Several Perceptions

by Angela Carter

Joseph - a 22-year-old self-styled nihilist in search of meaning, found releasing a badger from a zoo, seducing his best friend's mother, dancing at a Dionysic revel and spending his days in a mortuary - is the anti-hero at the heart of this novel.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, 20th Century, Contemporary, Fantasy, Classics, Novels

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.

She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). She was there at the same time as Roland Barthes, who published his experiences in Empire of Signs (1970).

She then explored the United States, Asia, and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.

As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Wolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).

At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.

Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.

Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Reading this novel it felt to me like a second novel, although by all conventional methods of counting it was, I believe, Angela Carter's third novel, but all the same it felt like a second novel - I had a sense of a kicking over the traces and turning her ire on all the Jane Austen she had to read for her English Literature degree that she had completed at the University of Bristol.

It also struck me also as an earlier and less successful version of Love (in the sense that I felt Love packed a punch which Several Perceptions did not)but with a focus here on the person most vulnerable from the point of view of their mental health. There's a shared theme of relationships mostly going wrong - though that is presented in a more extreme way in Love - by which time she was herself divorced.

I see that I have now read four of Carter's nine novels and I certainly read this with the impression of her later writing in mind (it was not so long ago that I read Wise Children, but in this novel she has not yet become the novelist that she would later be, and I was disappointed by that. This could be read as a quirky glance at the demi-monde of a shabby Bristol towards the close of the 1960s, perhaps that is what it is. And it was enjoyable enough, but it lacked for me a certain intensity that I found in the other novels of hers that I read obliging me to recall the Niels Bohr saying your theory is crazy by not crazy enough to be true in this case liberally understood as it is Angela Carter but not Angela Carter enough to be ravishing (the curse of the earlier novel).

The many character is called Joseph - this is related to the the Biblical Joseph explicitly late in the book but Carter's Joseph does not interpret dreams he suffers from them and no one will explain them to him.

Joseph may be said to die and rise again, while birth and the offspring being given away is a reoccurring presence too - symbolically it is quite rich then, but equally Joseph is in such a fragile state that this richness could be symptomatic of the extent of his illness. However the book was written between March and December 1967, suggestive of gestation in the womb, and Joseph is in extreme need of a comprehensive rebirth.

In a way this is quite the non-novel in that Joseph blunders through the book having a mildly catalytic effect on some of the people he bumps into, I have a sneaky suspicion that the book might be modelled on Alice's adventures in Wonderland, there is not a plot in any conventional way.

Fun and in the quirky zone, but maybe I just read it too quickly.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angela Carter's third novel is steeped in a very similar milieu as her first one, Shadow Dance, and in fact this follows that one in the informal Bristol Trilogy. Once again we find ourselves in crumbling urban surroundings among the late 60s Bohemian set. The Vietnam War is raging, jobs are scarce, and 22-year-old anti-hero Joseph hangs at the end of his existential rope. As with Shadow Dance there is not much plot here, but plenty of Carter's picture-perfect renderings of people, places, and events. There is even a sly nod to Dickens near the end which is a bit hokey, but works in context. The narrative arc that does exist follows Joseph's restoration of mental health through a number of formative experiences, and with the support of a range of intriguing characters. While Shadow Dance is certainly darker, as it focuses on the tortured villain Honeybuzzard and his violent tendencies, I think I prefer this one, with its more likeable characters and more finely spun narrative (and the badger rescue operation didn't hurt!). It also offers a bit more hope than Shadow Dance and I guess I just appreciated that at the moment. A case of the right book at the right time, which doesn't happen nearly as often as I would like.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gosh, this book was a struggle. The first ~20 pages are especially excruciating; it gets better and easier after that point, but it takes some effort to get into the swing of things. Apparently it's very different from all of Carter's other novels though, and it was written really early in her career, so I'm not going to hold it against her.

