Reviews

• 独創的で、残酷で、容赦のないヤングアダルト向けの童話

  19世紀以前と思われる架空の農村が舞台。15歳のLigaは、父からの性的虐待とギャングレイプの犠牲になり、人生に絶望して死を選ぼうとする。だが、不思議なMoon babyに出会い、現実とのパラレルワールドのような理想郷に移り住む。そこには、Ligaを傷つける者は誰一人として存在せず、平和な世界でLigaは虐待の結果生まれた二人の娘BranzaとUrddaを愛情たっぷりに育てる。だが、欲深い小人のDoughtが魔女のAnnieを説得してこの理想郷に裂け目を生じさせる。最初はDoughtだけだったが、春を呼び寄せるための祭り「Bear Day」に心優しい若者Davit RamstrongがLigaの世界に熊に姿を変えて迷い込む。Davitが現実世界に戻った後にLigaの世界に表れた熊は心卑しい若者だった。 心やさしい人々だけがすむ平和な世界しか知らない少女たちは、これら現実世界からの訪問者たちに異なる反応を示す。Branzaはこの理想郷に満足しているが、Urddaは「本物」が存在するエキサイティングな世界に行きたいと望み、ある日姿を消す。 相手が子供（YAだから高校生）だからといって容赦せずに人の心の闇を描いた本であり、文学作品として高く評価されている。ネタばれになるので詳細は説明しないが、カミュやカフカが好きな人であれば「今どき珍しく優れた児童書」と思うであろう。また、作者のLanaganが作り上げた不思議な世界は独創的であり、童話がもともと残酷なものであることを考えると、優れた現代の童話ともいえる。 心温まるストーリーや幸福な読後感、または私のように必然性を求める人は要注意。

• Not for the faint-hearted, but the hype is true. Incredible read.

  This is a fairy-tale. This is not a fairy-tale. It is both actually, boldly, brassily, sassily so, it is shocking too, demanding, poetry disguised as prose and so powerfully written as to demand that publishers worked hard to find a genre for it. Notionally YA because of the age of the key protagonists but it is actually sitting outside any marketing lines of demarcation. It's very different, a beautiful and ugly story, sometimes on the self-same page. Be warned; not for the faint-hearted or any Daily Mail reader who struggles with the nuance and detail of the world. Tender Morsels is set in a notional European country, it's a pre-industrial society and Liga is trapped in a house in the woods with her dad. After her mother's death she has become not simply his about-the-house slave but he's sex toy too. Liga is raped, continually, she gets pregnant and whilst she is young and doesn't know what is happening to her when her monthly bleeds stop, we see her father's disgusting attempts to poison the babby (local dialect, and there's a lot of this in the story) out of her. Her father goes to a local mudwife (a witch basically) who takes his good coin and supplies him with herbal remedies as teas and potions that will make poor Liga miscarry. She does. Several times. And then, she cottons on and tries to hide her pregnancy from her dad by using animal blood to stain the towels she keeps herself clean with. She manages in this way to keep her latest pregnancy from him and when he discovers it very late, he repairs once more to the witch to get the abortion-inducing chemicals. He never returns, dies at the side of the road, supposedly hit by a passing Stagecoach. Liga is alone, she has her babby. She tends her, raises her, calls her Branza. Liga has a quiet and idyllic pastoral life for a while, difficult, fighting cold and hunger but she is free of the horrible tyranny of her father's abuse so even these burdens are lighter. But her idyll is not for long as Liga becomes of interest to some local boys, five in all, and they discover her in the woods one day and gang rape her. Awful sexual violence again, depicted brutally using carefully chosen words, pain-riddled descriptions of the worst kind of desecration, but never gratuitous. Liga falls pregnant again and gives birth to Urdda, a dark-skinned child, obviously the result of one particular member of the gang rape. As you can see these themes are difficult and painful. This is a fairy story in the genuine, visceral sense, it is exploring deep and dark motives against the backdrop of a simple, pastoral life. We might deify our pastoral, pre-industrial past but we all know it was full of violence, injustice and awful nastiness. The