The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

An Angela Carter book is akin to a dream, where the everyday and ordinary can seamlessly slide into the surreal and fantastical, and sometimes into the nightmarish. And as in a dream, every detail is likely to have a symbolic meaning, often sexual in nature.

On the surface, this novel is a coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old girl. The novel begins when Melanie, clad in her mother's white wedding dress, is locked out of her home in the middle of the night and sheds her garments, which have become blood stained, to climb an apple tree into her bedroom. The next morning her childish life ends forever when she learns her parents have died in a plane crash. The symbolic picture of loss of innocence is obvious (perhaps even too explicit).

Melanie and her two younger siblings are sent to live with their maternal uncle, who makes toys and has a toyshop. There she meets her uncle's wife Margaret and Margaret's two brothers, and learns that her uncle is a brutal tyrant, who is perhaps more than a little mad. This, of course, all sounds like many, many folk tales and fairy stories and even modern novels--the orphaned children mistreated by a bad uncle, stepmother, stepfather, and so forth. But this is a fairy tale with a bite, similar to those of the Brothers Grimm. The magic of this toyshop is not good magic.

Myth and symbolism and allegory and our collective unconscious all come together in this remarkable novel, as in others by Angela Carter. The language is lush, perhaps too much so in this one, at times, but the totality is overwhelming.

My only criticism of the novel would be that some of the ending events seem contrived and illogical, with no previous hints of a major plot development. But perhaps I just missed the hints. I will read the book again.

For those who enjoy magic realism, the Gothic, and the just plain surreal, this novel is a treat. I also recommend Carter's Nights at the Circus, one of the best books ever.