Simpson on Carter

I chose Angela Carter's "The Kitchen Child" because it shows her stories can be sunnier, funnier and altogether more high-spirited than her more minatory, gothic tales might suggest. This one is as light and rich as the lobster soufflé around which it is constructed. The narrator's mother, a perfectionist Yorkshire cook in the kitchens of a great country house, is impregnated by an unknown admirer as she bends to place a soufflé in the oven (she doesn't turn for fear of spoiling the dish). Her baby boy's first cradle is a copper salmon kettle, his first bath a soup tureen; as he grows older, wise child that he is, he ­decides he must discover the identity of his father ...

Stylishly farcical, this story has the speed, tone and buoyancy of an opera by Rossini. The speech patterns of the various characters are sharply ventriloquised in such a way that their words leapfrog conventional dialogue into recitative. "The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo," Carter said, and this is certainly true of "The Kitchen Child", with its wit, sensuous detail and dazzling bravura set-pieces.