GENERAL INFORMATION
TITLE: WISE CHILDREN
AUTHOR: ANGELA CARTER
PAGES: 232
PUBLISHER: VINTAGE BOOKS
YEAR: 1991
GENRE: GENERAL FICTION
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Children
BLURB FROM THE COVER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITH1
A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and the Chances, Angela Carter’s witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins, and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.
EXTRACT
Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.
REVIEW
I thought Wise Children was a great. I’ve read a few of Carter’s novels and all of her short fiction and am generally a fan. She’s on my list of ‘must read’ authors. Wise Children is her final novel. Carter died a year after it was published.
Wise Children is split into five chapters. The chapters are quite long and generally more than 50 pages. Each chapter is a mix of current events with the aging Chance sisters attending the funeral of the man they have been told is their natural father and flashback to their life in the theater. This works really well. Carter blends the time shifts into each other so you’re not really aware of moving backwards and forwards in time.
I thought Dora, the narrator of Wise Children worked really well. She had a very strong voice. I was drawn deeper and deeper into Dora and her twin sister Nora’s story. I thought the opening when Dora directly addresses the reader worked very well.
One of the best things about Wise Children is the characters. Wise Children is set in the world of show business and the theater. You can imagine what weird and wonderful characters exist. Carter really pulls out the stops to make her characters especially Dora and Nora so alive, real and bursting with energy they leap off the page.
Most of Wise Children consists of flashbacks Dora has of her and sister’s life. They grew up in the theater world. They had complicated lives. They had a mother and the man in her life that they called father but they also had their biological father who had never declared them his children. It’s unclear if he even knew they existed. I really enjoyed Dora recalling her and her sister’s glory days. I found something incredibly sad about this as if Dora was a doddery old woman in the last days of her life recalling her glory days. The theatrical world Dora creates is rich, right, bawdy, vibrant and wonderful. I fell in the love with the people and the world.
RATING
