Status
Call number
Collections
Description
This crazy world whirled around her, men and women dwarfed by toys and puppets, where even the birds are mechanical and the few human figures went masked... She was in the night once again, and the doll was herself.' Melanie walks in the midnight garden, wearing her mother's wedding dress; naked she climbs the apple tree in the black of the moon. Omens of disaster, swiftly following, transport Melanie from rural comfort to London, to the Magic Toyshop. To the red-haired, dancing Finn, the gentle Francie, dumb Aunt Margaret and Uncle Phillip. Francie plays curious night music, Finn kisses fifteen-year-old Melanie in the mysterious ruins of the pleasure gardens. Brooding over all is Uncle Philip: Uncle Philip, with blank eyes the colour of wet newspaper, making puppets the size of men, and clockwork roses. He loves his magic puppets, but hates the love of man for woman, boy for girl, brother for sister...… (more)
User reviews
Melanie is on the cusp of adulthood and constantly thinking about love, marriage, and growing up. Her father, a successful author, and her mother are on a lecture tour of America while she and her brother and sister are at home. Her curiosity about sex and whether she is beautiful and Lady Chatterley’s Lover reaches a climax when she tries on her mother’s wedding gown and decides to wander around in it outside in the moonlight. This turns out to be not as romantic as she thinks. Almost immediately after, the children receive word that their parents have died in a plane crash and they are bundled off from their comfortable life to live with Uncle Philip, their mother’s brother, an eccentric toymaker. His wife, Aunt Margaret, is a sadly beaten down woman who doesn’t talk but frequently communicates with her eraseboard. Her two brothers also live with them – neat and quiet Francie, a fiddle player, and disheveled, sarcastic Finn who is learning the trade from Uncle Philip. Uncle Philip himself is largely absent from their day to day life, but he is an oppressive, menacing presence in the old house and his real passion – a puppet theater – becomes increasingly threatening to Melanie.
The writing is wonderfully evocative. A number of the setpieces – Melanie creeping around in the wedding dress, her hearing some night music, a walk with Finn to the ruined exposition grounds, a charged rehearsal and performance for the puppet theater - are memorably described and modern twists on Gothic tropes. However, I think my favorite passage was just a description of Aunt Margaret’s Sunday attire. Many of Carter’s other works are takes on fairy tales, and in this one, Uncle Philip is repeatedly compared to Bluebeard. But even with a few scenes that strain at the more realistic feel of the novel, besides the writing, the best part is the depiction of Melanie’s loneliness on losing her parents and leaving her home. Despite the fact that she has a brother and sister, she is still lonely. Jonathon has always been lost in the world of model shipbuilding and he continues that at their uncle’s house. Victoria is the baby and acts like one – she is immediately taken up by Aunt Margaret, who has no children. The little changes – the unpleasant bathroom – and significant ones – Uncle Philip’s violence and controlling attitude – both affect Melanie, and although they moved from the country to London, the family is even more isolated - the house and shop are dark, old, creaky and almost out of the 19th century. I didn’t especially care for Finn, who could be creepy but was also the object of Melanie's romantic thoughts, and thought some of his storyline was predictable. The ending is somewhat rushed and bizarre. Overall though an engrossing and well-written read.
Much has been made of Carter's riffs on folktales in her writings, and especially on the role of the Bluebeard story in The Magic Toyshop. It's true that she deliberately draws attention to 'Bluebeard' (and the related English tale of 'Mr Fox') by getting Melanie to muse on the correspondences; and in fact Carter alludes to her villain's facial hair by giving him a walrus moustache (though this is not in evidence in the film adaptation, a still from which is on the cover of my edition of the novel). But it's important to notice references to other fairytales, both explicit and implicit; for example in the dishing up of porridge at the breakfast table we are invited to recall the story of 'The Three Bears', and there are numerous other instances. But I'd like to draw attention to the centrality of puppets in the story, part of Carter's exploration of the dehumanising aspect of absolute power. In the ballet Coppélia (based on E T A Hoffman's story 'The Sandman') Swanilda suspects that her fiancé Franz has apparently fallen for the mysterious Coppélia, only to find that the latter is in fact a lifesize puppet. I'm sure Carter has taken elements from this (Franz perhaps suggested the name Francie) and similar tales, not least in the climactic Leda and the Swan scene, to help create such a rich mix of emotions and ideas and images.
