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the complete review - fiction

The Infernal Desire Machines
of Doctor Hoffman

by
Angela Carter

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A : remarkable; if anything, almost too dazzling

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Most very impressed -- if also a bit overwhelmed

  From the Reviews:

• "Her surrealistic view of the universe transcends time and involves us almost to extinction. She is unique among her contemporaries in her ability to sustain such imaginings and leaven them with humour and poetry." - Elizabeth Berridge, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "A tendency toward wordiness, then, and a baroque texture, which at times becomes almost impenetrable, seem the main faults. The devious and complex nature of fantasy demands a simple style. (...) But, at her best Angela Carter has created a grotesque and sensual world that calls to mind the texture of Fellini's film Satyricon and the violent poetics of Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight. It is a book which deserves to be read and not swept away under that convenient rug labeled "speculative fiction."" - William Hjortsberg, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "No doubt some readers will have no patience with the exuberant ramifications of Miss Carter's imagination. For my part, I can only testify that I read it enthralled, fascinated and bewitched. This column has not awarded a gold medal for some months now, but Miss Carter wins one for her sustained imagination, her originality and, most important of all, her clear, lucid English." - Auberon Waugh, The Spectator
  
  
• "Miss Carter's most impressive novel so far. (...) (T)he enjoyment and the peacock brilliance of this book are Miss Carter's own achievement." - John Whitley, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Miss Carter probes her unconscious like a diver feeling his way round an Armada-wreck, and she surfaces at intervals with grotesquely-barnacled treasures." - David Williams, The Times
  
  
• "Not a detail is neglected nor a sentence left clumsy. Well-made shapely stuff, beneath the phosphorescent glow, and with more for the mind and senses than many slices of so-called life." - Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is narrated by one Desiderio, looking back on an unusual time he lived through and adventures he had years earlier; as he admits: "I became a hero only because I survived". He was one of the few not greatly affected by the unusual changes that came over an entire city, the capital of a country -- African, presumably, though it's never precisely localized -- originally colonized by the Portuguese in the middle of the sixteenth century, who then were supplanted by the Dutch and, briefly, the British. The population is a mix of races -- Desiderio is half-Indian, half-middle-European --, and the city he grew up in was: "a solid, drab, yet not unfriendly city".
       What it became, however, is ... something entirely different. As the locale for an experiment by the nefarious Dr Hoffman -- echoes of E.T.A. entirely intentional -- it was a place where reality itself was warped beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. Or rather: exactly to everyone's wildest imaginings, amounting to, as Desiderio notes in his introduction, Dr Hoffman: "waging a massive campaign against human reason itself".
       As one Minister describes it:

The Doctor has invented a virus which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild.

For us, the world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world -- the real world, if you like -- is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structure is just as malleable.

Each was as circumscribed as a figure in rhetoric and you could not imagine they had names, for they had been reduced by the rigorous discipline of their vocation to the undifferentiated essence of the idea of the female. This ideational femaleness took amazingly different shapes though its nature was not that of Woman; when I examined them more closely, I saw that none of them were any longer, or might never have been, woman. All, without exception, passed or did not enter the realm of simple humanity. They were sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute.

They are symbolic constituents of representations of the basic constituents of the universe. If they are properly arranged, all the possible situations in the world and every possible mutation of those situations can be represented.

- M.A.Orthofer, 15 April 2017

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Links:

• Penguin Classics publicity page
• Les Éditions de l'Ogre publicity page

• Crítica de Libros (Spanish)
• Fringemania (Spanish)
• Gogol's Overcoat
• Kirkus Reviews
• Libro Vicio's (Spanish)
• Literary and Cultural Theory
• Lou et les feuilles volantes (French)
• Memorie di un Invasato di S-F (Italian)
• The Modern Novel
• The New York Times Book Review
• SFBook
• Un dernier livre avant la fin du monde (French)

• Official site
• Angela Carter at books and writers
• Interview in Review of Contemporary Fiction

• Heroes and Villains
• Shaking a Leg

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction
• See Index of Science Fiction and Fantasy books

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About the Author:

       British author Angela Carter (1940-1992) is best known for her fiction. She is the winner of numerous literary awards, including the John Llwellyn Rhys Prize (1967), the Somereset Maugham Award (1968), and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1984).

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© 2017=2022 the complete review

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