Writer and illustrator Louise Yates recommends the book she turns to when in need of a pick me up...

WISE CHILDREN, ANGELA CARTER

Feeling old? Daunted by the passage of time? Shake a leg. This is a novel that looks at life from a startlingly limber perspective.

The ‘wise children’ of the title (twins, Dora and Nora Chance) are celebrating their 75th birthday. These gaudy old birds fizz and spit energy as they go about selecting their party get-up in the market on Brixton’s Electric Avenue. They share their birthday with their 100-year-old father Melchior Hazard, who has (though never officially acknowledging these illegitimate daughters as his own) invited them to join him for his centenary celebrations.

Wise Children is a rebellious shout of a book, as the issue of the twin’s legitimacy becomes a wider exploration of what is ‘legitimate’ Art. While their father earned renown as a Shakespearean actor, they earned their crust as dancers ‘on the halls’ . His rejection of them inspires a subversive survival spirit that transforms all that is bawdy, base or vulgar into an elevated form. A belch becomes a thing of beauty, while Shakespeare’s sober lines fall into farce. The world is on its head; we’re on the wrong side of the tracks. This is fun!

Carter’s carnivalesque exaggeration describes an unstoppable life force and a fecund, regenerating spirit. Throughout the book, ambitiously staged extravaganzas resist order and descend into chaos and orgy. True ‘Art’ lies in the natural, the spontaneous, the untamed and illegitimate, while pomp, pretence and contrivance lead to disaster. Melchior’s several, heavily orchestrated parties manifest his desire to stage-manage his life and reputation, yet it is only when this imposed order is undone that the real party begins. Artifice is confounded by the forces of nature – by fire and sexual desire. Indignities, exposure and the revelation of carefully concealed truths are the unexpected, jubilant result. Grandma Chance (who we are led to suspect is really the twins’ mother) has an uncanny ability to explode social hierarchy and protocol with a belch, a giggle or an incendiary line. (What a refreshing way to turn up in Hollywood, for example, with only an oilskin bag and the opener ‘Who the fuck are you?’)

The book is a great riot of filthy colloquialisms, of cliché and euphemism. The Chance sisters speak their ‘mother tongue’ – not the fruity, mellifluous tones of their father, but the mangled vowels and vulgar quips of their grandmother. This casual torrent is every bit as rich and stimulating as the more elevated speech of legitimate Art and the ‘right’ side of the family. It is a particular language and humour that I fondly associate with an older generation in my own family. My great-grandmother, born in 1892, and – relative to me – the oldest person I’ve known, was tremendously funny. There is something of her in the characters described here: the pithy, laconic humour, the ego-deflating asides. She could floor pretensions with a well-placed swipe: the conspicuously unnecessary use of a long word would be met with the casual and solemn remark – ‘we had one of those, but its leg fell off’ – and she would eye up rich or unusual foodstuffs with the quietly satisfied ‘you-mark-my-words’ assurance, ‘That’ll turn your shit black’ .

Like Grandma Chance, Peregrine (the Chance twins’ nominal ‘father’ , but really their uncle) embodies an energy that gains its vim and vigour from protecting and preserving youth. He is just the sort of character I love in books and in life – charismatic, breezy natured and life affirming, a conduit of affection – a live wire. He’s also a reminder that living can be a magical experience. He engenders life, conjuring newborn babies and creatures from his pockets, and wonder out of thin air. ‘Larger than life, ’ physically and metaphysically, he busts the mould; he cannot sit still nor keep the measure of mediocrity, but must be gone. A force of nature, an adventurer and (rather aptly) a butterfly expert, his flight is always away from the ‘known world’ of the novel and into the realm of the extra ordinary: into imagination and enchantment. I miss him when he wanders off page, yet his absences appear as small rehearsals for death and are a calm reminder that in life, in spite of love, people come and go.

‘Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death, ’ Dora says. Angela Carter was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1991, the year Wise Children was published, and died the following year aged 51. I’m deeply grateful to her for a book that celebrates the joy and hazards of living. I hope that I have the good fortune to grow as old, incisive and irreverent as the Chance twins; I believe it could be – as Carter so vividly imagined – one of life’s highest kicks.