magical, fairy story elements impinge now, a magic realism delivered so deftly that we actually don't notice for a while. Through an accident of magic and the pulsing power of her heart's desire to protect her daughters from men and the other travails of the world, Liga's pain creates a bubble of new reality, a copy of the woods and the world that expunges all of the nastiness and harm. And there Liga and her daughters are left in peace, enjoying again an idyllic life in the woods. This bubble of heaven is generally untrammelled but every now and then other people impinge on it. There's a duplicitous and disreputable dwarf that accesses it, his greed transmuting everything he touches within it to gold, pearls and treasure. He becomes immensely rich as a result when he returns to the world. And then there're also the bears, two in particular. Here Lanagan draws from actual village tradition from Europe, a spring celebration ceremony involving young men dressing as bears and chasing girls round the town, smearing their faces when they caught them with coal. One of these young men dressed in a heavy and sweaty bear outfit tumbles into Liga's heaven and is transmuted to a real bear. Here he falls in love with Liga and her girls and is kind and good to them. Time in Liga's heaven moves faster than in the real world so when the boy tumbles back out of their world again only moments have passed in the real world whilst he feels he has lived three years as a bear. The book is beautifully written, unexpected descriptions, made-up words to convey brittle, nuanced emotions. It is also dark, dangerous and never shies away from the horror hidden deep inside our violent and folkloric past. As the story builds to a conclusion a less kindly man get transformed to a bear and then Urdda escapes the heaven and enters the real world. As the narrative builds to an incredible climax out in the real world the secrets of Urdda and Branza's births are revealed. Revenge occurs, magically inspired and as brutal and frightening as the original defilement of poor Liga. A demanding, beautiful story powerful in the way it repeats on you even days later. Margo Lanagan has achieved something quite remarkable here, a fairy story with all of the darkness left in, there is a Once Upon A Time... there is the life in the woods and there is the dark nastiness of men defiling innocence. And there is redemption here to, redemption in a graphic and violent form that might leave Stephen King or Clive Barker flinching! An awesome read, there's is much poetry here. What happens in this story is in fact a perfect oxymoron, there's peace and an idyll and love and companionship and then there's dark horror wormed away in the same such things. Liga is a towering figure, she overcomes the violence of her children's procreation to be an incredible mother, so loving, so true. Tender Morsels goes straight to the centre of the brittle curiosity that is at our figurative heart, we're capable of such love and compassion as well as such debilitating horrors too. There're many lessons in here too, not all good, the sweetness of the righteous rage of revenge is quite delicious actually. It is a dish served cold in terms of time in this story, but the blood runs thick and hot when it does come. There is no turning of the cheek here, violence meets violence and we actually feel good about it. Well done everyone involved in this project. Transformative fiction, not for the faint-hearted, a fairy tale for adults. A rare five stars (*****)

