BOOKS & ARTSWickedness in wax
Laura Freeman
Little
by Edward Carey
Gallic Books, £14.99, pp. 458The reader of Edward Carey’s Little must
have a tender heart and a strong stomach.
You will weep, you will applaud, you will
wonder if your nerves can take it, but most
of all you will shudder. In this gloriously
gruesome imagining of the girlhood of
Marie Tussaud, mistress of wax, fleas will
bite, rats will run and heads will roll and
roll and roll. Guts’n’gore galore: I bloody
loved it.
Carey, author of the children’s Ire-
monger Trilogy, tells his tale with gusto.
If this is a fairy story then Marie is more
Rumpelstiltskin than Rapunzel. Her nose
is hooked, her chin pointed, her eyes
short-sighted. Even in womanhood she is
tiny. They don’t call her Little for nothing.
Little Marie with big dreams. Or should
that be nightmares? The chapters on the
Terror — the Conciergerie, the guillo-
tine, the flies turning the streets black —
are hard to wash off. In his recreations of
Berne, Paris, Versailles and London, Carey
has written a Dickensian world as styled
by Tim Burton. Little is no Nell. She’s
a Pip, a David Copperfield, a twisted Oli-
ver. The living are no less grotesquely
fascinating than the waxworks. Meet the
weeping widow Picot, still in love with
a stuffed tailor’s doll of her dead hus-
band. Meet Jacques Beauvisage, the boy
who howls with the city’s dogs. Meet Doc-
tor Curtius, expert in anatomy, thin as
a skeleton himself. ‘We’ll trap barbarity in
wax!’ cries the doctor when they first start
casting murderers. Meet Louis XVI, King
of Locksmiths. Meet the grieving monkey
man of the Hôtel Singe. Meet Jean-Paul
Marat — oops, too late — scabbed and
stabbed in his bath, murdered by Char-
lotte Corday’s serrated breadknife. Meet
hearts, meet spleens, meet scapulae, laid
out on beds of red velvet.
Unlike, say, William Boyd’s Love is
Blind, which gives you the mechanics of
piano-tuning in fin-de-siècle Paris in the
manner of the Open University, Carey
teaches the face-makers’ art with lip-
smacking relish. Here is the beeswax, here
the straws up nostrils, here the peeled
orange skins rolled over clay to make
pores, here the votive organs left in side
chapels to cure revolting peasants. And
unlike, say, portentous Prague in Sarah
Perry’s Melmoth, in Carey’s subtle, mod-
elling hands, Paris is gay and gloomy,
debauched and deathly, fabulous and fear-
ful. Marie is the eyes, ears and hold-your-
nose of this book, a delightful guide to
a mad, macabre world.cally captured snapshots of the contempo-
rary scene. These modern episodes usually
take place in London or Sussex — but not
always. Sometimes we find the poet herself
in modern Italy, following in the footsteps
of the saint. Some of the juxtapositions
are almost commonplace — Francis cuts
the hair of St Clare on one page, and on
the next, a schoolgirl has her hair plaited
in modern Wimbledon — a very beautiful
poem, that one.
A characteristic juxtaposition is found at
the moment when Francis kissed the leper:You hardly know
where in this scene you should belong,
distant or near,
staying or fleeing; fending off
contagious fear
with both imploring hands, or else
embracing it.On the facing page, we are in the check-
out queue at Morrisons, St James’s Street,
Brighton where a ragged man, stinking of
‘ancient piss’, is given a wide berth by the
other shoppers:Within the beard, his delicate small lips
murmur a silent word — might take a kiss—The subject of these
poems is nothing less
than the revolution which
took place in history at
the time of the Incarna-
tion, when God put down
the mighty from their
seats and exalted the
humble; when the rich
were sent empty away
and the poor and the lep-
ers and the dispossessed
were found to be carrying
the mystery of the King-
dom.
Its ramifications were
perhaps never more dra-
matically explored than
by St Francis of Assisi —
in Dante’s view the first
since Christ himself fully
to embrace the implica-
tions of Holy Poverty.
From him, Dante wrote,
sprang streams with which
the Catholic orchard is
watered.
This is demonstrated
by Wroe in a number of
overpowering vignettes.
Perhaps none of them
is more extraordinary
than the scene, reported
in the Daily Mirror on
8 November 1940, when
the figure of the crucified
Christ, pierced and bleed-
ing and surrounded by
the angels, was witnessed
in the night sky by a shep-
herd at Firle in Sussex:as Fred came down the hill, his old coat
flapping.
feathered with bracken, bowler hat and crook
clamped into place, his flock as loud as ever,
and nothing out of usual in his look,he told the Mirror it was like a film show,
at least as film shows were described to him:
but much more real, what with that blaze, that
glory.
The vicar said he had not seen a thing.This is a poet with a distinctive voice,
a command of form and a lightness of touch
matched by a depth of heart. It made me
think that the reason so much modern Chris-
tianity is unpalatable to so many people is
a simple failure of the imagination — both
on the Church’s part and on the side of those
who reject it. People say they have no faith,
and they mean they have not tried to exer-
cise the imagination in the way that Wroe
so triumphantly does in poem after poem.
Inspired by Francis, she sees Christ in the
figure of a junkie, dancing on the pavement
by Mornington Crescent Underground
Station. William Blake would have done
the same.St Francis preaching to the birds. Fresco by Giotto
in San Francesco Upper Church, AssisiGETTY IMAGES