Marina Warner has marked out a distinctive literary mode for herself: the wide-ranging and intriguing investigation of myths, fairy tales and other archetypes. Like her magisterial study of 1994, From the Beast to the Blonde (on traditional tales and their tellers), her new book is both scholarly and scintillating. Its theme is fear, its forms, uses, sources, the whole mythological bag; and it shifts the emphasis from the female, Cinderella figure to the ravening, masculine, beast or bugbear.
Warner's title is adapted from the Louis MacNeice poem Bag- pipe Music (the actual line is "It's no go the yogi-man"), and the book is divided into three parts, with the second - "Lulling" - decidedly thinner than the other two. There's a lot more mileage to be got out of hair-raising and rib-tickling than there is out of appeasing.
Not that the lullaby is universally untroubled: the cradle itself is often beset by stalkers and snatchers, as Marina Warner notes: there's another MacNeice line about "the murderer on the nursery ceiling". The well-springs of dread run deep, but fear can become pleasurable, or at least manageable, once it's harnessed to the decorative or the grisly-comic. The ogres, vampires, monsters, witches, devils and devourers back through history, in fable and folktale: these supply an embodiment, and in a way a containment, for all kinds of nameless horrors, while at the same time ministering to the imagination. Children - the principal audience for gruesome tales, rhymes, wonders, night alarms and so forth - like nothing better than scaring the wits out of themselves. There are great delights in frights.
Marina Warner traces the cultivation of "dread . . . as an aesthetic thrill" to the late 17th century fairy tale - Perrault's Little Red Riding-Hood, for example, the one in which the heroine ends up eaten rather than saving her skin. Getting gobbled up: this fearsome fate, which is envisaged at its most exorbitant in the trope of "incestuous cannibalism" (as, for instance, in the Grimm tale The Juniper Tree), runs through the book like jam in a rolypoly pudding.
In the chapter entitled "The Devil's Banquet", Marina Warner jokes, "the fires of hell . . . turn culinary"; and there are later references to the sad fate of the Oysters in Lewis Carroll's Alice, not to mention the plight of Tom Kitten in one of Beatrix Potter's stories, who is rolled in pastry and very nearly baked. Light-hearted or full-blooded, the nursery menace rarely excludes merriment.
No Go the Bogeyman gets to grips with the whole grotesque gallimaufry lurking behind the alluring formulation, "Once upon a time". But it by no means confines itself to fairy tales. In its immensely serious, but also carnivalesque, course, it takes in, among other items, Hesiod, Socrates, Freud, Plutarch, Goya, the early German cinema, The Silence of the Lambs, Circe, the Christian hell, science fiction, the medieval mystery play, giants and other tall tales, Lillibullero (though it should be pointed out that, far from consisting of nonsense syllables, this word is a transliteration of the Irish phrase "An lile ba leir e/Ba linn an la"), The Hunchback of Notre Dame,Helene Cixous . . . It ends with an inspired dissertation on bananas, with all their balmy, ribald and slapstick connotations.
The book's purpose is the pursuit of origins and implications, as it trawls through centuries and genres, incessantly coming up with rich and abundant detail, shape-shifting between a danse macabre, an encyclopaedic romp and a witches' brew. Exhilaration and erudition go hand-in-hand here - while the book's illustrations, enlivening nearly every page, make for an added pungency. Enthralling and illuminating, No Go the Bogeyman makes mincemeat of all the old chestnuts and embodies audacity.
