Weird tales, well told

For one thing, her stories are more original, imaginative and accomplished than much of what is served up to young fantasy readers. The reason I reached for Red Spikes a few nights ago is because I wanted to be transported. I wanted a way out of my worries, and in her short stories Lanagan places you in an (often unnervingly) immediate, vivid and visceral other place.

She’s economical with the detail she gives you, winding her descriptions around dialogue or a protagonist’s thoughts rather than self-consciously setting the scene. The situations and societies she presents feel solid, brutally so at times, without you needing to be told what colour the sky is. The story is about the situation, not the setting, if you see what I mean.

And those situations are genuinely unusual, strange and surprising. You can set your story on the third moon of Azkablam and still make it clichéd, formulaic and dull as ditchwater (famed for its dullness). In Red Spikes and another collection, Black Juice, a girl watches her sister killed in a tar-pit as punishment for murdering her husband, while elsewhere in a circus-y dystopia two anti-clown vigilantes carry out a hit. A girl in a paper dress graduates from Bride School, and a boy finds some tiny figures of a bear and a heavily pregnant armoured queen who grow and come to life in the night. Naturally, he is enlisted as midwife.

Lanagan’s stories are bizarre, and even when you’re in more familiar terrain they’re often told from an unusual point of view. In Black Juice a village is periodically attacked by terrifying underground ‘yowlinin’ monsters. So far, so Tremors. But the tale is told by an ‘untouchable’ outcast, treated as a monster herself, who saves the life of the boy she loves only to be rejected. However, UNLIKE the Little Mermaid, she doesn’t wimpily dissolve into seafoam, but sees him for the coward he is and strides away into her future.

These synopses have probably given you a clue that as well as being strange, Lanagan’s stories are often pretty dark. And if you think Harry Potter is ‘dark’ you may be in for a shock: the first few chapters of her novel Tender Morsels include child abuse, incest, forced abortion and gang rape.

Tender Morsels

Here’s a review that describes why I think it’s a remarkable work. But it is distressing. Briefly: 14-year-old Liga lives in the usual cottage-on-the-edge-of-the-dark-forest with her father, who repeatedly rapes her. When she becomes pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion. He dies, but she discovers she has become pregnant again. She has her baby and lives alone in relative peace in the cottage until some boys from the nearby town come to find her and sexually assault her. Liga despairs, takes her baby daughter to a ravine in the forest and tries to kill them both, but they are magically saved and wake in what seems to be a parallel world in which she is at last safe. The townspeople have been replaced with kind, two-dimensional versions of themselves, and in this world there are no men. It seems to be a heaven that Liga has created to protect herself and her daughters (she has another baby). But as her daughter grows up the membrane between their protected world and the world Liga left behind starts to grow thin, and the story becomes a reimagining of the traditional fairytale of Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course, when it was published Tender Morsels met with a fair amount of controversy, but I agree with Lanagan when she says “I guess I’m not a big fan of corralling sex, death and war into the adult world and then giving children a terrible shock when they realise their existence.” Besides, there is nothing graphic, titillating or exploitative about the descriptions of the abuse suffered by Liga in the novel. One of the things the book is about is how people take refuge and heal from trauma.

Women in fairytales

It’s also about fairytales, and women’s lot in them. Asked in this interview why she was drawn to the Snow White and Rose Red story, Lanagan said:

Mainly I was annoyed by what the Grimm Brothers had done with Caroline Stahl’s story, that is, rewritten it to deliver a very oppressive message to girls and women: At all costs, however beastly your menfolk’s behaviour, remain nice, kind and always willing to come to their aid. This kind of message is not uncommon in the collections of transcribed and revised folktales of the 18th and 19th century, and it’s distressing that those versions are often mistaken for the root stories – although they still sometimes contain the germs of the originals, they are very much products of their times and societies.

So, the irritation was the main thing, but then I couldn’t resist a story that had such a great character as the ungrateful dwarf, the kindly bear and the three bemused women, trying to make good lives for themselves in an ever stranger world.

Like Angela Carter, Lanagan seems to be interested in the rawer, messier, less moral incarnations of our familiar fairytales, but where they differ is that Lanagan’s story fully inhabits the folkloric style where Carter’s versions are self-conscious and ironic.

