Marina Warner: Murderers I Have Known

Reviewed by ELIZABETH WILSON

I remember, as an undergraduate student in the 70s, the pleasure I took from Marina Warner's Alone All Her Sex, a compelling example of the power stories have to shape and shift the fabric of our lives.

Murderers I Have Known moves in the same space, aligning itself with long-standing conventions of metamorphosis and calling on material that has sustained Warner's scholarship throughout her stellar career.

Murderers I Have Known warns by its title, yet tempts with the promise of a survivor's dire insight.

The collection highlights those mutations of the self that come about through our engagement with the society of others. They suggest we are bound by change as by nothing else.

The death of a parent or the small permutations of our daily relationships signify a continual metamorphosis which Warner's tales figure both as potential-laden — where transformation brings delight — and as threatening: our fear of the monstrous in ourselves, as in others, haunting our dreams and our days.

The bleakness of the tales is leavened by our engagement with the idea that art might engender transformation, or conjure the magic by which we might imagine possibilities other than the one depicted.

Warner catalogues a world which strips the air from the lungs of its canaries, caged so they can warn the rest of us that we transgress the limits of the human. The cautionary imperatives of Warner's tales seem occasionally to be established at the cost of stylistic fluency. Their slightly impassive quality distances — perhaps deliberately, given what lurks in the shadows of these stories — rather than engages.

The collection, however, gathers force as it goes. In the final story, No One Goes Hungry, a bloated, gluttonous, technocratic father feeds off the will, energy and capacity to nourish of his harried and increasingly insubstantial daughter, whom the narrator fears will herself be eaten.

Instead, the girl is rendered insubstantial by the power of the father over a technology which offers her up for sale again and again. The male narrator is snared by a depiction he can neither terminate nor refute. The images roll relentlessly on; he and the girl are implicated, framed, without his having lifted a finger.

Life beyond the body is seen as a function of a computer programme, a transubstantive capacity waiting, like electricity did before its time arrived, in the wings of the technological stage. Warner's syncretic capacity makes fascinating reading.

• Marina Warner is giving the upcoming Sir Douglas Robb Lecture Series at the University of Auckland. Her audiences for her three lectures (After the Arabian Nights: Daemons and Alters; After Ovid: Flowers and Monsters; After Revelations: Angels and Machines) will discover the range of her knowledge and her lifetime's insistence that the self is a fluid entity, and her belief that stories bring about breaches in the order of reality through which our histories might always remain open to revision and debate.

Marina Warner talks on Magic and transformation in contemporary literature and culture, at 8pm, on March 30, April 1 and 6, in Auckland University lecture theatre B28, Library Building, Alfred St, Auckland. Free admission. More details: www.alumni.auckland.ac.nz/2446.html.

Vintage, $26.95

* Elizabeth Wilson works in Auckland University's English department.