Her prose is nice as always, with some great turns of phrase, but the protagonist Joseph is just so relentlessly unlikeable that it kept me out of the book pretty much the whole way through. I'm just not much interested in reading about young male depression and ennui, nor his going around wanting to bone practically every woman he sees. He's pretty much misogynistic and mildly racist and anti-Semitic! It ain't great!

Book club discussion did increase my appreciation for the book -- some nice commentary on 1960s existential anxiety, the PTSD from the parents' generation having lived through the Blitz, the younger characters' struggle for meaning and purpose -- but it was never my cuppa. By the end, not much has happened and there doesn't seem to have been much point to things.

Wise Children was similar, prose/style-wise, but was anchored by strong female characters throughout and a far stronger narrative arc driving towards a culminating event at the end. I'd initially thought that book felt meandering, but I'm now revising my opinion having read Several Perceptions: this one is meandering and purposeless.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this, Carter's third novel published in 1968, she invents a suitably miserable character with 22 year old Joseph.
He has failed his university exams, lives in a gloomy bedsit, and works as a hospital porter, cleaning the dying and tidying the dead, giving his money away to beggars on the street.
After his girl-friend leaves him he opts to end it all, but to compound his misery, he is not even successful at that.

This scenario gives Carter the chance to do what she does best; write those remarkable descriptions of shabby interiors inhabited by grimy characters, and do it with humour.

Amongst Joseph's associates are a number of other bedraggled characters; the elderly Miss Blossom downstairs, with her frizzed hair and crippled leg; a feral beatnik, Kay; his best friend Viv, and his mother, the voluptuous and seductive Mrs. Boulder who hypnotises him with her ever-weakening charms.

This isn't Carter in her magic realist - fantasy mode, nobody turns into a wolf or sprouts wings, but it is typical of her in other ways; witty, satirical and disrespectful.

Despite the best efforts of his entourage to pull him round, Joseph remains uninspired.
It is very much a novel of its time. The decaying homes of the town (Bristol one assumes, as it was where Carter was living at the time) are populated by the young hippie generation in their bright clothes who are, as well as Joseph, appalled at the established order of governments they see to be responsible for the atrocities in Vietnam, but can do nothing about it. Joseph however, struggles to direct his anger.

As is evident from the passages involving Joseph in therapy with his psychiatrist, Dr Ransome, this is a novel about, amongst other things, mental illness. But the question Carter asks, is who is really mad, to which there appears to be no simple answer.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

'"Oh, I'm all for shooting politicians," said Joseph. "It's murder I can't stomach."'

This is the last of Carter’s nine novels I had left to read, and whilst it certainly didn’t disappoint, it certainly didn’t astonish me either. Nevertheless, we owe it a lot: Several Perceptions won her the Somerset Maugham Prize with £500 to spend on travel. This gave Carter the freedom to leave her unhappy marriage and took her to Japan, a formative experience which radicalised her as a feminist, inspired some of her most disturbing and original works and ultimately made her into the writer we know and love.

This one is a strange romp through the demi-monde of Bristol in the Swinging Sixties, a substantial improvement on Shadow Dance, the first in the unofficial Bristol Trilogy and an early incarnation of Love. The characters and their plights aren’t entirely compelling beyond self-ordained nihilist Joseph, his existential crisis and botched suicide attempt. (Although I must also admit that the badger rescue operation endeared him to me somewhat.)

I wish Carter had pushed the antihero towards the political movements of his day (which he does consider at one point), more than anything to give this one more plot and perhaps even punch. There is a wonderful political awareness outside of Bohemian Bristol – widespread unemployment, the aftermath of WW2, the Vietnam War – which just goes to show how much of a study of one specific moment this novel is. But as an era of immense social change I would have loved to have an insight into that – especially since Carter herself was so politically engaged.

