The Magic Toyshop

Melanie truly lives in a nightmare. I mean of course there are more terrible things in the world but I couldn’t imagine having to go through the same thing at the age of fifteen. It’s not fair to compare nightmares and torments. What a horror to be living under one roof with a wicked family member of her own. I would say it’s a bit dark. However, I was a tad bit underwhelmed because I found myself wanting more and more of the nightmare during and once I finished reading. Hoping to read more of Carter’s works soon since this was my first. Glad I started with this one, yes!

No one does dark fairytales about teenage girls coming to terms with their identity and sexuality quite like Angela Carter. Her writing is lyrical and dreamy and atmospheric, much like the imagination of a girl growing into a woman, always at the odds with the crass reality she inhabits.

Carter accurately captures what being a teenage girl feels like, down to the dread and fear the world around you can bring. A feeling of unease as if someone is always leering at you but also the naivete that comes with youth where one does not know better - yet. "The Magic Toyshop" expresses this perfectly.

Where do I start...? Listen this is a book the author clearly put a lot of love into and they obviously know, technically, what they're doing. The images are vibrant and the setting is thick with atmosphere but its one of those books that will leave you with a heady dread days after you walk away from it. Did I learn anything vital about humanity? I don't know. Will I be having nightmares? Absolutely.

trigger warning: domestic abuse It is the Night, Revisited. Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop is a work of magical realism that I feel borders on being a disturbing read for me. It is haunting as much as it is mesmerising; the writing of it is so atmospheric so as to invite one to become immersed - or, entangled - in its many layers. It is the night that is laid out in the first chapter of the book - ominous, wondrous - revisited, page after page after page. My first time reading this (which was when I read it as a library book that I had borrowed on a whim, sometime very close to my thesis deadline last year and therefore, at the time, managed only to read a good quarter of), I felt that there was so little point to this night that was described so intensely. But having read it anew, I feel awestruck by the weight of its allegory in how the rest of the story is told. It is so clever and so cunning. And I feel that the same naive curiosity that had called out to our heroine, Melanie, on the night that is ‘revisited’ throughout the book is the same force that draws me to this story: this desire to plunge into the trenches of a world that is so different and vividly so, if only for a while - regardless of what is waiting on the other side. The Other Side. Melanie is fifteen and as such, finds herself at the brink of childhood. The book opens with her discovering and marvelling over the changes that are happening in her body. It delves into what it means for her to be facing these changes (emotionally and physically); and what it means for her to then be confronted by circumstances that have her being plunged over the brink of childhood and on to the other side when her family becomes uprooted from their comfortable life in the countryside to London, where she meets her estranged uncle, his family and the strange toyshop that they run. There is nothing of Melanie’s experience of becoming an adult / growing out of her childhood that I would call typical, but I am so fascinated by how much of it is as fraught with the emotions that are typical of this period of change - the confusion of being at this age, the desire to love / be loved, and the desperation for things to return back to the way they were that is as strong as the desperation for things to change. What feels at first to be a story focused exclusively on the curious findings in a magical toyshop, turns out to uncover much more than meets the eye. To be Immersed Once More. And even more than what meets the eye is this depth to the story - the intricacies of which Angela Carter untangles delicately while also maintaining the richness of the story’s ominous backdrop and atmosphere. This is what stands out the most to me. The use of magical realism in the Magic Toyshop feels subtle, and it is both stunning and unsettling to behold. Coming to the end of this book, I feel as unsettled as I was when I first started, but I am also as intrigued as ever. So much so that I want to immerse myself once more: to again revisit the feeling of being called to by a beckoning night and uncover more curious findings that lie in waiting on the other side. And this might mean another Angela Carter book sometime in the future (though I have to admit I feel sufficiently disconcerted for now).