Love

This is one of Angela Carter's earlier works and though it is not as adept nor as well-written as her other novels, it is still a work of beauty and well worth reading. It is the story of a menage a trois. Three freaks in the 1960's are entangled in a relationship that is mutually destructive for all of them. The triangle includes a husband, his suicidal wife, and his very bizarre brother. Carter writes a modern-day post-script to this early novel, putting the characters in a contemporary perspective. This is a nice touch to an otherwise limited novel. The story is rather basic. A frail ephemeral hippy-waif despairs of her husband's infidelities. She loses her mind and takes her life. Her life is interwoven with her husband's drug-crazed, caped brother. All three are trapped in a Gothic-like environment of their own creation.

It's hard to pidgeonhole Angela Carter's "Love" into a specific genre. It has all the elements of a melodrama - love, sex, madness, violence, even a hint of incest - but the entity created by the talented Carter isn't remotely the cheap and tawdry sexploitation feast you might expect from such seemingly unpromising material. If I had to categorise this slyly mythical tale of a deadly love triangle between/among two half brothers, Lee and Buzz (one blonde and fair, the other dark with traces of foreign blood) and a girl, I'd call it a gothic love story. With great skill, Carter quickly sets the tone for the novel with an opening scene that is simply unforgettable. The picture of Annabel, crouching in the dark under the open skies, is an early hint that the cosmic powers will play their part in shaping the lives of our three protagonists. Carter seems to like writing about lowlife in 60s England - her debut novel "Shadow Dance" is another example - but in "Love", she gives the subject an off centred spin to create something unique. You'd be hard pressed to find a sympathetic character in this chilling but compact short story. They're nearly all dirty, scruffy, drunk and vile. Annabel's parents don't count because they're middle class and even they're helpless in saving their daughter. The waif like Annabel (shades of Ophelia) isn't the victim you think she is. Mentally frail and otherworldly to the point of self absorption, she has no real grasp of reality and wreaks havoc on the lives of the menfolk around her. The gorgeously written tattoo scene is especially memorable and symbolic of the nature of her relationship with Lee. It's all about possession and control, aspects of love which the brothers have no ability to respond to or cope with. You know that it can only lead to tragedy. Haunted by the memory of their mother who lost her mind and gave them over to the care of their aunt, Lee and Buzz are as debauched as their friends and as out of control as Annabel. Carter is an incredibly gifted writer. Her prose is imaginative, colourful and sparkling and always a pleasure to read. This book is a wonderful read. It comes highly recommended.

Gorgeously painful to read, impossible to forget, and inexplicably unknown, "Love" is about a crazy trust fund girl who wrecks on the shores of Bohemia, about two brothers trying to emerge from the shadow of their fundamentalist Mairxist childhood, about the inevitable punishments of heterosexuality, and since this is Carter, about the intimate connections between madness, memory, fiction, and the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. It's not a waste of time.