The final thing I love about Lanagan’s stories is that they’re full of GIRLS and WOMEN! All kinds of different ones! With different personalities! And they do things! In Tender Morsels there are two witches, both distinct and full-developed characters, with powers and flaws and everything. The novel deals with violence against women, but also with women’s sexuality and desires.

I can’t say I’d recommend them to help you get to sleep, but Margo Lanagan’s stories offer strange worlds to be explored.

But I was in for a shock one day at school, when I settled myself down in the Book Corner with the Ladybird Well-Loved Tales version of Hans Christian Anderson‘s text. The Mermaid died at the end? She didn’t marry the prince? And then was turned into a “Daughter of the Air”, and wasn’t allowed a Christian soul unless a zillion children did good deeds and something-something-virtue? What a letdown. Expecting a straightforward happy ending, I was utterly bewildered. Prince or no prince, I hadn’t been prepared for quite so much all-out morbidity, and if you asked me, this Daughters of the Air business just sounded a bit suspicious.

It’s one hell of a leap from the all-out romance of Disney’s riff on the story to Anderson. Disney takes Anderson’s curious young mermaid princess and gives her a bit of sass, focusing the story on themes of adolescence and coming of age and adding a saleable happy ending into the mix. It’s a common refrain on feminist blogs to say that Disney “sanitised the originals” (whatever “original” means). Here, though, Disney at least allows Ariel her desires, even if they are chastely presented, and allows their fulfilment at the end. By contrast, Anderson focuses on the dangers of curiosity and makes the story arc a recognisably tragic one – and later, it seems, tacked on the stuff about the Daughters of the Air to add in a moral imperative for the reader: children, be good, else the mermaid will never earn her Christian soul!

In both stories, identity and self-knowledge is a key theme – and both mermaids are willing to give up their voices and identities for love and to gain access to the exciting, adult, otherworld of the land. There’s something problematic about both of them – with Anderson’s version, as Marina Warner puts it in From The Beast To The Blonde: On Fairy Tales And Their Tellers, “the story’s chilling message is that cutting out your tongue is still not enough. To be saved, more is required: self-obliteration , dissolution.” With Disney, Warner ruminates that “the issue of female desire dominates the film… the verb ‘want’ falls from the lips of Ariel more often than any other – until her tongue is cut out”, concluding that – however much we want to cry “sanitised!” – it is more that in the film “romance constitutes the ultimate redemption, and romantic love, personified by the prince, the justification of desire”. So it’s a kind of sanitising, but it’s also a secularising.

All of which brings me to The Flight of the Mermaid, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao‘s adaptation of the tale, a wonderful picture book, now recently reprinted by India-based publishing house Tara Books. This version re-energises Anderson’s original storyline and tells it in such a way that it becomes, devoid of its Victorian moralising, a genuinely life-affirming, feminist story. The real achievement, though, is that it keeps the Daughters of the Air stuff, and Anderson’s story structure, but tells the story in such a way that a happy ending is forged. And it’s an ending that retains the sense for wanderlust Disney gives its heroine, but doesn’t end in the mermaid trading selfhood or identity for marriage – at the same time neatly avoiding Anderson’s preachy, morbid shutdown of female desire or personal autonomy.

But let’s start with basic facts: the book is gorgeous. Check it out!

Flight of the Mermaid – skipping out the diminuitive little from the title for a start – is a treat for the senses from start to finish. Beautifully letter-pressed on tactile, thick-grain paper, the cover has a press-out fish shape which doubles as a bookmark and reveals the mermaid herself underneath. The book is fully illustrated with acclaimed artist Bhajju Shyam‘s distinctive artwork in the Gond tribal style, and the results are a wonderful, fresh contrast to the European visualisations of this story I’ve become so used to. Look how colourful it is!

The title of the book also describes the ending (skip to after the grey blockquotes if you don’t want the detail spoilered!) – the mermaid comes to the realisation that the prince, though he is fond of her, does not love her romantically. She is saddened, but will not kill him – the only way she can save her own life – and chooses to sacrifice herself instead: yes, familiar Anderson territory. And yet:

Slowly, the truth came over her – her plight had nothing to do with the prince at all… he knew nothing of her, and could not carry the weight of her dreams.

