“Reflections” (1974)

Angela Carter is a dense prose stylist. This story, formally a kind of M.C. Escher exercise, gets to strange places. The first-person narrator is taking a walk in the woods—his voice feels to me more like a woman, but he is a young man. He hears the singing of a bird, then the singing of a woman. His reverie is interrupted when he trips on something, which turns out to be a seashell. “A shell so far from the sea!” It’s very big and also the pattern of whorls on it goes the wrong way, our first clue that we are inside some mirror world. The singing young woman has a gun and shoots at him. She sics her “enormous black dog” on him. She forces him at gunpoint to an ”ancient brick house” surrounded by a magnificent walled garden. Wikipedia, via ISFDB, summarizes: “A boy goes on a Through the Looking-Glass-like adventure into a bizarre, reversed world. He encounters an elderly woman who is actually a hermaphrodite, and is raped by a girl in a forest before ultimately escaping.” That’s about it all right. The girl’s name is Anna, a palindrome. Everything in this world is reversed or reversible. Perhaps the androgyne represents a kind of balance between the two worlds. Here’s a typical Carter sentence, during the rape of the narrator: “I shouted and swore but the shell grotto in which she ravished me did not reverberate and I only emitted gobs of light.” What would the reverse look like, one wonders. By this time our guy is aware he is in a mirror world. He takes Anna’s gun and shoots her. He knows where the mirror portal is and intends to escape. The androgyne, I should mention because I’m sure it means something, if not everything, seems to spend all their time knitting prodigiously. Attempting to put it all together, the story has much the feel of dreams in the retelling (and rereading by fragments). Carter is one to read almost like poetry, slowly and carefully, savoring and pondering its raw ways. It’s at least as weird as, and maybe even better than, the Lewis Carroll tale. I know that’s saying something but also I have always found the classic Carroll tales slightly oversold.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Story not available online.