Stories of Black and White

Michael Wood

• In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women by Alice Walker
  Women’s Press, 138 pp, £7.50, September 1984, ISBN 0 7043 2852 6
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
  Chatto, 295 pp, £8.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7011 3932 3
• Democracy by Joan Didion
  Chatto, 234 pp, £8.95, September 1984, ISBN 0 7011 2890 9

The freedom to juggle with language, Angela Carter suggests, is a promise and perhaps an instrument of other freedoms. Certainly her own cheerful jokes bespeak a lively independence of hallowed prejudices. ‘It’s very tiring, not being alienated from your environment.’ ‘It won’t be much fun after the Revolution, people say. (Yes, but it’s not all that much fun, now.)’ St Petersburg, in her new novel, is ‘a city built of hubris, imagination and desire’, and that, Carter says, is what cities, and lives, should be: crazy possibilities, even impossibilities, juggled into practice. But what if the first freedom is illusory, if all we have to juggle with is cliché, the language of others, a shabby idiom we can’t refresh and can’t abandon? What if the ‘shop-soiled ... romance’ Carter finds so much energy in seems to us merely worn down, beaten thin, at best only the shadow of an old puzzle? This is the dilemma that confronts narrator and characters in Joan Didion’s Democracy, a novel whose title itself mimes the slippery problem. Democracy, in Didion’s work, is not a form of government but an item of rhetoric: what the world is to be made safe for; a conspiracy of empire rigged out as a heart-warming liberal dream. An organisation called the Alliance for Democratic Institutions is simply a means by which a once hopeful Presidential candidate in the novel seeks to keep his political flag flying.