Lee Foust's Reviews > Heroes and Villains

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.