Wise Children

Product Description Dora and Nora Chance are a famous song-and-dance team of the British music halls. Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchoir Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best. From AudioFile Margolyes’s reading of Carter’s rambunctious final novel provides an intriguing case study for audiobooks. Her performance, using a distinctive, lower-class English accent, is spirited, passionate and convincing in every way. Yet, to me, the narration is so showy that it ultimately proves more distracting than illuminating. That said, it should be acknowledged that Margolyes’s choice is absolutely true to this exuberant, rollicking novel, which presents a behind-the-scenes look at British theater, from one end of the century to the other. Paying homage to Shakespeare’s comedies, it is peopled by five sets of theatrical twins, whose ties and biological connections are always ambiguous. Ribald and raffish, the novel nonetheless has serious concerns about the meaning of family and pursuing life’s pleasures. A toned-down reading by Margolyes may have helped readers better appreciate Carter’s tour de force. M.O. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine About the Author Angela Carter (1940 -1992) wrote nine novels and numerous short stories, as well as nonfiction, radio plays, and the screenplay for Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, based on her story. She won numerous literary awards, traveled and taught widely in the United States, and lived in London. From Kirkus Reviews A bawdy tale of parenthood told by a typical Carter (Saints and Sinners, 1986) heroine: witty, brash, and a sucker for farce who gives a story a good feminist spin. The septuagenarian Chance sisters, identical twins Dora and Nora, may like all wise children know their father, though the paternity has never been acknowledged, but they also learn here that after all these years they can’t be too certain about their mother. Already busy on her memoirs, Dora begins her tale–told with all the innuendos and humor of the vaudeville comedians she once knew–on the day the sisters are invited to attend the hundredth birthday celebration of their father, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard. The family bloodlines, Dora tells, were never all that clear: it has long been believed that a young lead–rather than aging grandfather Hazard, married to a much younger actress–was the real father of Sir Melchior and his twin, the lovable and rich Perry. It’s also been believed that the eponymously named Chance sisters were the result of a liaison between their father and a young woman who died conveniently at their birth. Raised by the mysterious Mrs. Chance, the beloved “Granny,” the talented twins were soon dancing and acting in variety shows, having affairs with the great and not-so-great and- -the climax of their careers–making a movie in Hollywood, where Dora had an affair with a writer, whose resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald is quite intended. In between, Uncle Perry came bearing gifts; they met their father’s three wives, and watched from the sidelines the goings-on of their half-siblings, whose own paternity is not all that clear either. An amusing romp through theatrical history that tries to answer but doesn’t quite–the jokiness is ultimately too much and out of place–a serious question: What defines the true parent- -blood or the actual rearing? Accessible but thin. — Copyright (c)1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. From Library Journal On their 75th birthday, we meet Dora and Nora Chance, former dancers and illegitimate twin daughters of one of Britain’s leading theatrical actors. They relate their colorful and amusing family history as the novel unfolds, describing their often straine