It has often been said that folktales and myths, despite their often large cast of characters, are essentially about the relationships and dynamics within a family, and The Magic Toyshop largely fits this pattern in that most of the characters are related to each other. It's hardly surprising that incest rears its head, not just between two of the characters caught in flagrante but also in Uncle Philip's attempted rape of Melanie through the agency of his giant swan marionette.
Lots of other aspects of this tale make this for me a haunting and consummate piece of storytelling. I particularly like the puns and word-plays that she employs: dark-haired Melanie (from a Greek root, meaning black); the alliteration of Philip, Flower, Finn and Francie; the supine statue of Queen Victoria and the rather passive figure of Melanie's sister Victoria, the opposite of the active meaning of the name. The final conflagration, which is almost a deus ex machina resolution (despite being brought about by Uncle Philip himself), is a shocking conclusion but also with mythic resonances as Melanie and Finn, like a pair of doomed Celtic lovers, clamber out onto the roof, out in the open air away from the claustrophobic confines of this modern-day Bluebeard’s castle.
Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory of the Mirror Stage struck a chord with me, especially the opening pages in relation to this. It's all about Ego, the body image and the mother. Then the mirror was taken away from her when they moved to Uncle Philip's house. He reminded me of the Evil Queen in Snow White, which is again representative of the Mirror Stage. I think the title is quite apt, the toyshop is magic. Magic is a mysterious quality of enchantment and to be magic you possess distinctive qualities. Uncle Philip tried to perform his own magic by recreating a world he wanted and that he could control - Evil Queen? In one way or another they all possessed distinctive qualities and even down to the toyshop from the title, what is a toyshop? A toy is something you play with - which Uncle Philip did all the time, he played with them. An overwhelming 5/5 for me! It's now my fourth Angela Carter book and it certainly won't be my last.
Philip owns the eponymous toyshop, and quickly apprentices Jonathon who has an affinity for building model ships. Fortunately Philip isn’t around much, which affords Melanie space to develop relationships with the others, especially her aunt. But Philip also expects the family to attend elaborate and disturbing performances by his handmade puppets, and stroke his ego by responding with great enthusiasm. Anything less risks his wrath. Philip rules the house with an iron hand, but is unable to break the strong bonds between Margaret and her brothers. Melanie gradually comes to understand the reality of life in this family, and shifts from passive victim to active resistance. Anything more and I’ll be in spoiler territory; suffice to say the dramatic final chapter is simultaneously shocking and satisfying, while still leaving several loose ends.
This book was my introduction to Angela Carter. I understand she’s not an easy author to read, but this is one of her more accessible books. I may have to try another one someday.
I spotted a book named ‘The Magic Toyshop’ on a paperback carousel in the library. What was such a thing doing on the shelves for grown-ups? And why did it have a dark
I picked the book up, I began to read, and what I read was extraordinary. It was like nothing I had read before and it did things that I didn’t know books could do. After that I read every book by Angela Carter that I could lay my hands on, and I picked up more of those books with dark green covers – Virago Modern Classics – hoping to find more intriguing books and more oh so special authors.
And so it was Angela Carter who set me on a path of picking up books bearing unknown titles and unfamiliar author names, hoping to find more magic ….
I had nothing new to read for Angela Carter Week, but I had lots of books that I might revisit, to see what I might find in them with more experience of books and of life behind me. It seemed natural to start again with that first book, to revisit ‘The Magic Toyshop’.
