is with his own Professor hostage/trophy/bride.
Marianne finds that Jewel “talked like a half-educated man and this surprised her very much.” Jewel, for example, says stuff like “hisself”—apparently, yes, because he’s a jungle Barbarian who never had no proper skoolin’. Like Marianne, Jewel is sometimes “excessively bored.” Jewel refers to hisself as both the “public executioner” and the “grave-digger.”
Because Jewel’s parents are dead, everything he knows was taught to him by Dr. Donally, a white Professor who, like Marianne, was “bored” and decided to ditch the clean, scientific, insane life of the Professors to live with the filthy, insane, non-scientific Barbarians. Donally is described as a drunken lout, a large man with a colorful beard who wears sunglasses at all times. He’s chiseled his teeth into fangs. He’s vain, has “soft, white” hands, “carefully trimmed and manicured” fingernails and plucks his eyebrows. His voice was “perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft.” He has no interest in improving the circumstances of the Barbarian tribe he rules but instead psychopathically manipulates them with music, magic and a fake snake.
Donally’s got a half-retarded Barbarian son of around 13, whom he loves to humiliate and torture mentally and physically. Donally’s got some of the same books as Marianne’s father: “Teilhard de Chardin, Lévi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim.” Donally’s jive makes Marianne feel “at home.” Donally takes leering glee at Marianne’s rape and humiliation but counsels her that she can use her whiteness to cast a spell and obtain “power” over the tribe. “I can offer you a little power,” Donally tells Marianne.
To entertain and mystify Marianne, Donally likes to scrawl inane phrases like BOREDOM IS THE HANDSOME SON OF PRIDE and MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING and I THINK, THEREFORE I EXIST; BUT IF I TAKE TIME OFF FROM THINKING, WHAT THEN? on the walls. Yes—ugh. Because he is an idiotic farker, Donally took advantage of Jewel (when he was younger) to tattoo an elaborate rendering of the Garden of Eden, complete with Adam and Eve and the Reptile, across Jewel’s back. Yes, Donally has used a Barbarian body as a canvas for his “art.”
Donally calls Marianne “the virgin of the swamp.” He calls Jewel the “Prince of Darkness.” He says he didn’t teach Jewel to read because he wants to maintain the Barbarian in a “crude state of unrefined energy.” Yes—ugh.
Make no mistake: Carter has made these Barbarians terminally half-nude black jungle brutes. One gets the impression Carter was inspired by BBC documentaries and National Geographic reports on bone-in-the-nose African tribes that don’t wear no underwear—this, combined witwith sensational 1960s reportage on the thuggishness and alleged “primitive sexuality” of Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and the modern American black male “outlaw” running amok amongst rational, educated whites.
The Barbarians, Carter informs, live amidst “abominable refuse” and “ordure.” They cover themselves with garish war paint and tattoos. They’re “decorated with astonishing, tawdry jewelry, some of it plainly savaged from the ruins and of great age, some weirdly fashioned from animal bones and baked clay.” Unlike the Professors, whose clocks are always ticking “inscrutably,” the Barbarians don’t believe in time, according to Carter. They prefer instead to experience life “raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion.”
Featureless block of action, eh, Angela Carter? Yes, O.K., if you insist—these Barbarians are heathens and bastards, filthy rabble, primitives and heathens! And on it goes: The Barbarians are superstitious, wearers of good luck charms. They are prodigious makers of hand signs. Some believe Professor females don’t bleed and that they grow sharp teeth in their vaginas. Barbarians have piercings and braids. They festoon their clothing (which they stole) with beads and glass shards.
They have “black hair frizzed out in a cloud.” Their faces are “dark.” They are “brown with dirt.” Sometimes they’re just plain brown: “Marianne was now so dizzy the brown faces danced around her like dead leaves.” Barbarian males are “wild boys” who’ve got “eyes like dead wood and grinning mouths equipped with the whitest of teeth” (Carter is unclear on who’s responsible for Barbarian dental care).
On page 46 of my Penguin Classics paperback, Mrs. Green, a white woman who lives with the tribe as a kind of den mother, blurts out: They’re “black as pitch.”
In contrast to the Barbarians, Mrs. Green is a “clean woman,” a “dignified” lady, a “domestic matriarch” who insists on a “proper chamberpot of her own.” Mrs. Green loves to shout at her Barbarian helpers to empty “pail(s) of excrement” that are standing about the living quarters.