I’m so near the end of Carter’s oeuvre – there are sad times ahead…

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dust jacket of my copy says that this is notable for being a book about the lost youth of the hippie era written in 1968, and not a reflection on it years down the line after time has had the chance to sort out what's historical from what's merely passing. Looked upon that way, this is a remarkable book that captures a moment of aimless youthfulness in all its fashion-obsessed glory. I also appreciated all the cultural references that went right over my head, and got ridiculously excited when I got one. That said, the book seems a bit random and muted, even while the events of its thin plot are so bizarre that they hold it together, namely the protagonist, Joseph, freeing a badger from the zoo and mailing a turd to LBJ as acts of resistance, not to mention Joseph's multiple somewhat disturbing post-sexual and pre-feminist revolution sexual experiences ... Thinking about that, I was like, ok, so we have a fair bit of sex, some rock and roll at the Christmas party at the end, but no drugs ... And then I realized that the whole book holds together a lot better if you interweave some scenes from your mind about rolling a spliff or twenty and dropping acid a few times, and maybe throw in some arcane pills, because I guess people were into pills with colours for names back then. And, voila, the book ceases to seem like it's inhabited by people for whom reality isn't quite all there, and it becomes this wild and extraordinarily inebriated romp through a very specific moment in time. Which, by the way, appears to be a deliciously decaying Bristol, although I might be wrong about that because I clearly wasn't there ...

[Tom Meade · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd book, in that it's written in much the same way as a lot of Carter's other work, but sticks to a fairly realistic narrative about unemployed youths, which adds a strange sense of cock-eyed grandeur to a fairly simple story. It doesn't really go anyway, but then again I suppose that's the point. The protagonist is named Joseph, and there are a few nods to Kafka, as well as a running theme of referencing Alice in Wonderland, which is one of the great books about learning how to deal with the pointless trivial annoyances of existence, and hold up in the face of madness internal and external. So there's that.

[Temucano · Rating 2 out of 5]

Al empezar se nota el estilo elegante, lleno de intenciones y sobrevuelos, insuflando más expectativas a las ya acarreadas solo por el nombre de la autora. Mas resulta ser una historia nihilista de búsqueda y sentido en un ambiente juvenil urbano, donde ni la elevada prosa permite empatizar con el pelmazo del protagonista, tipo pesado que hace pensar en el desperdicio de tiempo que me hizo leer parte de su vida.

Debe ser lo que menos me ha gustado de Angela Carter.

[suzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

"you're wedged in the gap between art and life"

[Grace Harwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set during the 1960s - and written during at this point in time as well - this makes for an interesting read. As The Sunday Times review said of this book: "The importance of this early novel by Angela Carter lies in the fact that it gives a picture of the Swinging Sixties without the romantic gloss of middle-aged memories."

The book itself reads like a set of hallucinogenic happenings to the main character, Joseph, and the eclectic crowd of people around him (including an ageing hooker, her sharp-dressed and brilliantined musician son, a fey-like young man who has "adventures", a glamorous American (named "Barbie", perhaps appropriately) and an orphaned woman who has abandoned her baby and developed an hysterical limp as a result). From the Sunday Times review (contrasted with all I know of Carter's work) it's hard to know whether the story is a product of the Swinging Sixties and this is how people actually lived (I'm a child of the 70s myself) or whether this is Carter's surrealism at work.

Whatever it is, this is a beautifully-written (what else would you expect with Carter?), witty piece of work. I loved the bit about the badger.

As one other reviewer said on here - this probably isn't her best work - I personally prefer The Magic Toyshop or Nights at the Circus, but it's well worth a look and you won't be wasting your time reading it.

