This is a fairy-tale. This is not a fairy-tale. It is both actually, boldly, brassily, sassily so, it is shocking too, demanding, poetry disguised as prose and so powerfully written as to demand that publishers worked hard to find a genre for it. Notionally YA because of the age of the key protagonists but it is actually sitting outside any marketing lines of demarcation. It's very different, a beautiful and ugly story, sometimes on the self-same page. Be warned; not for the faint-hearted or any Daily Mail reader who struggles with the nuance and detail of the world.
Tender Morsels is set in a notional European country, it's a pre-industrial society and Liga is trapped in a house in the woods with her dad. After her mother's death she has become not simply his about-the-house slave but he's sex toy too. Liga is raped, continually, she gets pregnant and whilst she is young and doesn't know what is happening to her when her monthly bleeds stop, we see her father's disgusting attempts to poison the babby (local dialect, and there's a lot of this in the story) out of her. Her father goes to a local mudwife (a witch basically) who takes his good coin and supplies him with herbal remedies as teas and potions that will make poor Liga miscarry. She does. Several times. And then, she cottons on and tries to hide her pregnancy from her dad by using animal blood to stain the towels she keeps herself clean with. She manages in this way to keep her latest pregnancy from him and when he discovers it very late, he repairs once more to the witch to get the abortion-inducing chemicals. He never returns, dies at the side of the road, supposedly hit by a passing Stagecoach.
Liga is alone, she has her babby. She tends her, raises her, calls her Branza. Liga has a quiet and idyllic pastoral life for a while, difficult, fighting cold and hunger but she is free of the horrible tyranny of her father's abuse so even these burdens are lighter. But her idyll is not for long as Liga becomes of interest to some local boys, five in all, and they discover her in the woods one day and gang rape her. Awful sexual violence again, depicted brutally using carefully chosen words, pain-riddled descriptions of the worst kind of desecration, but never gratuitous. Liga falls pregnant again and gives birth to Urdda, a dark-skinned child, obviously the result of one particular member of the gang rape.
As you can see these themes are difficult and painful. This is a fairy story in the genuine, visceral sense, it is exploring deep and dark motives against the backdrop of a simple, pastoral life. We might deify our pastoral, pre-industrial past but we all know it was full of violence, injustice and awful nastiness. The magical, fairy story elements impinge now, a magic realism delivered so deftly that we actually don't notice for a while. Through an accident of magic and the pulsing power of her heart's desire to protect her daughters from men and the other travails of the world, Liga's pain creates a bubble of new reality, a copy of the woods and the world that expunges all of the nastiness and harm. And there Liga and her daughters are left in peace, enjoying again an idyllic life in the woods.
This bubble of heaven is generally untrammelled but every now and then other people impinge on it. There's a duplicitous and disreputable dwarf that accesses it, his greed transmuting everything he touches within it to gold, pearls and treasure. He becomes immensely rich as a result when he returns to the world. And then there're also the bears, two in particular. Here Lanagan draws from actual village tradition from Europe, a spring celebration ceremony involving young men dressing as bears and chasing girls round the town, smearing their faces when they caught them with coal. One of these young men dressed in a heavy and sweaty bear outfit tumbles into Liga's heaven and is transmuted to a real bear. Here he falls in love with Liga and her girls and is kind and good to them. Time in Liga's heaven moves faster than in the real world so when the boy tumbles back out of their world again only moments have passed in the real world whilst he feels he has lived three years as a bear.
The book is beautifully written, unexpected descriptions, made-up words to convey brittle, nuanced emotions. It is also dark, dangerous and never shies away from the horror hidden deep inside our violent and folkloric past. As the story builds to a conclusion a less kindly man get transformed to a bear and then Urdda escapes the heaven and enters the real world. As the narrative builds to an incredible climax out in the real world the secrets of Urdda and Branza's births are revealed. Revenge occurs, magically inspired and as brutal and frightening as the original defilement of poor Liga.
A demanding, beautiful story powerful in the way it repeats on you even days later. Margo Lanagan has achieved something quite remarkable here, a fairy story with all of the darkness left in, there is a Once Upon A Time... there is the life in the woods and there is the dark nastiness of men defiling innocence. And there is redemption here to, redemption in a graphic and violent form that might leave Stephen King or Clive Barker flinching!
An awesome read, there's is much poetry here. What happens in this story is in fact a perfect oxymoron, there's peace and an idyll and love and companionship and then there's dark horror wormed away in the same such things. Liga is a towering figure, she overcomes the violence of her children's procreation to be an incredible mother, so loving, so true. Tender Morsels goes straight to the centre of the brittle curiosity that is at our figurative heart, we're capable of such love and compassion as well as such debilitating horrors too.
There're many lessons in here too, not all good, the sweetness of the righteous rage of revenge is quite delicious actually. It is a dish served cold in terms of time in this story, but the blood runs thick and hot when it does come. There is no turning of the cheek here, violence meets violence and we actually feel good about it.
Well done everyone involved in this project. Transformative fiction, not for the faint-hearted, a fairy tale for adults.
A rare five stars (*****)
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Andrew D Wright
Not for the faint-hearted, but the hype is true. Incredible read.
Granskad i Storbritannien den 16 april 2014Verifierat köp
Intrepid Newbie
A book I couldn't put down!
Granskad i Storbritannien den 2 juni 2010Verifierat köp
elisemlswansborough
love it
Granskad i Storbritannien den 8 september 2017Verifierat köp
Pensato
A bit indigestible
Granskad i Storbritannien den 18 februari 2012Verifierat köp
KelM
A beautiful tale
Granskad i Storbritannien den 17 maj 2017Verifierat köp