This book is enigmatic, unwilling to unveil its riches too easily or quickly. You could not unlock it, I would suggest, in one fell swoop. It resembles a bell being rung without fully understanding what exactly is being summoned. You have to stand, listen and wait.
FIRST READ THROUGH
Martin Shaw is a mythologist and storyteller. And his power with words and the telling of tales is well worn, rich, gnarly and twisting. He embellishes tales with evocative deeply etched details and rubbed through hues, that are all part and parcel of what appears to be camouflaging it's meaning. The writing style is alluring, yet distracting. It's speaking to your heart, which is not always paying attention.
The book is split into roughly three sections - an exploration of these two tales - a central chapter where he expresses opinions about the state of the world - a final chapter where the two tales are told in their fullness. I'm not quite clicking what the purpose in drawing these two tales together is, which obviously share similar themes and symbolisms. I am missing something in my reading, a link to purpose or meaning. I'm left feeling dissatisfied, whilst still remaining curious to understand.
SECOND READ THROUGH
Finding myself alone I felt able to speak the introductory chapter The Conditions of Wondering out loud. And, as if this were a miraculous act, it has all come more vivdly alive for me. It's as though by giving voice to it, I lit a candle into its long and darkened corridors. There is a different level of engagement required to reading out loud. You have to look for meaning in order to be able to give it expression.
This is a story revivified by the public recounting of it. Reading it aloud connects you with that tradition, with the writer, the speaker of myths and truths, the one who intones this material live. Perhaps this should not be a surprise. To be put in tune with Shaw and his antecedents, and suddenly I am right there.
A central theme of the two stories is the perfectly good royal couple who for some reason cannot conceive. A suggested earthing and fertilising ritual is given by a an old woman from the woods. But the queen does not follow her instructions to the letter. Supposed to only eat the white flower, she insatiably gobbles the red first. The outcome is the birth of an abberant offspring, the wilder twin, that is initially rejected. In the end this has to be brought fully into their lives for a new revitalised direction to be taken.
Shaw's opinion is we all succum to a type of intellectual, if not imaginatively, dry lifestyle. Suppressing the wilder passionate irrational side of our psyche in order to be considered a good person or in pursuit of some ideal of individual perfection. At some point there's a need to integrate these neglected rawer instincts if we are to live a more rounded and meaningful existence. Whilst bedevilled by this lack on an individual level, it is also embedded in the ethos of contemporary society. Encouraging us to all live, work and play distractedly, at one emotional remove from a full blooded passionate response to life. Modern life has become sterile from the inside out. Too enamoured with surface presentation and facile truths.
As in the stories, there is a need to assiduously court our wilder twin. Always running the risk of being eaten by it, before this can be integrated. Shaw gives the example of the archetypal rock n roll lifestyle, as one in search for and indulging in the wild twin, that can easily consume you to the point of an early tragic death.
An opposite is the religiously solitary life, seeking some sort of idealised perfection through contemplation and ethical rectitude. This can become so arid and lifeless that the eruption of a more anarchic rebellion or self harm, is almost inevitable. If the wild twin is not courted, it acts as a disruptive force that will always threaten to upend any hard earned yet brittle equilibrium.
There is a lot of food for further thought here.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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