If books had lists of ingredients, in the manner of packaged foods, the disclosure statement on The Magic Toyshop might well read: "pure and unadulterated Dickens." Here are all the familiar elements: orphaned children grappling with the dark side of London amidst eccentric characters whose odd appearances and quirky behavior are simultaneously beguiling and terrifying. Even the tiny touches remind us of Dickens's novels: an old white wedding dress, like Miss Havisham’s from Great Expectations , figures prominently in the plot, and the Christmas scene in The Magic Toyshop could easily have been devised by Ebeneezer Scrooge himself.
But the literary ingredients here, as in the food aisle of the supermarket, can be misleading. As the novel moves towards its conclusion, a more dysfunctional and menacing tone emerges, suggesting that Angela Carter's London is even darker and more destructive than Dickens’. Along the way, we get occasional, isolated hints, usually in passing comments, that The Magic Toy shop is not set in Victorian England. On the margins of the story we encounter airplanes, Disney characters, new wave films—hints of contemporaneity that never intrude into the center of our tale , but linger long enough to remind us that this is our world here, not some fictive recreation of the past.
Three children have been left as orphans after their parents died in a plane crash. Melanie, fifteen-years-old, is the oldest of the youngsters, and feels she must become a surrogate mother to her brother Jonathon, age twelve, and her baby sister Victoria. But the three are s huffled off to a relative’s house, where Melanie finds that her siblings adapt quite easily to the new setting, while she is the odd one out, unsettled and intimidated by her strange circumstances.
For the first time, she meets her uncle, Philip Flower, who owns a toyshop in a rundown neighborhood of South London. In an age of video games and mass-produced toys, Uncle Philip is a throwback to an earlier era. He makes hand-crafted toys—intricate mechanical devices, elaborate masks, beautifully carved wood figures. Yet the same man who puts such care and consideration into playthings, has no patience for children, or adults for that matter. He is an angry, demanding presence in the household, terrorizing the family members who live with him above the toyshop.
Readers familiar with the biography of author Angela Carter are tempted to see her own life story echoed in these pages. As with her heroine Melanie, Carter found herself s ent off to a relative in her childhood years—in the author’s case, she moved in with her maternal grandmother, who resided in Yorkshire, for its comparative safety during the Second World War. In a way, this set the tone for her subsequent life, marked by a constant quest to belong, to find an always elusive permanent home. As a teenager, she struggled with anorexia and loneliness, and may have felt even more isolated than Melanie in The Magic Toyshop . Looking back years later on her persona at age 18, Carter commented: "I looked like a 30-year old divorcee. I was shy, immature, insensitive, selfish, pain-in-the-neck, way-out and terribly unhappy.” In later years, she moved frequently, eventually living in Japan, Australia, Texas, Iowa, New York and (at the end of her life) London.
In The Magic Toyshop , our young protagonist finds herself living alongside equally troubled adults. Aunt Margaret, Philip’s wife, has been cowed into submission by her tyrannical husband. Since their marriage night, Margaret has lost the ability to speak, and communicates by jotting messages on blackboards and tablets. She is joined in the household by her two brothers, siblings who like Melanie became orphans at a young age. Francie, a violinist, is almost as silent as his sister Margaret, but his brother Finn is more extroverted, and his impudence gets him into constant trouble with the hot-tempered toymaker. Shortly after Melanie’s arrival, Finn begins courting her, and the fifteen-year-old girl is both attracted and repulsed by the older man’s advances.
Aunt Margaret is delighted by the new arrivals, especially by the youngest child Victoria, who gives the toymaker’s wife an outlet for maternal affection that has been thwarted in her own married life. Jonathon, for his part, finds satisfaction in learning how to make toy ships that his uncle plans to sell in the family shop. Melanie looks on in dismay as her siblings become integrated into a household where she still painfully feels herself to be an outsider. "But did she really want to belong to them?" she asks herself. "For a moment she ached with longing—then, just as quickly, revolted against them. They were dirty and common. She hated to use the word 'common', only common people called other people 'common'; her mother taught her that. But it fitted."
Uncle Philip spends most of time in the basement workshop, where he makes toys for the store and large wooden puppets that he uses in private shows that he stages for the other members of the household. His obsession with the puppets is more than a hobby, but rather an unhealthy mania—he is more concerned with the well-being of his wooden figures than with his own family. When Philip decides to stage a puppet enactment of the mythological account of Leda and the swan, with Melanie acting the part of Leda opposite a large puppet swan, the production takes on the ominous outlines of a psychological disorder disguised as a stage show.
If this were a true Dickens’ novel, virtue would finally triumph over vice at this point, and our main protagonists would now have a chance to emerge, à la David Copperfield , as the heroes of their own story. But Carter refuses to offer such an easy redemption. As The Magic Toyshop races to its dramatic conclusion, some are destroyed, others manage the narrowest of escapes, but even the survivors are scarred, literally and psychically. Even when puppets and puppeteer fade from view, readers are left with a troubling sense that someone might still be pulling the strings.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.