• If James Joyce had written a fairy tale

  The first sentence—“there are plenty would call her a slut for it”—tips the reader off right away that this may not be the most kid-friendly of YA novels. In fact, Margo Lanagan strips past the implicitly brutal foundations of the Grimm fairy tales to reveal the savagery of a world from which such a tale of female refuge could spring. We speed past Grimm territory very quickly. Providing a back story for her version of the Grimm Brothers’ ‘Snow White and Rose Red,” Lanagan places it in a harsh world—the dark doppelganger of Disney enchanted forests and wicked witches. In this story, the witches are not wicked although a few are a bit naïve and unwittingly create chaos out of the best intentions. The real wickedness lies in the hearts and loins of lustful men. Liga is a traumatized teenager, left in the care of her cruel father after her mother’s death. Repeatedly molested and impregnated by this person on whom she placed her trust, her spirit is broken and she fruitlessly seeks deliverance. After two miscarriages brought on by tinctures purchased by her father from a local midwife/witch, the third results in a living, breathing baby girl. The discovery that her father has been killed in an apparent accident is small consolation for Liga. There are more brutes where her father came from and, knowing she now lives alone and defenseless, five of the younger breed pursue and trap her back in her cottage. In stylistic acknowledgment to the YA genre, Lanagan refrains from describing either the previous molestation from Liga’s father or the gang rape that results in a second baby growing inside her. She doesn’t need to. What she has written evokes the brutal betrayal of a child’s innocence and the post-traumatic, existential despair that results from it, far more powerfully than if every sexual assault had been painstakingly depicted. After a failed suicide attempt by jumping off a cliff Liga and her babies is transported to a parallel world, a twilight zone-like Heaven/Haven of her heart’s desire where she and her babies can live in safety and without fear. Summarizing the rest of the novel would not only take up too much space but deviate from what I want to convey about this novel. As anyone familiar with ‘Snow-White and Rose-Red’ may have surmised, the first baby, Branza, is the Snow White surrogate and the second, Urdda, is Rose Red. Like the original, ‘Tender Morsels’ contains a disagreeable, avaricious dwarf and a bear that transforms into a man. How the dwarf and the bear enter Liga’s Heaven world is due entirely to the unwitting carelessness of the clueless witch, Muddy Annie (the former ‘slut’ from the first sentence). A membrane between the worlds has been tampered with and ripped with repeated use (primarily by the dwarf, Collaby Dought) so that the temporal continuum between the dimensions has been shifted out of alignment. Time in Liga’s world goes at a faster rate than time in the true world. But how does a bear transform into a man or man into bear? First, a few words about Liga’s home village, St. Olafred’s. There are a good many rough, lustful, aggressive cretins such as the biological fathers of Liga’s daughters. The residents of Liga’s village are a crude and bawdy bunch in general. Although the world resembles the European settings of the Grimm tales, the characters speak in a vernacular resembling James Joyce’s lusty Dubliners, where children refer to Father as ‘Da’ and Mother as ‘Mam’, babies are ‘babs’ and one of the pastimes is “fecking”. The town also has pagan-like festivals. In addition to Midsummer Eve/Day, there is an annual ‘Day of the Bear’, in which young men wear bear hoods and furry outfits, soot up their faces, and run after young women—a presumably more harmless and lighthearted version of the liberties that many of the young men avail themselves of on a nearly daily basis. One of the young “bears”, Davit Ramstrong, somehow breaks through the membrane between the worlds, becoming a real bear in Liga’s and a faithful companion and playmate, like a pet dog, to Liga and her then little girls Branza and Urdda. The safe world in which Liga has raised her daughters is also sterile. Each incursion from the other world further rips the barrier. Although Branza is content to stay in her safe world, Urdda is restless and curious. A few years after Davit runs across the barrier back into his world, a second bear appears, eats the dwarf, and pursues she-bears as male bears are wont to do. Urdda pushes through the barrier and grows accustomed to life in St. Olafred’s. Due to the misalignment of time between the worlds, she ages one year in St. Olafred’s while Liga and Branza age ten in their world. Eventually Liga and Branza are forcibly pulled back into the world after Urdda seeks help from the person that caused them to travel to it originally. Trying to adjust to the shock of being in this similar yet different world, Branza is woefully unprepared for its harshness and Liga is filled with guilt and regret. She learns that she stayed in that other world far longer than she should have, considering the lives of her children. “…it seemed to her now that she had had cause for towering, disabling anxieties about them; that what had seemed little plaints and sorrows in their childhoods were in fact off-drawings from much greater tragedies, from which she had tried to keep them but could not. And the joys she had had of them, too, their embraces and laughter—it was all too intense to be endured, this connection with them, which was a miniature of the connection with the forces that drove planet and season—the relentlessness of them, the randomness, the susceptibility to glory, to accident, to disaster. How soft had been her life in that other place, how safe and mild! And here she was, back where terrors could immobilize her, and wonders too; where life might become gulps of strong ale rather than sips of bloom-tea. She did not know whether she was capable of lifting the cup, let alone drinking the contents.” Although this novel is a fantasy and a young adult fantasy at that, the emotions and the psychology of humans are as genuine as those of characters in any so called ‘realistic’ novel. Lanagan slowly develops an intensity and power in this novel of accumulated emotional wrinkles and entanglements. Her ability to drop, god-like, into the minds of varied characters and convincingly depict all of them is reminiscent of Tolstoy and her ability to render the emotional turmoil as these wrinkles become even more difficult to unravel resembles George Eliot, especially in the emotionally devastating conclusion. I would advise anyone with a passing thought of reading this novel to disregard the YA label as well as the fantasy label. This is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read in many years. Yes, ‘Tender Morsels’ is a fairy tale full of magic, dwarves, witches, metamorphosed humans/bears, but it describes characters that love, hate and have natural desires like humans in our own true world of good and evil. The complexity of this particular fairy tale world resembles ours and, like our own world, contains the harsh fact that happy endings are not uniformly ‘one size fits all’ for every character.

