“It gave him further, comforting proof of his unseen host’s wealth and eccentricity to see the dog wore, in place of a collar, a diamond necklace.”
But how did Beauty’s father think he knew as a fact, from a distance, that this Spaniel — the familiar of Beast — wore a necklace that had real diamonds? A rhetorical question on my part, one that will remain unanswered because there is no answer, transcended by this Angela Carter story with its own Beauty that one can only compare to Angela Carter as an indication for you of its intrinsic style and meaning. A tripartite blend of Lewis Carroll and Brothers Grimm and, yes, Angela Carter….
“…and there, to her well-disguised dismay, she found her host, seated beside the fire with a tray of coffee at his elbow from which she must pour.”
Suddenly, one realises from such a trigger partway through that there is ever a first negative tipping-point to every story that then gradually meanders, with equal Beauty, towards what one knows to be a sad ending, but here one is somehow tipped up, indeed tripped up by even that fearful certainty. Kissing hands, flinching at his touch, the Beauty and the Beast syndrome and her father’s initial crime of stealing, for her, a white rose from the leonine Beast’s garden, all of these events having, in hindsight, caused the story’s turning “a mite petulant when things went not quite as she wanted them to go.” And you know this is a feint of tantalising the reader before the inevitable happy ending, But were you right the first time in fearing the worst, and is any review inevitably nothing but a mischievous counter-feint? The carats of diamonds deemed counterfeit as well as the characters themselves? The ending, as part of the whole story’s inner syndrome, changing each time you read it?
My previous reviews of this author: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/907-2/#comment-2213 and https://nemonymous123456.wordpress.com/59-2/
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Full context of this review: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/kingsley-amis-masons-life/
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
Angela Carter’s LIZZIE’S TIGER: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/10/lizzies-tiger-by-angela-carter/