The Passion of New Eve

Everyone knows what the word "passion" means in ordinary usage; it's a strong feeling, often of sexual desire, and generally considered to be the opposite of reason. It means something quite different in religious terms, though. The word comes from a Latin root that means "suffering" and originally referred to the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Later, it came to mean the suffering that would lead a person to sainthood, the sensation of leaving one's body and joining with God for a time. You can see the resemblance to eroticism there. Angela Carter certainly did; the protagonist of "The Passion of New Eve" goes through both suffering and ecstasy at various junctures. And yes, that means a certain amount of bloody sexual violence, although it stops well short of pornography. This novel isn't about sex and violence anyway; it's mostly about sin, forgiveness, self-image, and the possibility of happiness once you've learned acceptance. All for under 200 pages. You might call "Passion" a work of science fiction, since it takes place in some not-too-distant future, but then you might as well call it a Western because most of it takes place in the southwestern desert of the United States. A young professor named Evelyn (which is a man's first name in England when pronounced EVE-linn) comes to New York for a college job, only to find that black revolutionaries are about to burn the college to the ground. These same revolutionaries then build a wall around Harlem while feminist revolutionaries take random potshots at miscellaneous men. Good times. Evelyn begins an affair with an underage black exotic dancer, whom he abandons when she gets pregnant. Hoping in the vaguest way for some kind of renewal, he flees New York for the aforementioned desert and gets captured by a group of those feminist revolutionaries. These women live underground and worship a former plastic surgeon who has, by her art, transformed herself into a grotesque goddess-form. She takes a sperm sample from Evelyn and then surgically transforms him into a fully-functioning woman (uterus and all) named Eve. She intends to impregnate Eve with Evelyn's seed and thus transform the mythological underpinnings of Western civilization as it collapses under its own weight, whatever that means. We're about halfway through the book. Stay tuned. All of this is revealed on the book jacket, so I have no qualms about revealing it here. I assure you, the rest of this little adventure is even more bizarre. Someone asked me a little while ago if "The Passion of New Eve" is surrealistic - that's putting it mildly. Some people enjoy creative work that goes off the deep end like this and others prefer something that deals with more recognizable events. You'll have to judge for yourself if this novel is for you. If it helps, you might consider the fact that "Passion" has more on its mind than just getting as weird as possible. Let's put it this way; for a long time, thinkers about ge

Angela Carter makes few concessions to the ordinary reader. She is abstruse, wilful, demanding, her vocabulary is immense, her intelligence daunting. She dares to make her characters one-dimensional (though colourful and believable), her story as unlikely and fantastic as possible. The Passion Of New Eve is set in a vividly visualised, but almost unreal, civil-war-locked U.S.A. that is rapidly disintegrating into all-out civil war. 'Bizarre' might, perhaps, be an understatement when considering the plot. Amongst other things, Evelyn, a young, 'straight' young Englishman, is forced to undergo a sex-change operation that transforms him ('a change in the appearance will restructure the essence') into a perfect woman. 'Eve' is then - after an attempted escape - taken prisoner by Zero - a barbaric, one-eyed, one-legged man, and his personal harem of several 'wives', who worship him the more unquestioningly and eagerly, the more thoroughly he degrades them. Following this, Eve - having found her true love - enjoys a sexual interlude in the desert that completes her realisation of herself as a fulfilled man-loving woman. The best part of the novel is the beautiful ending. Here the author uses surrealistic imagery superbly in order to explore themes of time, re-birth and the inexorable power of nature. It is intensely affecting. The whole book is held together by Carter's boldness and dazzling style. She is dreaming frightening and blackly resonant dreams, and by her artistry makes them plausible. A pity, then, that her uncompromising literary brilliance will alienate and bore those most in need of her provoking vision.

Angela Carter makes few concessions to the ordinary reader. She is abstruse, wilful, demanding, her vocabulary is immense, her intelligence daunting. She dares to make her characters one-dimensional (though colourful and believable), her story as unlikely and fantastic as possible. The Passion Of New Eve is set in a vividly visualised, but almost unreal U.S.A. that is rapidly disintegrating into all-out civil war. 'Bizarre' might, perhaps, be an understatement when considering the plot. Amongst other things, Evelyn, a young, 'straight' young Englishman, is forced to undergo a sex-change operation that transforms him ('a change in the appearance will restructure the essence') into a perfect woman. 'Eve' is then - after an attempted escape - taken prisoner by Zero - a barbaric, one-eyed, one-legged man, and his personal harem of several 'wives', who worship him the more unquestioningly and eagerly, the more thoroughly he degrades them. Following this, Eve - having found her true love - enjoys a sexual interlude in the desert that completes her realisation of herself as a fulfilled man-loving woman. The best part of the novel is the beautiful ending. Here the author uses surrealistic imagery superbly in order to explore themes of time, re-birth and the inexorable power of nature. It is intensely affecting. The whole book is held together by Carter's boldness and dazzling style. She is dreaming frightening and blackly resonant dreams, and by her artistry makes them plausible. A pity, then, that her uncompromising literary brilliance will alienate and bore those most in need of her provoking vision.

This is the most outrageous Angela Carter novel I've read. Just when you begin to settle into one bizarre plot, Carter turns everything upside down and takes the story down a completely different avenue. She still manages, however, to bring all of her seemingly disparate plot elements together at the novel's satisfying close.Evelyn's transformation from loathesome creep into a protagonist the reader actually cares about is a riotous roller-coaster ride, punctuated by Carter's beautiful prose and embellished by her perverse sense of humor. As always with Angela Carter, a satisfying, thought-provoking read!

In this, one of Carter's boldest and most subversive novels, the protagonist undergoes an excrutiating exercise in de-masculinization. As a female, he realizes that women truly are "made" into nurturers, into mothers, into objects of sexual desire. Carter's prose is richly--chillingly--beautiful, as she describes one man's confusing transformation from being the "hunter" into the "hunted." Quite possibly Angela Carter's finest work--as well as one of the most provocative studies of gender construction in the Western world.