And at the point where, in Anderson, her tragic end is mitigated only by the Daughters of the Air announcing “welcome to the airy feminine purgatory party!”, Wolf, Rao and Shyam show the mermaid’s transition into the air as a change, not an ending:

“Who are you?” she asked, and found that her voice had returned.

“We are the daughters of the air, they answered. “And now you are one of us.”

The mermaid was delighted. “I was born into water,” she said to them. “And I know the world on the shore too. Only the air is left to explore, and it seems to hold more freedom than sea or land.”

The air is, logically, her next destination on a continuous journey. Always on the move, the mermaid’s real aim is constant self-discovery and adventure. Visually, in each of her phases on land, sea, and air, she retains her flowing hair and colourful attributes, whether they are feathers or scales. Her identity is always hers, and is never relinquished.

It’s a wonderfully executed blend of the positive points of both Anderson’s text and the optimism the Disney generation have come to expect from the story, and for parents, schools and people who love beautifully made books, I just can’t recommend Tara Books highly enough.

We managed to grab five minutes of co-author Gita Wolf’s time, via email, to ask her a little about the book – why this story?

“We felt that the story had universal resonance,” says Gita. “It was both a coming-of-age tale as well as the story of a journey (both literal and spiritual). When we first told the story to Bhajju Shyam, he related to it right away. ‘That’s exactly it!’ he said, ‘That’s what it feels like to come into a completely new element – like when I traveled to another country for the first time. I lost my language, and it felt like I was [as Anderson’s mermaid experiences when she loses her voice] walking on knives.'”

How about the ending? “We wanted to give the tale a feminist twist, and not focus on the loss of the prince as an absolute tragic end of everything – nor did we want the Disney ending. In keeping with Anderson’s basic narrative, the Mermaid in a sense does go up in the air, but the air is here a new element to explore, and her journey will continue.”

All hail the flying mermaid!

Order your copy from Tara’s UK distributors or on Amazon.

Find out more

• See more of the interior of the book at Drawn.ca here
• Check out the Tara Books blog here, and read about their work in their recent article on For Books’ Sake. Be sure to check out their catalogue (available on their homepage as a PDF file – I’m especially excited for Sita’s Ramayana!

Warm thanks to Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Gita Wolf and Sirish Rao at Tara Books for taking the time to talk to us, sending us parcels and being generally lovely.

But it seems we’re all in the pink plastic grip of fantasy princesshood, so I’ve decided to give in for a moment and take a look at some fairytale-themed pop music – but with a little bit of smarts and sass thrown in. Songs that turn tropes upside down or inside out, or give the princesses unexpected vigourous voice. In this post-Shrek epoch we’re living in, it’s a pretty well-travelled road, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.

The reliably-entertaining folks over at Comics Alliance are also having a Princess Moment, which this post is intended as a sort of humorous companion to. It’s not really an Order of Preference so much as a Pile of Stuff, because I’m not in the mood today to be ranking things in a heirarchy. A Pile of Stuff is way better.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This isn’t, of course, the be-all and end-all of anything – just a personal take – so I’d love to hear your own suggestions in the comments, with no rules on style! The only rules were 1) fairytale themed; and 2) attempting (if not always succeeding) to do something interesting.

PART ONE OF MIRANDA’S PILE OF POP PRINCESSERY, FROM 10 to 6!

10. Janelle Monae: Sir Greendown

I throw up my hands here – this is a flagrant excuse for me to talk about Janelle Monae. Her image is more robot warrior rock star than princess. This track is one of her dreamier moments, and I admit that aside from a faintly Angela Carter-esque meet me at the tower/the dragon wants a bite/of our love moment, it’s actually pretty straightforward prince-awaitin’ fare – but actually that makes it a funny little island in the context of the rest of her work (check out the bolshy Motown-tinged slice of pure aural glory that is Violet Stars Happy Hunting! and you’ll see what I mean). Monae is fond of her concept albums, and combines a sci-fi android alter-ego with a deep- seated love for The Wizard of Oz. But the forbidden love of her android persona Cyndi Mayweather and the human millionaire Greendown (the storyline of her album and EPs) kinda is a space-age fairytale. (Oh, and go and listen to Wondaland, too.)

