Heroes and Villains - Angela Carter

My New Year resolution to read more has lasted an entire two books.

This makes it the New Year resolution that I have most adhered to, ever.

I bought 'Heroes and Villains' in the very early 90's. My girlfriend at the time had a real passion for Angela Carter's writing, and that influenced me. I read Strange Perceptions and the Magic Toyshop and revelled in Carter's surreal imagery.

I rarely finished her books. I would drink in random paragraphs of her writing. They tasted like some sophisticated and complex wine and I thought that absorbing them would make me sophisticated and complex as a result.

This time I was determined to pick up one of her novels and read it quickly and all the way through. I wondered if I would still be dazzled by her imagery, or whether my age and cynicism would make me regard her writing with the same twist of embarrassed distaste as I now regard an Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solo.

I'm happy to say that there is no linguistic finger-tapping in Carter's fourth novel, Heroes and Villains. It was first published in 1969 which gives its warped, naturalistic imagery some kind of cultural context.

But if 'Heroes and Villains' is a product of the psychotropic 60's, it's most definitely a bad trip.

There is, still, a sanctimonious notion [most often perpetrated by those who were there but pretend they can't remember it, despite then clogging up all kinds of fora with detailed remembrances and proclamations of its superiority] that the cultural elite in the 60's were the most inventive, the most socially aware and the most radical generation pop culture has yet produced.

I'd challenge that.

Most of them were spineless idealists whose ideals didn't extend beyond 'radical' ideas of free love and narcotic experimentation.

It's a generalisation, I know: but it's as valid a generalisation as the one that is frequently shoved down out throats about that era's superiority and uniqueness.

Despite what the self-proclaimed shamen of that era told us, LSD wasn't about expanding your consciousness. It was about escapism. Acid didn't stop the Vietnam War. Flowers in gun barrels made an arresting image for the world's newsreels, but the hippies didn't change anything. Otherwise the world we live in now wouldn't be riven and on the edge of ruin.

In light of all of that, I wonder if 'Heroes and Villains' is as much a comment on the flimsiness of the hippy dream and the contradictions inherent within that era's zeitgeist. It's set in a post apocalyptic world with an apparently neat division between the educated and civilized [the Professors] and the savage and unrestrained [the Barbarians].

The fact that the very premise of the book is symbolic from the off is one of its weaknesses. I find it difficult to truly empathise with characters when they're initially set-up to represent something rather than to be someone.

Marianne is one of the professors. She lives in a white tower. Their enclave is raided by nomadic barbarians... humans who subsist off the supposedly civilized.

Marianne sees her brother killed during one of the barbarian raids. The fact that Carter dwells rather too long on her brother's killer, like a clumsy film director, makes the ensuing meeting between Marianne and the murderer too predictable for my liking.

Despite the clunkiness of the plot and the dark shadows cast by the overt symbolism, the characters are well-drawn and compelling.

I imagine that Liam Gallagher, when he was on cheap speed and Stella rather than champagne and cocaine, would have had a lot in common with Jewel, the barbarian Adam who killed Marianne's brother and then rapes her, years later, in an overgrown forest that might as well have neon signs proclaiming 'Garden of Eden II' flashing amongst the branches.

Jewel, though, isn't just a savage -- his step-father, the self-styled shaman and former professor, Donelly, has equipped him with enough knowledge to make him aware of his own shortcomings.

Carter is renowned for her writing's inherent eroticism. The scene where Marianne is raped is the one that affected me most in the book.

It made me ask awkward questions. I wonder how prominent feminists of the time reacted to the scene.

It strikes me that Carter was quite happy to upset the tables in the foyer of her local library.

I enjoyed the book. There is a real emotional wrench at the end and a satisfyingly unresolved denouement. It reminded me, in tone, of Stephen King's novella 'The Mist' in that respect.

But, for me at least, at this stage in her career Angela Carter wasn't the great writer I wanted her to be. The overt - sometimes crass - symbolism threatens to overwhelm and undermine the story, and there are constant literary allusions that make me wonder if Carter had lost sight of telling her story in favour of bolstering her intellectual credentials.

So, what am I going to read next? A random finger jab of the 'unread' section in my bookcase has selected Albert Camus' 'The Plague'.

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