[M F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty standard fare for Angela Carter and her grotesques. Joseph, the protagonist, is an unwashed, psychologically-damaged, nihilistic beatnik-type who stumbles about his day-to-day existence doing odd-ish things and encountering a cast of characters who seem extracted from a Fellini film. The novel is a bit insular; it's set in an English city (Bristol, maybe?), but it feels much smaller than that, since Joseph's perambulations take him only a few blocks in any direction. There's not much plot to speak of here, but Carter's a beautiful writer capable of some of the most exquisite passages you'll encounter, combining filth, beauty, and eroticism in the most unique ways (the dream about eating his best friend's mom is a standout, and there are individual sentences that made me just stop reading and contemplate life for a few moments). The title, as indicated by the epigraph, is inspired by David Hume's conception of the mind as a theatre, and its expressionist vibe resonates with Hume's take on the multiplicity of perception--the characters are, despite their ways in which they are introduced, quite difficult to pin down, exceeding the limits of Joseph's schemas. The last thing I'll say is that the final chapter is exquisite, and that Carter writes about cats better than anyone except, perhaps, Murakami.

[Pippa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was well written, and intriguing at times, but it didn't appeal to me hugely. I don't know how accurate the psychology of the hero/anti-hero was likely to be, but it didn't feel right that he would care so much, and then be so cruel, at times... but I may be wrong! One possibility that struck me was that he might be on the autistic spectrum (I won't give an example in case I spoil it for other people!) I think it would be the only way I could make any kind of sense out of his character. I liked the way that characters were drawn - and got a very clear sense of what they were like, in their physical presence. I've only given it three stars, but that is a very personal rating. Other people might like it a lot more.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

HOUSEKEEPING 2025:

Look, it's been 7 years and I still remember most of this novel. That says much, all of it good. Carter was not yet 'Carter' in her first two novels, this being the second, and this wonderfully fuckodd monstrosity is the last gasp of nebulous Angela. A true phantasmagoria, and likely the first reread I will get around to if I don't die before finally just reading Wise Children; I've staved off that inevitability by pacing her novels at annual intervals, but that batter is in this year's lineup. Maybe this again, too, once I'm made complete. You completist me?

[Geoffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

For most of its length, this reminded me of an early Godard film--disaffected young people talking past one another--which was entertaining in its way but not necessarily all I'd hope for from Carter. But then the last chapter is beautiful and luminous and bam, I'm in love all over again.

[Simon newson · Rating 2 out of 5]

oh dear-not interested in any of the characters and missing the fantastic atmosphere of other of her books-I skimmed the last 50 pages

[Javier Avilés · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tengo cierto problema con este tipo de narrativa que parece consumirse en sí misma en el esfuerzo de explicar ciertos acontecimientos que no llevan a ninguna parte. La novela no está mal, pero no me aporta nada. me muestra un fragmento en la vida de una persona, o de un grupo de personas, pero no soy capaz de ver que es lo que quiere decir (dejando de lado cierta moraleja banal que prefiero evitar)
En fin, una buena novela y una escritora interesante... pero...

[Sheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is the last of Angela Carter's early novels on my reading list, and I am relieved to finish it.
Despite having some gorgeous writing (of course!) and a few very funny scenes, this is primarily a meandering overlong book that goes nowhere.
I suppose you could take that as a perfect metaphor for the lives of the dissafected young people of 1960s London who are the main characters of the story. Unfortunately, I was never drawn into the story enough to care much about any of them.
Another one for completists only.

[Richard Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a novelist, Carter seems to me much better at realistic fiction with a fantastical twist than she was at straightforward fantasy or science fiction. So, if you've been left as cold as I was by 'Heroes and Villains', 'The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman' or 'The Passion of New Eve', I'd advise you to give her another chance with either this one, 'The Magic Toyshop', 'Love', 'Night's at the Circus' or 'Wise Children'.

The blurb on the back suggests it's all a put-down of the Sixties. I'd disagree: this is an effective study of the mentally ill and the would-be creative, hanging on for as long as they can in the less expensive parts of town. It could have been set in any decade since the war. It does not despise its subjects, though it makes no excuses for them. A lot of the people who will look at this will have read 'The Space between Things' by Charlie Hill; if you liked that, try this.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decided to read this after reading a couple of reviews of the new biography of Carter, who I'd never quite gotten around to. It's a strange novel, a mix up of Antonioni's "Blow Up," Alice in Wonderland and a wicked satirist in the Evelyn Waugh stream. The humor's distinctive and if you don't like it early on, might as well find something else because it won't change. Carter's not worried about being polite or politically correct (the brief piece on an African character made me cringe) but she provides a anti-romantic take on Sixties (not so very "Swinging") London. Not sure whether or not I'll come back to her, but not sorry to have read this one.