At its heart is a simple story. Melanie is fifteen years-old and she has a lovely life; her parents are happy and successful, she and her siblings are much loved, and they have a beautiful home in the country. But Melanie’s parents are killed in an accident and the three children are sent to live with unknown relations …
But it is clear from the start that this will be a coming of age story like no other.
Melanie’s sexuality is awakening. She is drawn to her mother’s wedding dress, to put it on, to go outside. But she finds herself locked out and she has to shed the dress, bundle it up, climb the apple tree to get back inside.
“She parcelled up the dress and stuck it in the fork of the tree. she could carry it up with her and put it away again in the trunk and no one would know it had been worn if they did not see the blood on the hem, and there was only a little blood. The cat put its head on one side and turned it sequin regard on the parcel; it stretched out its paddy paw and stroked the dress. Its paw was tipped with curved, cunning meat hooks. It had a cruel stroke. There was a ripping sound.”
And when she wakes the next morning she learns that her parents are dead.
Angela Carter painted that scene gloriously, in such rich colours, and there was so much that you could read into it. The whole story was like that; a coming of age story twisted into the most profound, dark, gothic drama.
Melanie found herself in a dilapidated house where her tyrannical uncle ruled over his mute, cowed wife, and her two young brothers. It was a magic toyshop, but it was also a house ruled by fear. Melanie had to learn to live with that, with dirt and poverty, with her feelings for her aunt’s brother, Finn.
Sometimes she was drawn to him – as he was to her – and sometimes she was repulsed by him.
Conflicts and contradictions like that were threaded through the story.
Angela Carter painted vivid pictures in rich colours, picking out the strangest details. Those pictures are utterly compelling, but they are also disturbing, and sometimes repellent.
The most dramatic pictures of all were of her uncle, his life-sized puppets, and the puppet shows he drew first his family and then Melanie into:
“Red plush curtains swung to the floor from a large, box-like construction at the far end of the room. Finn, masked, advanced and tugged a cord. The curtains swished open, gathering in swags at each side of a small stage, arranged as a grotto in a hushed, expectant woodland, with cardboard rocks. Lying face-downwards in a tangle of strings was a puppet five feet high, a sulphide in a fountain of white tulle, fallen flat down as if someone had got tired of her in the middle of playing with her, dropped her and wandered off. She had long, black hair down to the waist of her tight satin bodice.”
In the end something broke. It had to.
Melanie had tried to change things. But there were some things that she didn’t know, that she didn’t understand.
‘The Magic Toyshop’ touches on some difficult subjects, but the images, the ideas, the symbolism, the eccentricity are just so wonderful. It’s untidy though, not a book for those with delicate sensibilities, who like things neat and tidy.
But I can’t pick this book apart. I loved it the first time I read it and I still love it now.
The best way I have to explain its appeal is to confess that I typed ‘Alice’ instead of ‘Melanie’ more than once, because Melanie’s situation seemed so much like Alice’s when she tumbled down the rabbit hole.
It sounds mad, and yet it works ….
But the household itself is a digression from the traditional Bluebeard fairy tale. Rather than being kept in isolation, Melanie takes solace in her aunt and in-laws: first because of the emotional bond based on the shared psychology living under Philip, then a stronger bond built upon mutual love and humanity, even in the face of Philip's dehumanizing aggression. The household itself is a subversion of Philip's terror by virtue of its collective strength and mutual encouragement; Philip, on the other hand, in isolation with a hobby of puppetry that surpasses his care and attention for actual fleshly humans, is lacking and weaker in comparison to the bonds that emerge among the rest of the family. A really interesting look at the psychology of fear, and a fascinating retelling of the fairy tale.
What a strange family she has joined - the Uncle, huge and imperious; the Aunt, struck dumb on her wedding day; and her two brothers, one a quiet fiddler, the other a
The story revolves around Melanie and how she manages to endure in this environment.
One quibble is that I was occasionally thrown out of the story by some issues with writing. One example I can point to is this: "And their father, who was he? Everything, family jokes and their parents' love-letters before they were married (if their parents had exchanged love-letters) and cut locks of treasured hair and clippings of birth announcements from yellowed old local newspapers. She felt she would die if she could not know everything." The parenthetical statement is out of character and just didn't go along with the mood of the narrator. It stopped me in my (reading) tracks....
