“You don’t need princes to save you… I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men,” says Gaiman, speaking about his new fairy tale. The book depicts features of Sleeping Beauty which are distorted by aspects of Snow White, but while classical fairy tale characters are typical figures (the princess, the hunter, the stepmother, the beast); Gaiman’s protagonists are the products of their pasts. “I feel like some kind of alchemist,” Gaiman suggests. “I have to go to the cupboard and take one ounce of Snow White and two ounces of Sleeping Beauty, and heat the Sleeping Beauty and froth the Snow White and mix them together: it’s kind of like fusion cuisine. It tastes like both of them but it’s actually a new dish.”
Neil Gaiman
Gaiman is one of the world’s best-known fantasy writers, having penned such international bestsellers as The Bloody Chamber, Coraline and Neverwhere. “The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me,” he says. “[Novelist] Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: ‘You see these fairy stories, these things that are sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right, it will blow up.’ And we all went: ‘Oh my gosh, she’s right — you can blow things up with these!’”
The reason why Disney’s Sleeping Beauty doesn’t work, he says, is because “it’s not a story. It’s the opening to a story. The first versions we have of it make more sense but are less kind to human nature. The prince makes it in [to the castle] after a hundred years, tries to wake her up, fails, impregnates her and leaves. Then, nine months later — still asleep — she gives birth to twins. She and the prince and their children go back to the prince’s house, and his mother is an evil, cannibalistic ogress who tries to eat the children. The story is really about the nightmare of your mother–in–law being a monster.”
In The Sleeper and the Spindle, the author takes a dramatic twist to show the book following the adventures of a young queen who, on the eve of her wedding, sets out to rescue a princess in a neighboring kingdom from a spell that has caused her to fall into a deep slumber. “I want people to imagine. I think that your imagination is the most important tool that you possess, and I think that in addition to being a tool, it’s a muscle, and unless it’s exercised, it atrophies,” he says.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 25th, 2014.
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