This week, I read Roshani Chokshi’s novel The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, a contemporary fairy tale for adults that includes a different slant on the theme of “kids doing magic.” When I started reading it, I wasn’t sure I’d like it, despite the siren call of fairy tale and mythological subject matter and the author’s darkly seductive storytelling voice. Actually, it was probably the latter that put me on my guard, along with the rapidity with which one character, an expert in the history of mythology, falls under the spell of an alluring but clearly dangerous woman, Indigo Maxwell-Castenada. Her name, if not her proclivities, places her in the category of things that are both very much what they seem and more than they seem.
Against a backdrop of glittering wealth and luxury, the two main characters conduct a cat-and-mouse courtship and are soon married. The Bridegroom—as the character is known throughout—agrees not to pry into his bride’s mysterious past, much in the manner of other mortals who married mermaids or selkies without fully understanding the risks involved. In this case, the bride, clearly no stranger to dangerous games, is in the role of Bluebeard to her handsome but somewhat overmatched husband. “Love is blind” is a saying that here is both metaphorically and literally true.
When Indigo gets word that her aunt is dying, she and her husband visit her childhood home, an island mansion off the Washington coast. As the house begins to reveal its secrets, voices from Indigo’s past insert themselves into the story, and we learn of another doomed relationship in which Indigo played the dominant role. As the Bridegroom searches for answers to memories he can’t explain from his own childhood, he picks up the thread of the story of Indigo and Azure, who were inseparable childhood friends until the day Azure dropped out of the story.
It would be easy to condemn Azure for falling under the sway of Indigo’s manipulations except for the fact that she’s not so much gullible as needy (and essentially orphaned). The two girls share a strong bond based on a belief in magic and the faerie realm, which they are able to indulge in Indigo’s home to their heart’s content under the eye of Indigo’s loving but indulgent aunt. The idyll the two girls share is tested as they grow older and Azure begins to feel the pull of the actual real world as an alternative to the Otherworld the girls have created in secret and which they plan to inhabit permanently one day. The descriptions of the girls’ beautifully conceived private realm, their revels, their play with costumes, hair, and makeup, and the luxuries with which they surround themselves have a seductive glamour that—at least in Azure’s case—feeds a nurturing sense of imagination. Her imaginary (and perhaps not-so-imaginary) world helps her survive adolescence.
Although the story is steeped in the seductions of Aphrodite (and Hecate), it becomes clear that the glamour, in Indigo’s hands, is more a snare than a gift. The Otherworld is really an Underworld, and Indigo is the Hades to Azure’s Persephone, a poor girl who keeps trying to return to her mother. The novel is rich in references to European and Middle Eastern mythology and folklore as well as fantasy; the girls have a special affinity for The Chronicles of Narnia (as does Indigo’s Bridegroom) and early on are determined not to meet the fate of Susan Pevensie, one of the siblings who visited Narnia and became a Queen, only to be later barred. (This apparently for the sin of growing up.)
To speak of the novel as Freud might, it’s only Azure who is really ruled by Eros and a lust for life; Indigo, whose main goal is to never grow up, is ruled by Thanatos (the death wish). For every impossibly lovely (and unsustainable) faerie feast of champagne, cake, and crushed pearls there is its dark counterpart, a still life of heavy foods surrounding a dead bird or beast. This story cleverly turns the idea of Eden on its head, suggesting that growing up and out of childhood is really the happy ending and that trying to remain in a state of stasis—no matter how agreeable—beyond one’s natural term is the true horror. This, of course, is a message one often encounters in fairy tales, in which one youth or another is being shown the way to adulthood.
The Last Tale of the Flower Bride also marks the second novel or series I’ve encountered recently in which Narnia plays a significant role, the other being The Magicians series by Lev Grossman that I recently discussed. In Mr. Grossman’s novels, Fillory is a magical world that students from Brakebills sometimes find their way into. In some particulars, Fillory pays homage to Narnia: the Neitherlands is something like The Wood Between the Worlds; some of the people from Earth who go to Fillory end up as Kings and Queens there; and the passage between the two worlds is sometimes dismayingly abrupt (you might go there or come back without really meaning to). While characters in The Magicians books sometimes make nerdy references to The Lord of the Rings, their fantasy destination of choice actually resembles Narnia, a more markedly childlike world of storybook castles and talking animals than the more mature-toned LOTR.
While I don’t think it can be said that C.S. Lewis ever really went out of style, it seems noteworthy that his work is having a bit of a run in the dark fantasy of current pop culture. Several films of the first books in the series were completed in the 2000s, and there have been other adaptations in the past. In both Flower Bride and The Magicians, Narnia or a Narnia-like world seems to me symbolic of a place of “stuckness” that adults or young adults are continually longing to get to: the fixation on a fantasy world can be either a dangerous obsession or a necessary detour to recovering something lost. Narnia is a more primitive place than Middle-earth (and so, more dangerous, I would argue), so whatever the problem is, it must be buried pretty deep.