January 15, 2021
If I hadn't known this was a Carter novel there is no way I would have guessed. It demonstrates her versatility, and bears little resemblance to anything else of hers that I have read, just maybe her short rewrites of fairy tales.
This is more of a fable than a fairy tale, set in a dystopian future after a nuclear event has wiped most of the population out, though the characters barely think about the past. The land is now thickly wooded, and there are wild beasts, lions and tigers, descendants of those that escaped from zoos during the war.
The protagonist, a young woman called Marianne, belongs to the Professors, a group that lives in steel and concrete towers, but is fascinated by the primitive people called the Barbarians, who live by marauding and pillage.
This is a strange and compelling book with all sorts of unexpected elements to it; at times a western, at others a barbaric romance or a piece of feminist literature.
This is more of a fable than a fairy tale, set in a dystopian future after a nuclear event has wiped most of the population out, though the characters barely think about the past. The land is now thickly wooded, and there are wild beasts, lions and tigers, descendants of those that escaped from zoos during the war.
The protagonist, a young woman called Marianne, belongs to the Professors, a group that lives in steel and concrete towers, but is fascinated by the primitive people called the Barbarians, who live by marauding and pillage.
This is a strange and compelling book with all sorts of unexpected elements to it; at times a western, at others a barbaric romance or a piece of feminist literature.
July 9, 2023
"Era bella como Venus alzándose entre las nubes en la celebrada pintura de Botticelli, sólo que más. Era bella como el celebrado busto de Nefertiti en el Louvre, sólo que más. Era bella como la estatua del joven David del celebrado Michelangelo, que contempla el tráfico atestado de Milán con total serenidad, sólo que más."
May 2, 2020
I'm finding this novel a bit difficult to digest. Generally I love Angela Carter's writing but I'm being forced to admit it's her short stories that really impress me, as now three of the four novels of hers that I've read have failed to live up to her brilliance in the short form. This one seemed dated--funny since it's basically a futuristic tale--somehow, or perhaps its lack of an obvious theme or point annoyed me. I'm like that: I love books that are complex and difficult formally, but I like being told something, having a clear theme or moral or philosophy thrown in my face. Although all the best novels (Ulysses for instance, with all of its lovely bells and whistles) only say the one thing really: "Love each other you morons!" Perhaps that's why this novel failed to send me--its message regarding the possibility of human coupling and love (that there isn't one) is pretty radically pessimistic. And while I love pessimism regarding fate, politics, religion (tragedy in general), maybe I just hold this one last thing sacred and therefore I found Heroes and Villains just a little too bleak even for an old curmudgeon like myself.
Also the post-apocalypse scenario is pretty tired now--although that's not the fault of the novel, written in '68/'69. Still, I felt like its depiction of a culture divided between professors, savages, and mutants had more to do with the upheavals of '68, the emergent youth culture occupying universities and protesting the Vietnam war, than any actual post-apocalyptic future. Thinking of Heroes and Villains that way, as something of a historical artifact, makes me like it a bit better. Considered as a sign of those times, the violent and unsentimental "love story" here then becomes a metaphor for our female protagonist (a prof.'s daughter) bourgeois longing to escape her dryasdust world through a noble savage hippie rebel--the leader of the commune, as it were. While such a scenario works, it also somewhat falls into the archaic concept of the noble savage, which the novel itself raises and ridicules. Still, in the end, the novel is about how a young woman negotiates the world she inherits--the patriarchy--and then another, newer savage world created by a renegade intellectual and a charismatic young man of an entirely different social class. Since revolutionary, bohemian, and utopic sub-cultures have long been criticized for turning a blind eye to issues of patriarchy while criticizing everything else about the bourgeois world, then the critique here is spot on.
Also have to note that Carter, as usual, can really write. There were some descriptive passages here made me sigh out loud with the pure pleasure of running my mind over the words. So tactile. 3.5 stars.
Also the post-apocalypse scenario is pretty tired now--although that's not the fault of the novel, written in '68/'69. Still, I felt like its depiction of a culture divided between professors, savages, and mutants had more to do with the upheavals of '68, the emergent youth culture occupying universities and protesting the Vietnam war, than any actual post-apocalyptic future. Thinking of Heroes and Villains that way, as something of a historical artifact, makes me like it a bit better. Considered as a sign of those times, the violent and unsentimental "love story" here then becomes a metaphor for our female protagonist (a prof.'s daughter) bourgeois longing to escape her dryasdust world through a noble savage hippie rebel--the leader of the commune, as it were. While such a scenario works, it also somewhat falls into the archaic concept of the noble savage, which the novel itself raises and ridicules. Still, in the end, the novel is about how a young woman negotiates the world she inherits--the patriarchy--and then another, newer savage world created by a renegade intellectual and a charismatic young man of an entirely different social class. Since revolutionary, bohemian, and utopic sub-cultures have long been criticized for turning a blind eye to issues of patriarchy while criticizing everything else about the bourgeois world, then the critique here is spot on.