But anyway, there wasn't that much of that. And I really did like it, it had a lot of unexpected moments in it.
If there is a flaw to this book, it is that the main character from the beginning longs to be loved by a man and married. She sees her older spinster nanny and her cat and she is scared this will happen to her. She arranges her body in various positions to echo the females in famous paintings and just longs for a man. You can tell when she finally reaches the point where she is kissed, admired, and loved that she doesn't want to settle in her mind into a life with a smelly older cousin from Ireland with gross teeth but at the same time she is thrilled to be loved and admired by a man that you get the sense she will overlook this.
I don't know...I think that sort of brought the book down a great deal for me. Otherwise, it's relatively light reading about a darker topic and I was looking for something quite like this in terms of writing style when I picked it up considering the heavy handed bleak days I must bike through in winter.
Carter's writing is at times, exquisite and at times, harrowing. This has all the elements of a fairy tale but goes much deeper than
The ending is abrupt and a little jarring because of that. With hindsight though, what else was there left to say?
Did find the first chapter hard work,
and the ending was a little rushed but still loved it.
It's about ... well, it's weird because it's NOT about a magic toyshop. So, yeah, there's that. There's a toyshop, but ... there's no magic there. There's a hint of maybe supernatural or gothic or something ... like 3 times. Just a hint. But that's it. And ... it's easy to chalk it up to exhaustion, imagination, stress... rather than ANYthing supernatural at all. So you think you're reading a book about magic, but it's just not.
Melanie loses her folks and has to go live with her uncle in a dirty, poor part of London. Her formerly rich and lavish life takes a severe nosedive as she attempts to navigate a world in which the patriarch is an abusive, angry, oppressive force. And poor 15-year-old Melanie struggles with not being the loved, pretty, spoiled girl she once was, as her 12-year-old brother withdraws further into himself and her 5-year-old sister essentially forgets her former life. Along with her uncle are his mute wife (who is only ever referred to as "dumb") and her two brothers, one of whom Melanie finds herself simultaneously repulsed by and drawn to. And the uncle is a toy maker who hates many of his customers, and he is obsessed with life-sized puppets, which is creepy and weird.
So yeah. It's like a creepy, weird, dark, depressing story about terrible things happening to people. Terrible things. But yes, it is well written. Carter has a talent.
So overall, three of 5 stars. Not enjoyable, but well done, if the story sounds like your kind of thing (and it apparently is for a LOT of people who really love this book).
Melanie is the eldest of three children from a well to-do upper middle class family. The only life she and her siblings has ever known is
I'm not sure what to make of The Magic Toyshop in that I didn't find anything remotely close to magical in the story itself. Melanie is coming of age, discovering the world around her is perhaps more twisted than what she once thought, while at the same time, discovering that the stirrings and longings of a girl, soon to be a woman, is vastly more complicated that she could have imagined. I wasn't able to connect fully with the story or the characters despite some atmospheric charms, so rather than feeling satisfied, I'm left with a gnawing sense of confusion.
The Magic Toyshop is, firstly, much more horrific and disturbing than the cute cover of this edition would lead one to
However, I did have the same issue with it as I did with the stories in 'The Bloody Chamber,' which is that the characters are both emotionally opaque and oddly passive. Even when dramatic events occur, the reader doesn't get the sense that decisions have been made that set those events in motion. Instead, there is a sense that it was inevitable that events would unfold the way they did; that the characters do not have free will. Carter is too good a writer for this to be unintentional; perhaps it reflects her world view. Personally, however, I find it bothersome.
