Sunday Short: Mise-en-Scene for a Parricide by Angela Carter

One peculiarity of this house is the number of doors the rooms contain and, a further peculiarity, how all these doors are always locked. A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmate’s personal territory; it is a house with no shared, no common spaces between one room and the next. It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal document.

One of my favourite books of recent years is We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. There was something so tantalising, so exploratory, criminal, heartfelt, dastardly to it all that had left me almost sick to my stomach (particularly with a few of those final scenes - you know what I'm talking about). Shriver managed to worm her way into the heart and mind of a killer, not to justify his actions but, rather simply, to try and understand it. This is a part of narrative that recurs over and over, from shows like Criminal Minds and Law & Order through to books like Lolita, we as writers, readers, society seem to have a need to enter the minds of bad people.

Mise-en-Scene for a Parricide by Angela Carter is a study of Lizzie Borden, a 32-year old woman who took an axe to her father and stepmother in 1892. The effect is a pretty moving portrayal of loss, loneliness and family in an oppressive household, a story that skips the gruesome acts, but not the feelings and mindfulness that fell either side of it. It's a pretty awesome piece of writing.

You can read 'Mise-en-Scene for a Parricide' care of The London Review of Books here.