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Heroes and Villains (Penguin Modern Classics) [Kindle Edition]

Angela Carter (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews) |
Print List Price: £9.99
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Review

'An unashamed fantasist, a fabulist of daemonic energy' (The Times )

'Angela Carter is a genius' (Victoria Glendinning )

Product Description

Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination.

Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, Heroes and Villains is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.

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Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 333 KB
  • Print Length: 180 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0141192380
  • Publisher: Penguin (3 Feb 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B004MYFQAY
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #33,913 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Angela Carter
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Eileen Shaw TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
After the apocalypse the world is divided into the steel and concrete villages of the professors and marauding bands of Barbarians. Apart from that there only those who live in holes in the ground, mostly grotesquely deformed with maybe an extra eye, no elbows or several too many fingers.

One day, Marianne, the very bored daughter of one of the professors watching from her tower window as the village comes under attack, sees that one of the marauders has been injured and has crept to hide in a stable. When she goes, late at night, to see if he is dead, she finds him very much alive and leaves the safety of the village to join his band of Barbarians.

The story of Marianne and Jewel is a tale of hatred, fighting, rape, violence and despair - but also of love. Fitting the apocalyptic nature - end of time, reorganisation of social structures, the reinvention of the evil eye, the danger of zoo animals abroad, the unrelieved filth and chaos of an army on almost permanent manoeuvres, this is an amazing story. Jewel is a fabulous creature, a wild animal, a knowing lover, a tattooed, tribal leader. But the priest of the tribe Donally, with his sleeping snake and his enigmatic pronouncements becomes an implacable enemy to Marianne. Yet at times, they are closer, all three than to anyone else in the tribe. They know something of the terrors, torments and temptations of leadership - at its heart is fear.

This is another fabulous confabulation from the wonderful Angela Carter, set in a future in which order and peace is rapidly decomposing. Who are the heroes, and who the villains in a world where civilisation no longer exists?
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Format:Paperback
She begins the book as a seemingly straightforward love(?) story about an intelligent, well bred, but disenchanted girl who befriends a barbarian in a post apocalyptic setting. In the last 1/3 of the book she capitalizes on that "love" story to allegorically delve into the social structures, hierarchies, and deviance of mankind in a matter of 90 pages or so. The work is necessary, and the parallels she makes with power, race, and gender dynamics are insightful throughout. The last 90 pages are truly explosive compared to the first part - they take you to a place where language use is unique but somehow still completely appropriate.

I had never read Carter but will pick up some more books this weekend.
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Amazon.com:  1 review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Savage love 2 April 2011
By Jay Dickson - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Angela Carter's 1969 novel, while difficult to find in the United States, is an important work in her oeuvre: it marked her willingness to be hampered less by the demands of realism (the bounds of which she had pushed in her previous novels given their obsessive interest in fantasy) and to give full rein to her interest in the fantastic. In many ways, this short novel is a reworking of the basic story of her previous and better-known work THE MAGIC TOYSHOP, where a young girl is violently transported from the home of her upbringing to a savage and dreamlike realm dominated by a vicious patriarchal enchanter figure, except here we are now more firmly in the genre of fantasy fiction: her Marianne lives in a concrete-constructed world of the Professors and Soldiers, the last bulwark of civilization after a great nuclear war, and she is carried away by a "barbarian" named Jewel to the jungles that now infest Great Britain. (At the point of Marianne's transition, Carter's prose becomes much less sterile and assumes the richer and more dense qualities readers more often associate with her work.) Although the rogue professor living among and dominating the barbarians is an opponent for Marianne, her more complex antagonism is with Jewel, who becomes first her friend, then her rapist, and finally her husband. It might well be that the discomfiting relations of power and sex between the two characters, which are quite difficult to fit into current contemporary paradigms of relations between the sexes, is why this novel is not better known among Carter's work. (The nothing title, which Carter took from the famous Beach Boys song, is also likely a reason.) But it's a rich and fascinating fiction, and deserves to be read.
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Popular Highlights

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&quote;
we played at heroes and villains but now I dont know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances? &quote;
Highlighted by 4 Kindle users
&quote;
community stretched out years for ever and also somehow cancelled them out, so an event could as well have taken place yesterday or ten years before. &quote;
Highlighted by 3 Kindle users
&quote;
She wore a dead wrist watch on her arm, purely for decoration; it was a little corpse of time, having stopped for good and all at ten to three one distant and forgotten day. &quote;
Highlighted by 3 Kindle users

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