Wise Children (Magill Book Reviews)

The last in a line of wildly inventive novels, WISE CHILDREN—published shortly before Angela Carter’s death—is in many respects her gentlest and most conciliatory work. Written as the first-person memoir of seventy-five-year-old Dora Chance, half of a twin-sister song-and-dance team, the novel re-creates five crucial periods in the sisters’ lives, each of which centers on an encounter between the twins and their natural father, Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. Through these encounters, the novel explores the relationship between legitimacy and illegitimacy, fathers and children, reality and illusion, tragedy and comedy.

Orphaned at birth, the twins are adopted by the questionably respectable Mrs. Chance, who gives them lots of love and dancing lessons. On stage, they enjoy moderate success, but they are consistently disappointed by their father’s refusal to acknowledge them. When they are grown, he makes partial amends by taking them with him to Hollywood to appear in a Shakespearean film. Hollywood offers the sisters their big, if corrupt, chance, but they refuse to take it. They return to England, “sadder and wiser girls,” but with their innocence and goodness intact. Over the years, their vaudeville career declines. At the nadir of their fortunes, they are invited to Melchior Hazard’s one hundredth birthday party, where they at last find love and acceptance in a final scene of “laughter, forgiveness, generosity, reconciliation.”

Amid its improbable events and comic exuberance, the book makes several serious points. It shows that families may comprise the unlikeliest conjunctions of people, bound by love, not law. Accordingly, there is no such thing as legitimacy or illegitimacy. Further, by repeatedly calling attention to its own artifice yet nevertheless persuading the reader to suspend disbelief, the book demonstrates that illusion prevails over reality. In its determined cheerfulness, the book asserts that the difference between comedy and tragedy lies not in subject matter but in treatment. Yet, by exhorting the reader to look on the bright side of things, the narrative suggests that although for the moment comedy is center stage, tragedy is always waiting in the wings.

Sources for Further Study

Belles Lettres. VII, Summer, 1992, p. 57.

Chicago Tribune. December 19, 1991, V, p. 3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 5, 1992, p. 3.

The Nation. CCLIV, April 20, 1992, p. 526.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIX, April 23, 1992, p. 9.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, January 19, 1992, p. 7.

Review of Contemporary Fiction. XII, Summer, 1992, p. 195.

The Times Literary Supplement. December 13, 1991, p. 12.

The Wall Street Journal. January 22, 1992, p. A12.