By SHEILA MACLEOD (Secker & Warburg; 1970)
Amid all the modern-day ire being aired about Snow White, here’s a most unorthodox take on that immortal Brothers Grimm fairy tale. How the five decades-old SNOW-WHITE SOLILOQUIES might fit into our ultra-sensitive modern age I’m not sure, but it is a most fascinating adult-oriented oddity.
Author Sheila MacLeod is a Scottish columnist and screenwriter whose second novel this was. As the author bio makes sure to reveal, she was married to Paul Jones (they divorced in 1976), the lead singer of Manfred Mann and star of Peter Watkins’ PRIVILEGE (1967). That swinging sixties connection likely informed THE SNOW-WHITE SOLILOQUIES, which has a jaunty, turned-on air the other MacLeod novels I’ve sampled (such as the 1977 science fiction themed XANTHE AND THE ROBOTS) lack. It also boasts uniformly lush and erudite prose, and a dreamlike air that’s more redolent of a surreal prose poem than the “myth for today” promised by the jacket description.
The title character takes the form of a beautiful woman in a state of suspended animation (suggesting another famed Brothers Grimm narrative, one involving sleep and beauty). She’s quite conscious of her surroundings, which consist of a coffin made of “Glass That Breathes.” This “triumph of modern engineering” was commissioned by Doc, an immoral but quite brilliant individual who mans a traveling circus of sorts whose centerpiece is Snow White. Luckily for him there seem to be no shortage of crowds eager to gawk at this seemingly dead woman.
The narrative is taken up largely with Snow White’s philosophical yet poetic first person musings (“The knowledge of the finality of death is as firmly within me as the knowledge…of my own heart beating, beating like a lost crimson flower inside its own ribbed fortress”) and dreams, in which she’s able to walk and function normally but is invariably felled by some horrific element (maggot-ridden meat, an epileptic man, uncontrollably growing hair, etc.). Doc leaves each week to have his six attendants (not exactly seven dwarfs but close) look after Snow White. They include the too-sensitive-for-this-world Adonais, the drug-addicted Buttons, the revolutionary-minded Cato and his colleague Discipulus, the uber-feminine Egalantine and the clownish Feste.
Nearly all these individuals provide detailed soliloquies about their lives (inner and outer), followed, in a few cases, by their deaths—in Cato’s case via a botched attempt at assassinating Doc. After a while Snow White learns how to communicate by blinking her eyes, and meets her destiny at a raucous wedding party in which…