Heroes and Villains

by Angela Carter

Paperback, 1991

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

Collection

Recommended Books

Publication

Penguin Books (1991), Paperback, 160 pages

Description

With a new Introduction by Robert Coover 'An unashamed fantasist, a fabulist of daemonic energy' The Times Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination. Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, Heroes and Villains is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance. 'Angela Carter is a genius' Victoria Glendinning… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member trinityofone

A post-apocalyptic story, which is a genre I really like. This one didn't quite do it for me, however: I found the world fascinating, but the characters who inhabited it remained strangers to me (and the anti-climatic climax didn't help much, either). A book I didn't so much enjoy as find

occasionally interesting.

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LibraryThing member thioviolight

This fascinating read felt like a warped fairy tale, and had a bit of a hallucinatory effect. It breaks down the demarcation between heroes and villains, pointing out how social distinctions are a matter of how one perceives and defines things.

LibraryThing member isabelx

During the war, the Professors were safe in the deep shelters, while everyone else had to survive as best they could on the surface. Centuries later, the Professors live in fortified villages with Workers to do the farming and housework. The villages are periodically raided by nomadic barbarian

tribes, who take ammunition, cloth, food, and women, some of whom go willingly. And then there are the Out People, mutants who live in holes in the ground, use bows and arrows rather than guns, and attack both of the other groups when they can.

Marianne is a Professor's daughter who leaves the safety and boredom of life in a village to live with the tribe who has just attacked her village and finds that it is not like she expected. This was Angela Carter's fourth novel and I hadn’t even heard of it before finding it at a BookCrossing meet-up. It was very interesting but tailed off at the end.

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LibraryThing member dulcinea14

I hate rating these kinds of books. Extremely well-written, but a little too strange and disturbing for me to "enjoy" reading. It's the kind of novel I'd probably enjoy dissecting for a literature class, but for day-to-day reading, not so much. In other words, intellectually, I'd give it a higher

rating, but on a personal level, nothing stuck.

Set in a dystopian future, where humans now either live among the Professors (men of reason), Barbarians (primitives), or the Out People (mutant aggressives). Marianne, a child of one of the Professors, runs away to join the Barbarians out of boredom but only finds rampant filth, disease, violence and ignorance. She is forced to marry Jewel, a Barbarian who has been educated to a degree, but they hate each other and she constantly thinks of escape. The group is led by a former Professor who acts as sort of a tyrannical medicine man, conducting social experiments for what seems to be only his amusement and desire for power. The characters and their relationships in the novel are highly complex, so much so that I'm still unsure of some of the motivations for the primary characters.

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LibraryThing member hredwards

So so, wierd, not as expected.

LibraryThing member jkdavies

wonderful blunt and "Jewel" like (pun intended)

19/04/2013 re-read wondering if this is the one with the "story" embedded in it... it's not.

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