'Fireworks' by Angela Carter

 Rooted in love, lust, anger, and perception, and laden with symbolism and allegory, Angela Carter’s ‘Fireworks’ is a darkly explosive and ambitious collection of nine stories. Reality gives way to a sonorously intense landscape of riotous and uncensored sensibility, whilst, as the reader, you peruse this bewitching compilation of twisted tales. ‘Fireworks’ starts off with the story ‘A Souvenir of Japan’ in which the effervescent city of Tokyo is subverted into a mirrored chamber, reflecting the longings and insecurities of an exiled English woman abandoned by her Japanese lover. It marks an apt, though somewhat mild, threshold to the dark and irreverent dreamland that is ‘Fireworks’. ‘The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter’ is the second piece in the book, followed by 'The Loves of Lady Purple' , 'The Smile of Winter', 'Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest', 'Flesh and the Mirror', 'Master', 'Reflections', and then, finally, 'Elegy for a Freelance'.

Of all the stories, ‘The Smile of Winter’ would seem to blaze the brightest in the short fiction. Here, with richly ‘languorous imagery and overripe vocabulary ‘ (Kirkus), Carter combines the ocean and the night sky to show what it is to be lonely. ‘On rainy nights when there is a winter moon bright enough to pierce the heart, I often find my face wet with tears so that I know I have been crying’, is an extract that hardly captures the perfervid stream of thought. However, I would not have placed ‘The Smile of Winter’ where it is in the book- the potency of its stasis is nullified in between an itinerant puppet show of murderous lust (‘The Loves of Lady Purple’) and a brother and sister’s nightmarish journey (‘Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest’). ‘The Smile of Winter’ should be at the end of ‘Fireworks’.

Even so, if you are prepared to pick your way through this gloriously wordy and often decidedly profane, series of stories, then you are certain to be dazzled by Carter’s pyrotechnic imagination.

With thanks to amazon.com for the image.