(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Much as we love things as they were written originally, there’s also a great deal of fun to be had, and in this postmodern world of ours we love to indulge it, subverting and playing with all kinds of storytelling forms.
While the purists will insist from the top of the inspired haircuts to the very end of their conservatively shod toes that you can’t play around with anything once it’s set in narrative stone, there’s a great deal to be gained from taking something as it is and looking at it through modern, hopefully more enlightened lens and see what else it could be.
Case in vibrantly told point is the second in Alix E. Harrow’s Fractured Fables series, A Mirror Mended (book #1, A Spindle Splintered is also definitely worth a read), which takes not only the well-told fairytale of Sleeping Beauty and gives it a whole new empowered spit and polish but also Snow White too who, you’ll be surprised to learn may not be as squeaky clean as we might imagine.
In fact, as the hero of the hour, or quite a few hours over five years of diving into a bountiful array of Sleeping beauty iterations, Zinnia Gray will attest, nothing is as you imagine, certainly not fairytales which were revived by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century as a way of evoking and amplifying a sense of German national identity.
I’ve been in the princess-rescuing game long enough that I don’t hesitate. I raise my fingers to the glass too, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there. I can feel the heat of her hand, the slight give of her skin.
Then her fingers close like claws around my wrist and pull me through.
Considerably darker than the Disneyised versions with with our easily-disturbed modern sensibilities are familiar, fairytales like those of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are full of outdated notions of gender roles, good and evil and usually lacking very little nuance about the greyish inconsistencies of human nature.
While some people and things are clearly abhorrently evil, not everything is and in A Mirror Mended, Gray discovers that all over again when, fresh from rescuing Sleeping Beauty who really should’ve just got up and rescued herself – the idea that women are perfectly capable of saving themselves radiates right through the novella, a welcome charge to the only-a-man-can-save-you bunkum of the usual fairytale diet – she is pulled into a version of Snow White via a mirror held by the Evil Queen aka Snow White’s stepmum, herself.
Shocked and surprised that the Evil Queen, jokingly christened Eva by Zinnia as a twisted in-joke, knows all about her storytelling multiverse adventures – the blending of the in vogue multiversal idea of reality with enlightened ideas about fairytales is inspired and works superlatively and seamlessly well – Zinnia initially refuses to help Eva who comes across exactly as Disney portrayed her.
All bluster and threats, Eva is not one to inspire any sort of friendship and loyalty but after she returns to Zinnia and apologises and asks her to ask her forge a new ending, one that preferably doesn’t end up a cruel and violent death, our now cynical protagonist begins to wonder if there might be more to the story, in fact any story, than she’s previously been prepared to admit.
What follows in A Mirror Mended is, quite simply, brilliantly conceived and impressively well executed.
Harrow doesn’t just subvert the idea of Snow White, and who’s good and who’s evil, she unceremoniously upends it, and what we get is a breathtakingly good story that asks some very cleverly insightful questions in the middle of hopping through various iterations of Snow White, many of which speak to the darkness in the heart of people (and certainly not the propensity of small woodland animals to musically do housework) and encouraging us ask to ask ourselves whether the stories we know are really all reflective of life, humanity and the sometimes haphazard way they interact.
It’s a masterful piece of storytelling elegantly and engagingly unfurled over 128 perfectly-judged pages, which takes a wrecking ball to many of the traditional ideas of what a fairytale should be and what the lives of those who inhabit are like.
Eva goes from being the sort of archetypal villain we know and weirdly enough love in these kinds of stories to something altogether entirely, transforming Zinnia in turn who, dealing with a lifelong terminal prognosis, has a marked and friend-alienating propensity to not want to get too close to anyone. (Her BFF from book one, Charm, is on the outer for much of this second instalment until Zinnia gets an epiphany of the relational kind, courtesy, surprisingly enough, of her wholly unexpected adventures with Eva.)
In their absence, the only sound is the steady splish of my blood against the floorboards and the whine of the door as it swings in the wind, and–in the distance, fading fast–the cries of a brave little girl who has come, at last, to the end of her bravery.
It a gloriously good journey and rather than feeling like some sort of ridiculously retcon of a villainy, the way Eva changes and how Zinnia reacts to her, is proof of how good reevaluations of traditionally, long-accepted stories can be.
Done right, and Harrow’s A Mirror Mended is done superbly and deliciously right, these narrative revisits can not only entertain in completely new and heart-restorative ways but get you thinking about all kinds of long held beliefs, which can only be a good thing.
Because no matter where all that thinking takes you, and if you’re self aware and open, it’s got to be somewhere better than you and the story once were, the reality is that we need to always examine and question and challenge; if we don’t, we face sliding into fossilised recitations of ideas so stale they make old loaves of bread looking positively freshly baked.
By undertaking a fresh new appraisal of Snow White, and by extension fairytales generally, all of which are in danger of blending into each other in this story as realities collide, and by reminding us that we are the authors of own stories and that we shouldn’t let anyone else write them for us, A Mirror Mended not only subverts and challenges to wonderfully rewarding effect, but builds something altogether new, a queer-inspired new tale for our age which welcomingly doesn’t take the old versions of things for granted but which asks us to fashion new takes, ones more in keeping with our ages and its more grounded and honest take on humanity.