December 11–18, 1997

book quarterly

fiction

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories

By A. S. Byatt, Random House, 288 p., $19

Though fairy tales aren't simply stories for children, they're comprehensible to children in ways that 19th-century novels surely aren't, and they convey a vivid, mythical sense of the world that's "child-identified." Similarly, the five fairy tales in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by acclaimed English novelist A.S. Byatt, appear "adolescent-identified," reflecting a world in which adolescence exists as a separate, deeply ambiguous stage of life. In this, our world, the most fundamental virtues and lessons of fairy tales can't just be learned, they must be mediated in light of each other, as well as the arbitrary limits fairy tales also contain—a process that's distinctively, though surely not exclusively, adolescent.

This is clearest in "The Story of the Eldest Princess," whose hero has read "a great many stories," including some about royal children on quests. She knows the elder two are invariably turned into statues, or otherwise trapped till rescued by their youngest sibling, and is less than thrilled with the prospect. Can she break the mold of the quest story she's trapped in, or will the attempt turn her to stone?

The hero of the "The Glass Key" isn't an adolescent, he's "a little tailor, a good and unremarkable man," but he's placed in a story scripted for a young prince. Offered a choice of three gifts for his kindness, he speculates on a possibly-never-empty purse and a similar pot—both traditional magic objects he's heard about, unlike the third choice, a glass key, which couldn't possibly fit any lock without breaking. Yet, because as a craftsman he admires the exquisite skill it took to make, and because it arouses his curiosity, he chooses the apparently useless key. His tale parallels, yet differs from the classic form the story would take if he were young.

Finally, the hero of the title story (a novella making up over half the book) is a middle-aged woman whose professional concern with storytelling provides a natural frame-story, recalling Scheherazade, narrator/heroine of A Thousand And One Nights. Her tale, too, concerns adolescent virtues and challenges: handling the break-up of a relationship (her marriage), negotiating different cultures (like high school cliques writ large) and encountering—even entering—magical stories in the quintessentially adolescent processes of transformation. Yet, like all Byatt's stories here, it remains a fairy tale of gemlike clarity with a sharp sense of good and evil, made more mature with an enhanced sense of difficulty in deciphering the world. For adolescents of all ages.

-Paul Rosenberg