• great writing, twisted but highly enjoyable

  Tender Morsels isn't a young adult book. Not because it's too graphic and horrifying and the poor innocent babies can't handle it. They can handle it. They just won't get as much out of it as adults will. This book challenged me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was a prude! Me! Although I look harmless, I am actually a total degenerate. I watched Silence of the Lambs when I was ten years old. When I was a little girl, nearly all of my bedtime stories were written by Stephen King. I can handle just about anything without taking offense: sex, nudity, violence, watching Game of Thrones with my in-laws. Tender Morsels exposed all of the straight lines and Puritanical preconceptions in my dirty little mind. Thank you, Margo Lanagan. The first half of the book is some of the best writing I've ever seen. Some object to the dialect and the made up words, but I found the vocabulary believable and easy to grasp. It made the world just different enough to set it apart but still familiar enough to understand. The beginning is exquisite, powerful, and horrible. I loved it. Lanagan's writing about infants (even the stillborn) and new motherhood is some of the best I have ever read. She captures the sweetness, the rawness, the weirdness, the horror and the love. The way she describes living with an abuser is also amazing in its realism. The beautiful, precise writing kept me plowing forward even when the story got so dark and cruel that I felt sick. The dark, boiling awfulness established in the beginning lends tension to the rest of the book. It never let me rest easy or predict what was coming. With each new visitor to Liga's heaven, I sat on edge waiting for something awful to happen, expecting the horror of the life she left to come bursting through. The characters themselves bring tension as well. Their desires and motivations wear at the edges of the pleasant safe haven, threatening to destroy it at any moment. And the book has bears. Man bears. A nice one and a perverted one. Oh my god I loved them both. I appreciated the way Branza's feelings about the creepy bear were complex, how her longing and naivete distorted her perceptions. I expected her to recoil at his advances, but she pursued him instead. This happened many times throughout. Whenever there was an easy way forward, a way to make me comfortable and put my mind at ease, Lanagan went in the other direction, muddying the waters and making me squirm. See above: I am not one who typically squirms. Unfortunately, I found the latter half of the book lacking, at least compared to the rest. The pacing was awkward and skipped over years at a time. It seemed that the tension just below the surface of the beginning was hard to maintain throughout, and the book became less interesting once heaven went away. The village of the beginning is nearly hellish, but it has no teeth at all at the end. I could believe that it was not as bad as Liga thought it was when she was fifteen and in distress, but I could not believe that it was really so safe, so void of consequences. The various points of view didn't bother or confuse me, except toward the end when ignoring Ramstrong's point of view to hide his growing feelings for Branza felt like cheating. My edition contained an interview with Margo Lanagan in the back. She said that she didn't intend for the story to have a message. Well, it did. The message was laid on way too thick in the final quarter of the book. I didn't disagree with it, but I thought it could have been delivered in a subtler way, without long lectures from Miss Dance. Ah, enough about the shortcomings. I'm just nitpicking anyway. It's a wonderful, vivid book by someone whose writing prowess I find remarkable. Read it. Love it. And if you do happen to be a young adult, don't worry, you can handle it--probably better than a grown up.

• Towards the very end it felt a little bit like the storytelling ran out of steam

  Interesting spin on the Snow White and Red Rose fairytale. Brutal but also gentle in a kind of sine wave. Towards the very end it felt a little bit like the storytelling ran out of steam, but overall a satisfying read.

• Beautiful and uncomfortable....

  I purchased this book after the Bitch Magazine debacle where they first included, then removed it from a top 100 list. Let's be clear - this is in no way an appropriate book for children or young teens. It was enough to make me uncomfortable, and I'm 28. But the very topics it addresses are reason enough; one should be uncomfortable reading about incest, rape, forced abortion, and all the emotional aftermath that comes with those things. These are not subjects that you should be able to casually read through and toss aside. This book haunts. I found the first half of the novel the most compelling; the heroine's strength is not in resisting the traumas that happen to her, but in quietly picking up the tattered pieces and doing what she can, while she can, until she reaches the point when all doors seem closed to her. The magic in this part is faint, ethereal, and dream-like; a sharp contrast to later when it becomes something under human agency. The second half or so of the book is much starker, sharper, less surreal and more commonplace. The scene that generated the objections leading to Bitch Magazine pulling the book from their list, I found less offensive than others might. I understand the concerns about the portrayal of rape as a means of revenge, but in this case, the action was not under anyone's direct control. It was the sheer anger and frustration of one girl, unconsciously generated and never willed by her to take the direction it did; and in that, it to me like a case of a sort of divine justice using the daughter's power to manifest itself, than in any other way it could be interpreted.

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