Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings
by Natalie Lawrence
Genres: Non-fictionPages: 368
Rating:
Synopsis:The hydra rears its many heads in a flurry of teeth and poisonous fumes. The cyborg lays waste to humanity with a ruthless, expressionless stare.
From ancient mythology to modern science fiction, we have had to confront the monsters that lurk in the depths of our collective imagination. They embody our anxieties and our irrational terrors, giving form to what we don't wish to know or understand. For millennia, monsters have helped us to manage the extraordinary complexity of our minds and to deal with the challenges of being human.
In Enchanted Creatures, Natalie Lawrence delves into 15,000 years of imaginary beasts and uncovers the other-worldly natural history that has evolved with our deepest fears and fascinations. Join Lawrence on a tour of prehistoric cave monsters, serpentine hybrids, deep-sea leviathans and fire-breathing Kaiju. Discover how this monstrous menagerie has shaped our minds, our societies and how we see our place in nature.
Natalie Lawrence’s Enchanted Creatures is a fairly entertaining read, an attempt to dig into why humans imagine monsters, and what various kinds of monsters mean to us and what they say about us. It’s unfortunately one of those books where the research is marred by bizarre mistakes; the most basic check on Google would yield the info that the Goblin King in Labyrinth is called Jareth, not Jared, for instance.
When that kind of easily-verifiable fact is wrong, it really casts everything else into doubt. There is a bibliography with some references, which is somewhat reassuring, but… Jared? I know that’s wrong and I’ve never even seen Labyrinth.
Or there’s a section where she refers to Circe as one of several snake women who’ve had modern novels written from their point of view. What? Circe isn’t associated with snakes (as far as I’ve ever heard).
The more I think about it, the more it falls to bits — how can any conclusions be supported when this stuff is randomly mentioned without actual evidence? If you want me to accept that Circe’s a snake-woman in some way, then we need the evidence.
Rating: 2/5
Too bad. Though Circe is indeed often depicted with snakes, though her sister Angitia has more connections with them than she has.
It’s telling that for example I searched the wikipedia entry on snakes [edit: Circe’s, I mean, and searched it FOR the word snakes], and it only mentions the word three times, and all reference modern art… Not that Wikipedia is the ultimate arbiter, but if there was enough evidence to consider Circe a “snake-woman”, you’d think it’d come up there.
And Circe’s own Wikipedia article only mentions snakes or serpents twice, in reference to 20th century depictions. Snakes don’t appear in the ancient sources https://www.theoi.com/Titan/Kirke.html but I suppose snakes might make an appearance whenever snakes are associated with sorcery, but that’s in conjunction with other things (eg toads and bats and whatnot). Is she getting mixed up with Medea, who *is* associated with snakes thanks to her chariot?
That’s what I meant, in my original post — that I searched Circe’s entry for snakes. I just typed nonsense because brain’s dead.
I don’t think there was a mix-up with Medea, but since I returned the book to the library, I can’t say for sure.
The Circe/snake confusion is new to me to me. I wonder if it’s a bit of cross-myth bleedover given the role of the Serpent in the Biblical story of the Fall.. That, or the author was just thinking of Medusa somehow…
Medusa (and Eve) are both discussed separately!
Yikes, the subtitle caught my interest so too bad to hear there’s not much to back it up.
It was a pleasant enough read, but stepping back to think about it further definitely gave me pause…
I’m afraid to say the Labyrinth error got introduced during editing and it went to print before I had a chance to make final corrections. Circe was not a confusion with the snake women, its rather obvious she’s a difficult female mythical character and so in the same bucket. So it seems rather unnecessary to get hung up on that. But I’m aware it’s the kind of book that doesn’t click with everyone, especially with no psychoanalytic interest, so it’s a shame you didn’t enjoy!
Like it or not, the failure of editing is a part of this book and how people experience it. It might not be your error, but it’s certainly a telling one about the quality of the book. How can I trust anything in a book with an error as sloppy and ridiculous as that? My rating largely reflected this carelessness: the care taken with editing a book and ensuring any factual points are actually correct is extremely important and relevant, and necessary to mention in a review. I was not the only one who felt my reading experience was marred by silly mistakes — this other review details some of the things that they picked up on, for instance.
It was clearly not obvious that you just meant Circe was a “difficult female mythical character”, rather than directly referring to her as a snake woman, since I didn’t find it to be so (bringing in a reference to Circe at that moment seemed rather out of nowhere, as I recall). Whether you made an error or just failed to make yourself clear, this isn’t “getting hung up” on something “unnecessary”. Perhaps if I hadn’t noticed the other mistakes, I’d have given you more benefit of the doubt.
This may not have been your intent, but you come across as quite passive-aggressive and insulting. It’s also just a bit of a pathetic look, to go around insisting that oh well, this random person I don’t know must have just not liked my book because they’re not interested in psychoanalysis. That’s the kind of thing you think to take the sting out of it but don’t go ahead and say in public about a reviewer, when you’re a professional. Unfortunately, you’ve happened to say that on the blog of someone who is (notoriously) interested in just about everything, and picked up your book because it spoke to some of their interests.
As I said in the review, it was an entertaining read (as reflected in a rating defined as “it was okay”). I just didn’t trust it because I noticed mistakes, and stopped giving you benefit of the doubt for them.