In her first anthology of fairy tales, Angela Carter included a story from Kenya: while a poor man's wife in the village thrives, the Sultana in the palace grows thinner and scrappier by the minute. The Sultan summons the poor man and demands to know the secret of his wife's happiness. 'Very simple,' he replies. 'I feed her meat of the tongue.' The Sultan sends out for all the tongues money can buy - ox tongues and lambs' tongues and larks' tongues; still his sad Sultana withers away. He orders his litter, makes her change places with the poor man's wife; she immediately starts to thrive, becoming the picture of health, plumper, rosier, gayer. Meanwhile, in the palace, her replacement languishes, and soon has become as scrawny and miserable as the former queen. For the tongue meats that the poor man feeds the women are not material, of course. They are fairy tales, stories, jokes, songs; he nourishes them on talk, wraps them in language; he banishes melancholy by refusing silence. Storytelling makes women thrive - and not exclusively women, the Kenyan fable implies, but other sorts of people, too, even sultans.
When I was young and highly robust, I still felt great hunger for fairy tales; they seemed to offer the possibility of change, far beyond the boundaries of their improbable plots or fantastically illustrated pages. The metamorphoses promised more of the same, not only in fairy land, but in this world, and this instability of appearances, these sudden swerves of destiny, created the first sustaining excitement of such stories. Like romance, to which fairy tales bear a strong affinity, they could 'remake the world in the image of desire'. That this is a blissful dream which need not be dismissed as totally foolish is central to the argument of this book.

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