Also have to note that Carter, as usual, can really write. There were some descriptive passages here made me sigh out loud with the pure pleasure of running my mind over the words. So tactile. 3.5 stars.
February 25, 2015
Oh, this one really pushes some buttons. People expecting a proper post-apocalyptic adventure are disappointed. People are distressed with the problematic central "romance". Anyone expecting anything like the clear categories of the title are certainly going to be somewhat put out. But amid cynical reflections on the collapse of civilization -- the grim struggles of those who have cast it off, and the erosion of purpose in the hold-outs behind their walls -- what Angela Carter seems to be attempting is some kind of deep analysis of problematic relationships themselves. The tyrannies of need and desire. It's going to be frustrating because people make decisions with which they themselves can only be frustrated all the time. Though not to say that this isn't imperfect -- she hasn't here reached her later streamlined state of clarity of word and purpose, and the long slow tangle of emotions as the relationship runs its course leads to a little circularity. Though I'm not bothered by the sci-fi aspects at all. To my mind this is not adventure being bogged down, but an exploration of dismal relationship movements granted a strange and inventive metaphorical landscape to unfold in. Which is to say that the imperfections do nothing to diminish my general obsession with Carter right now.
Oh, also, there are many covers of this, but the 80s penguin reprint I've got is gorgeous and gets it exactly right:
Oh, also, there are many covers of this, but the 80s penguin reprint I've got is gorgeous and gets it exactly right:
February 2, 2023
This is probably my least favorite novel by Carter; yet, being a creation of Carter’s, it is imaginative, subversive, feminist, and beautifully strange. The entire story is an exploration of this quote from the novel: “When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don't know which is which any more.”
February 13, 2019
Hi, Angela Carter, bye, Angela Carter.
July 20, 2023
Heroes and Villains may be one of the eerie and bizarre fiction that which set in post-apocalypse world; as any Angela Carter's fictions, this book has its elliptical and inexplicit meanings in the contexts. Sometimes I felt bewildered when I was trying to follow the narrator of our protagonist, Marianne whose story was a conflict between the outside world of the marsh and her melancholy experience with the barbarians. The main structure of the story is not vague to comprehend; a girl who witness her brother was kill by a barbarian, after 16 years old, her father was killed by her nanny.
One day, she has rescued the barbarian who was the one has killed her young brother. Furthermore, become her future husband; later in the story, their matrimony would be compulsive and unharmonious in their relationship till the end.
It definitely not a typetical heroes versus villains stereotype, but rather would be a significantly metaphorical story-telling that wrapped in a post-apocalypse setting. For some readers that the story may not explain lots of things like, the outpost people who are similar to cannibals, and they are just a refer to the background settings more than a real characters. Why and how cause the World has become post-apocalypse that is juts briefly mentioned. It's a book with multiple questions but a little bit answers to readers. Full of space for this sort of speculative fictions would
potentially be a fun reading experience.
November 17, 2019
Set text for university module on post-apocalyptic fiction
A barbaric romance amid a post-apocalyptic nightmare; Marianne is bored of monotonous life in the town of the Professors and at 16, exempts herself by running off with her brother’s killer, a Barbarian named Jewel. Carter blurs binaries as Marianne falls in love with the illiterate brute who rapes her into marriage, and the runaway girl is a stranger to her own needs and desires. It’s strange, unnerving and unpleasant to read to the extent that I felt weary. Overall, it was a wild ride, but ideas were thrown about willy-nilly and there were an abundance of unanswered questions and ideas that remain unexplored.
A barbaric romance amid a post-apocalyptic nightmare; Marianne is bored of monotonous life in the town of the Professors and at 16, exempts herself by running off with her brother’s killer, a Barbarian named Jewel. Carter blurs binaries as Marianne falls in love with the illiterate brute who rapes her into marriage, and the runaway girl is a stranger to her own needs and desires. It’s strange, unnerving and unpleasant to read to the extent that I felt weary. Overall, it was a wild ride, but ideas were thrown about willy-nilly and there were an abundance of unanswered questions and ideas that remain unexplored.
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