Once upon a time, the Grimms got it right
FAIRY TALEs tap into depths of our collective DNA, with themes that can be quite adult
As a child, I didn’t read fairy tales. Nor were they read to me. Back then my tastes leaned more toward real-life hero narratives: ghostwritten sports autobiographies, stories of loyal pets, historical tales of exploration and scientific discovery. I innately distrusted any story that didn’t respect the basic laws of time and space. At the first hint of the supernatural or magical, my knee-jerk response would be to shout something akin to “That’s fake!” (I’ve relaxed a little since then.)
How is it, then, that while reading Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (Viking, 406 pages, $29.50), I so often found myself thinking “Wait a minute, why do I know this”? Time and again, not just with the greatest-hits standbys like Hansel and Gretel and Snow White but with seldom-told tales like Hans-my-Hedgehog and The Brave Little Tailor, plot points that must once have held readers and listeners in rapt suspense instead triggered a palpable déjà vu. Clearly these 50 stories, many of them already immeasurably old when Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first started publishing them 200 years ago, tap into something deep in the collective DNA, dramatizing primal fears, hopes and impulses of which we’re not always necessarily even aware.
Often assumed to have been wandering gatherers of middle Europe’s oral tradition, the Grimms were in fact less intrepid folklorists than anthologists and curators, concerned with presenting the source material in as straightforward and readable a manner as possible. In that sense they’ve found their ideal modern evangelist in Pullman, whose Dark Materials trilogy secularized themes from Milton’s Paradise Lost and became the go-to fantasy lit choice for a lot of adult readers who normally steer clear of that genre. “What matters is the vigour and zest” of the stories, Pullman writes in his introduction, and a lot of that is down to style. Adverbs are almost completely absent; protagonists are invested with only the bare minimum of description; character is inseparable from action; years or even decades can be telescoped into a line or two, so let your concentration waver for even a minute and you’ll have missed several crucial plot points. No attempt is made to “update” the tales, thank goodness, though Pullman is not above the occasional insertion of a contemporary catchphrase: the lover in Rapunzel is called a “lounge lizard,” the gifted warrior in The Brave Little Tailor a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Pullman’s faith in the stories extends to a willingness to let them speak for themselves. In the notes he appends to each tale, he’s loath to pinpoint a moral, content instead to point out variations among different versions and to mention when he has done a bit of editorial streamlining. It’s a salutary approach, as it honours the multipronged utility that has allowed these stories to survive for so long. Cinderella, to cite just one example, has been seized upon by the Nazis as a parable of ethnic purity, by Marxists as a protest against class inequities, and by two centuries of young wallflowers as the ultimate wish-fulfilment story. When appropriate, Pullman will play the good cop, calling to task a story like The Girl With No Hands for crossing the line between the magical and the preposterous. “The tone of nevershaken piety is nauseating,” he writes, and the honesty is bracing.
Who, at this point in history, are these stories for? The question hangs over the collection. Even allowing for the fact that the tales are products of a time when scaring children witless was an accepted way to impart life lessons, the body count in this book would put the latest Tarantino flick or gangsta rap opus to shame. What’s more, the methods of dispatch are often quite gruesome. Decapitation and general dismemberment are especially popular. Whether you want to read any of this to your kids, or let them read it themselves, is probably a decision best made on a case-by-case basis, after judicious screening. In so doing, though, you’ll most likely find yourself getting lost in these tales yourself, for reasons having nothing to do with childhood nostalgia. There’s meat here to match any novel you’d care to name. As themes go, you can’t get much more adult and timeless than avarice (The Fisherman and His Wife), guilt (The Juniper Tree), and that everfaithful attendant, mortality (Godfather Death, and indeed nearly every one of the stories here to a greater or lesser degree). And guess what? There actually aren’t all that many fairies to deal with. Life of Pi is not a fairy tale, despite often being referred to as one. Yann Martel has always said that he took pains to make sure that nothing in his novel wasn’t scientifically plausible. Still, the book asked enough of a leap from readers that its challenge to a filmmaker might have looked insuperable. Ang Lee, as you may have seen by now, has proven otherwise. Suraj Sharma as Pi proves a casting coup, imbuing the film with a vivid human presence that’s all the more crucial given that the only other prominent character is a computer-generated tiger. Best of all, Lee resists any temptation to anthropomorphize the tiger and romanticize the boy’s relationship with it. A movie whose tone I was reminded of, oddly enough, was Rain Man, which admirably denied an easy emotional bond between a man and his autistic brother.
So, then, in the first of a periodic Books Column featurette to be known as DMRB? (Does the movie ruin the book?), Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is awarded a resounding “No.”