Melanie is fifteen, living in rural England with her younger siblings, Jonathan and Victoria, and discovering her ripening sexuality. One night whilst her parents are away in America she find her wedding dress in a trunk and decides
Still feeling traumatised by the previous night's excursion her world is rocked the next afternoon when telegram arrives bringing news of her parents' death in an plane crash. She blames their death on her destruction of the wedding dress and soon afterwards along with her two younger siblings she is forced to leave the countryside and move to South London to live with their estranged maternal Uncle Philip. Melanie's only knowledge of her uncle is from her parents’ wedding photo.
Philip owns a toyshop and lives with his wife, Margaret, and her younger brothers, Francie and Finn, and he rules the house by tyranny. Philip likes to make life sized puppets which he uses to put on private performances and sees Melanie's ripening beauty as the perfect foil in his demented theatre. Philip's influence throughout this extended family is like breakers crashing onto a beach hitting the household in waves as the other family members' relationships fluctuate between compliance or resistance to his overbearing control.
Family relationships are central to this novel. As Melanie’s sexuality grows she grows closer and closer to Finn until they begin to form the basis of a new family independent of the world that they’re trapped in with Uncle Philip. However, it is Margaret's relationship with her brother Francie that leads to the climax of this novel. However, this is not the only relationship that is sorely tested. Finn takes Melanie to visit an overgrown park once used to house an Expo to took at a fallen statue of Queen Victoria which seems to symbolize the death of traditional patriarchy.
Overall I found this an enjoyable read but it failed to really hit the mark with the intrigues not quite strong enough to rescue the book. Uncle Philip is largely absent from the book as he toils in his workshop and personally I would have liked to see him have an greater presence. Also the ending has rather strong echoes of Jane Eyre. All in all the book does not quite live up to it's fascinating opening but is still a worthwhile read.
This splendid book was first published in 1967. The Magic Toyshop won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1969. From the very first page it became obvious to me - this is a creative and very well written
The story begins with Melanie (15), Jonathon (12), and Victoria (5), living in the beautiful countryside, under the care of their housekeeper, Mrs Rundle. (She's looking after the children while their parents were away on a lecture tour, in America)
I loved the moment when Melanie (unable to sleep on a hot summer's night) finds herself wearing her mother's wedding-dress. It was far too big! - Nevertheless, this excited, beautiful girl felt the urge and desire to go out into the garden, in her bare feet and embrace her sublime feelings, in the enchanting moonlight.
What happened next was very humorous and most amusing to read - but an unfortunate incident for young Melanie! (I'm sorry, but I'm not going to reveal the outcome!)
Unfortunately, tragedy soon strikes for the three children, when they are informed their mummy and daddy have died in an aeroplane accident, in America. The children are taken to London to live with relatives they have never met. Uncle Philip was a toymaker. He lived with his long-suffering wife, Margaret and her two brothers, Francie and Finn.
It soon became apparent to the unfortunate children that this family were poverty stricken. Their lives and circumstances had therefore changed forever.
Uncle Philip was a stern disciplinarian, and he took little notice of the three children. He cared more about his workshop and his wooden creations, than his family. Indeed, he had a brutal and fearsome relationship with Finn. However, Aunt Margaret treated Victoria like her own child, ably assisted by the caring Melanie. Jonathon enjoyed working in the workshop. He was encouraged by Uncle Philip to indulge himself in his passion for making models. In the meantime, Melanie was coming-of-age and she took a growing interest in the volatile Finn.
What follows is an intense and interesting story. Creative, sensuality, rich in colours, with emotional feelings, and endless impressions. You will enjoy reading about the fluctuating relationship between Melanie and Finn.
The climax of this story occurs over the Christmas period. Uncle Philip discovers a dark secret about his wife, Margaret and needless to say, all hell breaks out! - Finn's deliberately broken and destroyed Philip's beloved puppet-toy-swan, and he suddenly fears for his life! - With the house already on fire, a frenzy occurs, and it all ends in an abrupt and bizarre finale!
I found this an entertaining story with interesting characters. It's beautifully written and described
in wonderful detail. There's not much humour to be found in this book - but for me - it's all about the compelling circumstances and the survival of these dear, unfortunate children.