[Fhsanders54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the 1960s among the marginalized elements of city life in anonymous apartments and decaying houses, it follows 6 months in the life of a 22 year old intellectual nihilist dropout, self-neglecting since the separation with his co-student girlfriend. Other characters include an ex-Barnados girl whose baby has been taken away, a violin-playing tramp, and an ageing but wealthy prostiute whose son is the protagonist's best friend. All comes together in a saturnalian New Years partywith drink drugs and sex all on offer. perhaps a new beginning will follow after a nightmarish vision of life on the edge.

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Siempre he pensado en esta novela como un reflejo oscuro de La señora Dalloway de Virginia Woolf: el protagonista vaga por un Londres de los 70, en un ambiente de pesadilla, encontrándose con distintos personajes, que para mí, son el reflejo de él mismo.
Como dice el título, no existe un argumento propiamente tal, sólo el febril recorrido y los encuentros con distintas percepciones, que Carter logra mostrar de manera muy sutil.  

[Adam O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several Perceptions is a surreal jewel that follows a young man, Joseph, through a botched suicide attempt and his difficulties in coming to terms with adult life in a cruel world. Facets of 60s life in a dreamlike Bristol shimmer in the background as Joseph grapples with the Vietnam war, caged animals and unsentimental romance. Carter's use of language and vivid cast of characters are delicious and I devoured this novel through the course of a day.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

this one was out of print, but i found it at POWELLS!
(my version doesn't have boobies on the cover though)

[Tali · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can read my review here:

http://greyplane.com/2009/01/08/sever...

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very human portrait of very broken people trying to move on and heal. Nothing really happens, but for Carter it doesn't really need to: characters - and what drives them - come first.

[Padmini Sukumaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant literary piece on the complexity of the dream sequence & inner psychology!

[Serena]

Borrowed from Billy

[Adam O’Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Following the story of Joseph, a directionless young man who attempts to take his own life prior to the opening of the novel, Several Perceptions gives a slice of life leading up to a Christmas in the swinging sixties. Joseph and his friends free a badger from the zoo, send excrement to the American president, and have improbable parties where it seems perfectly feasible to just grab someone and have sex with them. The era of free love looks a bit different post Me Too movement. The drama reaches a climax as Joseph sleeps with his best friend’s mum, who is a sex worker, and they fall out. Unfortunately, being the sixties, the plot is resolved via a racist trope, which turns out to be much worse than a friend sleeping with your mum, and the friends teach the woman who lives another room in Joseph’s shared house how to walk properly (she had a limp) in a sort of Christmas miracle. An interestingly told story that kind of reminded me of The Graduate in some ways, and really shows the attitudes of the time.

[coco's reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

After finishing Several Perceptions, the two words that comes to mind are time and reflections. It's Angela Carter; of course there are countless instances of mirroring throughout the book: reflections as true or false selves, as revealing something about the characters. But the theme of time is what really stood out to me, maybe because this novel is so firmly grounded in a specific time. By far, this has been the most mundane of Carter's novels...and maybe that's why I was so charmed by it. It wasn't plot-driven but rather a character study of Joseph just as much as of the city of Bristol at this point in the 1960s. Carter's prose was as sharp as ever but also toned down in a way that felt purposeful. A great way to kick off December!

[Calandria Doza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Te induce en la atmósfera del relato, logra que palpes el entorno en su frialdad y oscuridad, y a los personajes, en características tan complejas como los aromas, sonidos y texturas. No siempre gratas, las situaciones, algunas incómodas, transcurren en una cotidianeidad que a veces sorprende, repugna o conmueve.