9. Kate Bush: The Red Shoes

Because it’s good to be obvious. For the unfamiliar, Kate made an entire album based on both the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale of the same name (as well as the 1948 film, which also drew on the same text). The story itself is unrivalled, if nightmarish, lecturing Victoriana is your thing – read Anderson’s text here and cringe! – but for Bush it proved fertile songwriting ground. The story’s about a girl whose vain attraction to a pair of red shoes (RED! IN CHURCH! SCANDAL) is punished by an angel – she finds she is unable to take the shoes off, or stop dancing, and ends up having to ask the local executioner to cut off her feet. Which then chase her around. Yeah, her disembodied feet, still dancing, follow her around and haunt her. In the end she repents thoroughly …and dies. As you do. Kate Bush’s version, on the other hand, is a hymn to dancing the dream and making the dream come true and enjoying your desires, even so-called dangerous ones. Or as Prof Bonnie Gordon puts it in this essay, “by singing and reclaiming this story meant to constrain women’s bodies and their erotic potential, Bush confronts and overturns its original inherent violence.”

8. Emilie Autumn: Shallott

Ah, Madame Autumn. Prone to self-indulgence on occasion she may be (The Art of Suicide just bores me, for example) but when she’s on form, she’s good fun. I much prefer her when she’s interacting with a story or old folk tale trope that already exists, like, say, with Rose Red from her debut album Enchant, as opposed to when she’s languidly drawling about how Dead Is The New Alive on far less ethereal later LP Opheliac. Here’s Shallott, in which the famous tragic lady of Arthurian legend and Tennyson’s poem gets a soapbox of her own. Driven to distraction by sheer boredom, preternaturally aware that her life story’s already been written for her, archly quoting her own poem, and almost determined to die as flamboyantly as possible, Autumn’s take on the Lady may be angsty, but she’s also deliciously sarcastic – now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me!, she spits. Worth braving the gothic-girl-lost frills and flounces for.

7. CocoRosie: Werewolf

When I saw CocoRosie live a year or two ago, they took the stage in fake moustaches and proceeded to blow me away. Lyrically, only they know what Werewolf is really about, but I love the sudden changes of direction, the stream-of-consciousness narratives, and the thoughtful melancholy that hangs around my speakers in clouds after the music’s stopped playing. Corny movies make me reminisce / They break me down easy on this generic love shit / First kiss frog and princess … I’m-a shake you off though, get up on that horse and / Ride into the sunset, look back with no remorse…

6. Skye Sweetnam: Part Of Your World

I wanted to include a Disney cover- something done as a pop-punk number with a gutsy, bouncy female vocal. In my head, with a change of context, some spit and elbow grease, the song might come out kinda like the Disney Princess version of No Doubt’s Just A Girl.

A survey of YouTube’s trove of punk/rock Disney covers reveals a really male-heavy bunch of bands. (Ladies, where are you? Where’s my hardcore cover of Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, eh?) This was the closest match for a female-voxed attempt at this song (Ariel’s big ballady number from The Little Mermaid) that YouTube could offer me – I’d have preferred something rougher round the edges, but it’s still good fun. Avril-esque Skye Sweetnam, then: she’s supported Britney live, provided Barbie’s singing voice on a Mattel DVD, fronts metal band Sumo Cyco – VARIED CAREER TRAJECTORY – and overall sounds like Bif Naked on a sugar high (no bad thing in my book). Album B-side Wolves and Witches is also sugary fun, if lyrically a bit join-the-dots.

Haters should note that Miley Cyrus has also had a crack at this song, and by God, she phones it in like nobody’s business, making Skye’s effort sound edgier than Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by comparison.

SO! Readers. Could you do better than Skye? Dust off your Fender. Record it. Get in touch. And I will lavish THE FAME OF BADREP upon you. Provided you don’t sound like a cat in a tumble dryer. (Possibly even if you do.) Extra points if you do Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as a B-side. No wildly feminism-relevant reason. I just like it. (I use antlers in all of my DECCCC-o-rating…)

On that note, come back tomorrow morning for Part Two, in which we discover why Nicki Minaj, Paramore, and … Benjamin Zephaniah (trust me, he’s relevant) are rubbing shoulders.