June 12, 2007
The Books: "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" - 'The Glass Coffin' (A.S. Byatt)
Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:
Next book on the shelf is yet another short story collection by AS Byatt (my favorite - obviously!) - this one is called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye - This excerpt is from "The Glass Coffin"
I think this might be my favorite of her short story collections (and we've got one more to go!) and ironically, I resisted reading it. Even though it was AS Byatt. It's "Five Fairy Stories" - as I've mentioned, and as anyone who's read Byatt knows - she is VERY into fairy stories, and myths and fables ... her books usually have books-within-books - where magical things happen - the poems and stories in Possession ... My copy of The Arabian Nights has a preface by AS Byatt - she is very into all of it. So in this particular collection, she has 5 fairy stories (2 which appear within the narrative of Possession, and 3 that are new). And I guess I need to be in the mood for fairy stories, not sure - but I didn't read this one for a long time, it just sat on my shelf. And now - particularly the title story - I go to the stories again and again. She's just so damn GOOD. I finished the title story, sitting on a bench on the edge of Central Park - I was waiting for someone - and the wind was HUGE that day - and I was afraid (yes, afraid) that my friend would actually be on time for once - and interrupt me 2 pages from the end. I was literally sitting there, willing my friend to be a couple seconds late so I could finish the story in peace. Because it just GOT me. Tears flooded my eyes at one point ... and the ending - the last 3 paragraphs - are my definition of perfect. Closes out the story perfectly. So satisfying, so moving.
But the first story in the collection is "The Glass Coffin" which was, actually, Christabel's story in Possession. It's about a "little tailor" who journeys thru a forest, trying to "make a meagre living" - he wanted to find someone who would want his skills, so he goes deeper and deeper into the forest, until he comes across a little house. He knocks and a little old man lets him in. Beside the little old man stands a huge grey dog with red eyes. In the house are a lot of animals, sitting in chairs, lying on rugs. The little old man tells the tailor he has no need of a tailor - but would he mind making dinner? So the little tailor goes and makes a great dinner for everybody, humans and animals. Turns out, this was a test set to him by the little old man. He says, "You are a good man - you made dinner for all of us, not just the humans - you left nobody unattended - here are 3 objects - which one do you want?" There is a purse, a cooking pot, and a glass key. He ponders. He knows it will be an important choice. He chooses the key. The man tells him to go outside and call to the West Wind - show her the key - and let her carry him where she will. No fighting is allowed, no questions. She will let you down at a place where there will be the "gate to your adventure" ... and etc. etc. It's a fairy story. Lovely, haunting, and very eerie at points.
Here's the part where the West Wind takes him.
Excerpt from The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye "The Glass Coffin"
And that was a delightful and most alarming sensation, when the long, airy arms of the West Wind reached down through the trees and caught him up, and the leaves were all shivering and clattering and trembling with her passing, and the straws danced before the house and the dust rose and flew about in little earth-fountains. The trees grabbed at him with twiggy fingers as he rose up through them, lurching this way and that in the gusts, and then he felt himself held against the invisible rushing breast of the long Wind, as she hurled moaning along the sky. He rested his face against his airy pillows, and did not cry out or struggle, and the sighing song of the West Wind, full of fine rain and glancing sunshine, streaming clouds and driven starlight, netted him around and around.
She put him down as the little grey man had foretold on a huge grey granite stone, pitted and scarred and bald. He heard her whisking and wailing on her way, and he bent down and laid the cock-feather on the stone, and behold with a heavy groaning and grinding the huge stone swung up in the air and down in the earth, as though on a pivot or balance, disturbing waves of soil and heather like thick sea-water, and showing a dark, dank passage under the heather-roots and the knotty roots of the gorse. So in he went, bravely enough, thinking all the time of the thickness of rock and peat and earth over his head, and the air in that place was chill and damp and the ground underfoot was moist and sodden. He bethought him of his little key and held it up bravely before him, and it put out a little sparkling light that illumined a step at a time, silvery-pale. So he came down to the vestibule, where the three doors were, and under the sills of the two great doors, light shone, warm and enticing, and the third was behind a musty leather curtain. He touched this leather, just brushing it with the tip of his soft hen-feather, and it was drawn away in angular folds like bat-wings, and beyond a little dark door lay open into a tiny hole, into which he thought he might just manage to put his shouders. Then truly he was afraid, for his small grey friend had said nothing of this narrow little place, and he thought if he put his head in he might never come out alive.
So he looked behind himself and saw that the passage he had just come down was one of many, all wrinkled and wormy and dripping and tangled with roots, and he thought he could never find his way back so he must perforce push on and see what lay in store. It took all the courage he had to thrust his head and shoulders into the mouth of that entrance, but he closed his eyes and twisted and turned and after a time tumbled out into a great stone chamber, lit with a soft light of its own that dimmed the glitter of his shining key. It was a miracle, he thought, that the glass had not shivered in that tight struggle, but it was as clear and brittle as ever. So he looked about him, and saw three things. The first was a heap of glass bottles and flasks, all of them covered with dust and cobwebs. The second was a glass dome, the size of a man, and a little taller than our hero. And the third was a shining glass coffin, lying on a rich velvet pall on a gilded trestle. And from all these things the soft light proceeded, like the glimmering of pearls in the depth of water, like the phosphorescent light that moves of itself on the night surface of southern seas, or shines round the heaving shoals, milky-white over their silver darts, in their own dark Channel.
Well, he thought, one of these is my adventure.
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