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Far North and Other Dark Tales

A new way of seeing

Sara Maitland
Maia Press, 252pp, £8.99,

Honor Clerk

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Honor Clerk reviews Sara Maitland's latest book

In one of his more endearing flights of fancy, Eddie Izzard once speculated on what the Greeks did with themselves in the Wooden Horse while waiting for nightfall in Troy. It was clearly something that Homer had never got round to thinking through properly, but for Izzard, once a chap has got into his breastplate, helmet, greaves and short pleated skirt the answer is obvious — housework, and not just housework but hoovering the inside of his temporary home before he gets down to the real business of the warrior hero.

The fall of Troy has never seemed quite the same after Izzard, and though she might not approve the comparison, Sara Maitland has a similarly surreal imagination, taking the familiar ground of classical myths, biblical stories and fairytales and making a reader look at them afresh. It is hard to capture the piquancy of a short-story writer like Maitland without giving away the ending, but her territory is often the traditionally unrecorded woman’s side of the story, and her tone the dark vision of an Angela Carter or Paula Rego. A thought, a phrase, a whim is enough to set her off. Happily ever after, really? she ponders in ‘Rapunzel Revisited’. Suffering from osteoporosis and trouble in the neck (for obvious reasons), Rapunzel returns to her tower to confront the narrative which has defined and trapped her:

I have been the child and the beloved and the queen and the widow. I have come to a place where I need a new story, a new way of seeing and I am so entangled in the old ones, unbrushed and unbraided, that I cannot let down my hair and haul up a future.

This looking back at the multiple roles that life allots a woman is echoed in other stories but perhaps most tellingly in ‘Mother of the Promise’. This story moves from the world of fairytales to the Old Testament, to take up cudgels on behalf of Sarah, forced to watch with a mother’s dread while Abraham sets off with a bundle of kindling, a sharp knife, her only son Isaac, and a baffling faith in the God who could demand him of them.

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