Mortal Love
Sep. 29th, 2004 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI’ve been a huge fan of Elizabeth Hand’s ever since I first read her brilliant short story The Erl-King in an Ellen Datlow anthology some years ago. The homage is more subtle than the borrowed title may make it seem: the story is actually the actress Liv Tyler’s girlhood imagined against a backdrop of Gothic ruins, monstrous artists and the green, green Maine summertime.
Her themes are ones very close to my own heart: the vulgar and the sublime share a narrow bandwidth in the human consciousness. Gossip and celebrity schmoozing are the primary process of folktales. When enough time has passed, this ore is transformed into myth.
So Hand is one of those writers I make a point of buying in hard cover. And it’s grieved me over the years that her novels have never been as good as her short stories. The lush prose style, which served her well in the tighter, shorter narrative structure seemed excessive, even a trifle ludicrous, when there was 300 plus pages of it to slag through. Her characters are never very well defined; they’re interesting because they borrow numinosity from archetypal sources. For some reason, this clicked in the short pieces but short-circuited in the longer novels.
All this a preamble to saying that I am two-thirds of the way through her latest book, Mortal Love, and it is fabulous. Almost Nabokov-ian in its language and detail, and brilliant in its mirroring of dancer and dance. Interesting characterizations as well though she got the Mysterious Woman, the central muse, wrong: muses are always 15 year old girls without fathers. Robert Graves said so, so it must be true. But her minor characters are dazzling, particularly the character of Jacobus Candell (who, I take it, is a fictionalized version of the pre-Raphaelite patricide Richard Dadd, painter of one of the most truly disturbing visions ever committed to canvas, The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke – check it out next time you’re at the Tate Museum.) I am so pleased for Elizabeth Hand. She is going to be a major writer.
Her themes are ones very close to my own heart: the vulgar and the sublime share a narrow bandwidth in the human consciousness. Gossip and celebrity schmoozing are the primary process of folktales. When enough time has passed, this ore is transformed into myth.
So Hand is one of those writers I make a point of buying in hard cover. And it’s grieved me over the years that her novels have never been as good as her short stories. The lush prose style, which served her well in the tighter, shorter narrative structure seemed excessive, even a trifle ludicrous, when there was 300 plus pages of it to slag through. Her characters are never very well defined; they’re interesting because they borrow numinosity from archetypal sources. For some reason, this clicked in the short pieces but short-circuited in the longer novels.
All this a preamble to saying that I am two-thirds of the way through her latest book, Mortal Love, and it is fabulous. Almost Nabokov-ian in its language and detail, and brilliant in its mirroring of dancer and dance. Interesting characterizations as well though she got the Mysterious Woman, the central muse, wrong: muses are always 15 year old girls without fathers. Robert Graves said so, so it must be true. But her minor characters are dazzling, particularly the character of Jacobus Candell (who, I take it, is a fictionalized version of the pre-Raphaelite patricide Richard Dadd, painter of one of the most truly disturbing visions ever committed to canvas, The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke – check it out next time you’re at the Tate Museum.) I am so pleased for Elizabeth Hand. She is going to be a major writer.
