LIZZIE’S TIGER by Angela Carter

“Outside the parlour window were nothing but rows of counterfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.”

Read for the first time, this story with its glimpse of truth is unquestionably Angela Carter’s masterpiece. But what do I know? Merely my instinct to go on, and only three previous reviews by me about her work over the years:  HERE, HERE and HERE.
This one is the most shocking.
Lizzie is only 4 and looked after by her 13 year old sister Emma, living with a father who is this New England town’s funeral undertaker, trying to make the coffin-ends meet with the next hoped-for plague A genius loci that is full of people and their downtrodden lives and then a sensory-ripe circus comes to town, enticing Lizzie to escape the house by her sight of a poster advertising it on their fence and depicting a tiger. Lizzie is as feisty as de La Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget that I am currently reviewing. And, via cider vat, a friendly piglet, and a caring gang of children, and later a palimpsest of scars, she mindlessly pleasures an old man at his explicit request. More than just “Kissy, kissy from Missy?” And then she encounters the tiger, burning bright like Blake, and she has an outstaring balanced spirituality with it, and then a young tamer with a ‘secret frog’ in his trousers, as she watches him conduct a wondrously magical ballet battle with this tiger. But the most shocking item is an elbow trigger in the story’s climax (“The baby in the lace bonnet had slept peacefully through all this, but now began to stir and mumble. Its mother nudged her husband with her elbow.”) preceding an unexpected revelation of Lizzie’s future identity!

“Her pale-blue Calvinist eyes of New England encountered with a shock the flat, mineral eyes of the tiger. It seemed to Lizzie that they exchanged this cool regard for an endless time, the tiger and herself.”

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THAT GLIMPSE OF TRUTH context of this review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/06/that-glimpse-of-truth-6/ (100 best ever stories)