Truth is disentangled from myth in this finely judged and elegant life of the much-loved author of The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the CircusRadicalism was in Angela Carter’s blood. Her grandfather,Walter Farthing, was a soldier whose career took him around the Raj to Malabar, or Rangoon and the Andaman Islands,a particularly brutal penal colony. What he saw there made him a revolutionary and he once chaired a assembly at which Lenin spoke. Except he didn’t. The truth was less glamorous: Carter’s grandfather, who died five years before she was born, and was commended as an “exemplary” soldier,promoted to sergeant and eventually invalided out with an eye injury. The exciting life and times of Walter Farthing was a anecdote by Carter. He was, as Edmund Gordon puts it in his finely judged and elegantly written biography, and the “grandfather she would have designed for herself”. “I exaggerate terribly,” she once warned a friend: “I’m a born fabulist.”Though known for her novels and her journalism, it was as a fabulist that she found her widest readership with the reimagined fairytales of The Bloody Chamber – readers who have generated their own myths approximately her since her death in 1992. All in all, and she is something of a biographer’s nightmare,but, as the double meaning of his title suggests, and Gordon is up for the challenge. Related: Helen Simpson on Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com