'"All those who saw her picture gallery wondered, but Nelson would never have her pictures cleaned. She always said, didn't she, Liz, that Time himself, the father of transfigurations, was the greatest of artists, and his invisible hand must be respected at all costs, since it was in anonymous complicity with that of every human painter, so I always saw, as through a glass, darkly, what might have been my own primal scene, my own conception, the heavenly bird in a white majesty of feathers descending with imperious desire upon the half-stunned and yet herself impassioned girl."'
Nights at the Circus
Page 28
There's this feeling i get sometimes when i read.
A strange but comforting feeling that i'm a physical part of the story i'm absorbing.
I've followed Steerpike down the dank, echoing brick corridors of Gormenghast Castle.
Inhaled the rank deviancy of Ankh-Morpork.
Wandered the twisted and impossible structures of Calvino's Invisible Cities.
And dipped my toes in the Blackfoot River.
This is a feeling i cherish and long for when it's gone.
Angela Carter always evokes this feeling in me.
Her world is a wretched and abusive one but it hypnotises.
She plays games with your senses and tricks you into adoring the most repellent of characters.
You find yourself routing for the bad guy, who only beats his captured wife because it's how his story is laid out for him.
She forces you to long for the defeated orphan to surrender herself to a family of muted brutes with the gentlest of hearts.
How she does this, i have no idea.
But every single time i step into her world, i don't want to come back out again.
Which is exactly what happened when i finished the story of Fevvers, the winged aerialiste and her beautiful American boy.
Why can't i live inside these stories?
Why?
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