The book I’m most ashamed not to have readĪnything people are currently raving about. I always get to a point early on in The Waste Land where I just lose the will to live. Paul Murray’s brilliant, mordant comedy about the financial crisis, The Mark and the Void. I hardly ever cry at books, but I do tend to fill up a bit over the fate of Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Then I tried Swann’s Way – and it’s amazing! I always thought Proust would be hard going. It’s a perfect novel, a masterpiece of domestic gothic. Repetitive, preposterous – I can’t defend them at allīarbara Comyns’ 1959 The Vet’s Daughter, about a dreamy Battersea girl who discovers the ability to levitate, with awful results. My guilty pleasure is Dennis Wheatley novels. Philippa Gregory’s sublimely kinky Wideacre trilogy got me excited about the ways in which historical fiction could be a roaring good read yet also have things to say about gender, class and power. Jekyll and Hyde, triffids, Stepford wives – something like that. There is a coyness here that owes little to Carter and a great deal to soft porn, a peculiarly English mixture of rose-tinted erotica and trousers around the ankles rumpy-pumpy.I’d love to have written a novel that gave the world a new gothic concept or meme.
Sadly, Neil Murray's production never fulfils the promise of that first image, and before long it becomes foremost a demonstration that sex on stage is frequently a toe-curling embarrassment. Carter's lush prose, well served by Bryony Lavery's adaptation, is moist with symbolism, and the girl's final escape is not just from the sadistic marquis and death, but from her masochistic self. Carter was reading De Sade when she wrote The Bloody Chamber, and the erotic possibilities of pain and pleasure suffuse this violently sexual fairytale as the 17-year-old virgin bride is taken to her wealthy husband's remote castle, deflowered and makes a bloody discovery in an underground chamber. The Marquis lies sprawled across the family piano in a feminine pose passive, erotic and quite, quite dead. N eil Murray's staging of Angela Carter's ripe reimagining of Bluebeard begins at the end, and with a startling image.
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