A Grimm revival

Literary editor/columnist

Sunday 14 October 2012

In his introduction to his classic collection, Italian Folktales, Italo Calvino invoked an old Tuscan proverb to explain his urge to rework his country's best-known stories: "The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it".

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Grimm Tales For Young And Old by Philip Pullman Penguin, £20 Reviewed by Rosemary Goring

Few writers, one imagines, can read a fairytale without itching to change a line, or refashion it entirely. That's the motivation, certainly, behind Philip Pullman's venture, in which he has taken what he considers the finest 50 tales by the Brothers Grimm, and rewritten them in his own distinctive style.

Lest anyone think that taking timeless and simple tales and putting them into his own words is childishly easy, however, he is quick to correct them: "I suspect that the finest of them have the quality that the great pianist Artur Schnabel attributed to the sonatas of Mozart: they are too easy for children and too difficult for adults."Whatever the difficulties, Pullman's versions are excellent, some doing no more than refreshing the language, others incorporating elements found in different versions of these tales, or small embellishments of Pullman's own, in order to make them more coherent or powerful.Pullman's collection marks the 200th anniversary of the first edition of the Grimm Brothers' first collection, Kinder- und Hausmarchen, and he first explains how this poor but clever pair worked, using previous compilations, and trawling far and wide through Germany for further stories, both oral and written. Jacob and Wilhelm's work came out when Germany was trying to establish its national identity. Just as crucial to its popularity, perhaps, was the gathering momentum of the publishing trade, as readerships multiplied.Pullman's selection includes the staple titles most of us recall from childhood – Snow White, The Goose Girl, Little Red Riding Hood – but there is as much interest in the lesser known tales that plunge us back into the primeval mists out of which these frequently disturbing (and, for me as a child, utterly nightmarish) stories were born.Take, for instance, The Three Snake Leaves, in which a princess will marry only the man who promises that if she dies first, he will be buried (alive) with her. Pullman handles this superbly, showing primitive passions at work without curdling the blood. The same is true of Little Brother And Little Sister, about siblings caught under their stepmother's evil charm, though in these tales, and many, many others, there is such a sinister undercurrent, a psychologist would have a field day. It's no wonder Freud came from middle Europe.And it's no surprise either that women have for centuries been kept under the thumb. In scene after scene women are dreadful: either child-killers, like the mother and witch in Hansel And Gretel, or eye-wateringly ambitious and unkind, as in Cinderella. And when they're not conniving or evil, they are ridiculously sweet and guileless. Men, on the other hand, appear mostly as simpletons, as in the magnificent and comic The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About The Shivers (a wholly delightful tale, despite the occasional corpse), or as weaklings, like the husband of the outrageously greedy pauper in The Fisherman And His Wife.At the end of each tale Pullman adds his comments. These are illuminating, giving their source (though the tale type references are baffling – what is ATU 316 or AT 1430?). They are also intriguing, as when Pullman reflects on Hansel And Gretel, "a great and ferocious classic", that if he had been writing it as a novel, he would have had the father killing the wife. One can hardly blame him, this being a woman prepared to send her children into the forest to die rather than share a dwindling supply of food. The fear this story stirs, harking back to a child's keen awareness of vulnerability in his parents' affections, is what makes this riveting and horrifying, even today, when most infants seem to come out of the womb already versed in their rights.Pullman prefaces his enthrallingly fresh retellings with a literary critique of the fairy story's defining characteristics: a directness and economy that would be dizzying in any other hands but those pulling the puppet strings of stories so embedded in the human psyche it's as if they are part of our DNA. A few words can set a scene, and the action can move at lightning pace which, in mainstream fiction, would be unthinkable. His opening story, as it was with the Grimms, is The Frog King. This shows the clarity of expression essential to such stories and Pullman's skill in emulating it: "In the olden days, when wishing still worked, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful; but the youngest daughter was so lovely that even the sun, who has seen many things, was struck with wonder every time he shone on her face."Given his ear for rhythm, it makes sense that Pullman likens this sort of writing to music: "the substance of the tale is there already, just as the sequence of chords in a song is there ready for the jazz musician, and our task is to step from chord to chord, from event to event, with all the lightness and swing we can." Step he does, gaily and without a stumble, as if piping us to follow him back into the ancient woods where these characters first came alive.

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A Grimm revival

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