Daydreams of Angels

Excellent thought provoking collection. The almost nightmarish qualities harbour many 'messages'.
Strong prose with varied structures. Worth re-reading. Who could forget a 'bear' reading Anna Karenina?
Would recommend.

Response 1
I read the first 18 stories before going on holiday and decided not to bother reading the remaining two!

The stories supposedly twist old tales anew but I did not find it easy – nor an interesting challenge – to relate them to being magical for their realism nor profound in their darkness. Only occasionally were they captivating, witty and wicked.

I feel that the author has been extremely self-indulgent – rather as I felt when reading ‘Ragnarok’ – and I also felt that the constant explicit sexual overtones added nothing to these tales and was quite unnecessary in many contexts.

Furthermore, I did not particularly like her writing style and I found the stories felt somewhat repetitive.
Jean A P.

Response 2
I don’t know what to make of this collection. Certainly, I enjoyed reading it: the author’s style is ‘characterised by clear, cool, static, thinly painted, sharp-focus images frequently portraying the imaginary, the improbable, or fantastic in a realistic or rational manner’ (to quote the Oxford Companion to English Literature on magical realism), and I respond well to that.

I think I was expecting from the blurb something more akin to Angela Carter, so my bemusement may be partly disappointment. Nevertheless, whereas a collection such as ‘The Bloody Chamber’ has a gothic coherence and explores, intensely, recognizable themes such as desire, sexual repression, the other and the female perspective, I do not think ‘Daydreams of Angels’ explores any themes in striking particularity. It came across to me as, primarily, an exploration of narrative.

Having said which, many of the stories are about outsiders, and they are written with, overall, an authorial sense of feeling for humanity as a whole. In particular, I thought the lives of the poor and under-privileged were well presented, the author often dealing sympathetically with the survival skills of both children and vulnerable adults. In this respect, I would recommend ‘The Man without a Heart’, ‘Ferdinand’, and ‘The Conference of the Birds’.

Perhaps the key story is ‘Messages in Bottles’, in that that is what O’Neill offers her readers. And from that point of view, I think I might derive more from the collection on a second reading which would not, I am happy to concede, be an unpleasant experience.
Anthony P.

Response 3
I read ten of these stories, and then decided not to waste any more of my life reading the rest. I found the stories lacking in depth and characterisation, and the unvarying narrative style tedious. Although traditional fairy stories and sagas share some of these characteristics, that is acceptable because there the purpose is simply to tell a story. Here I felt that the author’s only aim is to hammer home her particular view of society. Apart from that I found them pointless.
Marion K.

Response 4
Not my kind of read, I’m afraid, partly because I don’t much care for short stories and partly because I couldn’t understand this collection. I felt the writer was deliberately trying to shock for the sake of it, but was neither ‘captivating [nor] witty’. However, I did enjoy ‘The Man without a Heart’ because I could follow it.
Jo H.

Response 5
Twenty short stories: not everybody’s choice, but look at the titles and pick one, then try another. Quirky, exaggerated, inventive: not to be read in sequence. They are a roller-coaster – downtown in Montreal, then up in the air with talking animals and sarcastic angels and Grandfathers telling tall tales of their youth; kind girls and boys plus sex not romance, as part of growing up. Shake the book and a kaleidoscope of characters and situations is there with occasional links to well-known folk-stories. There is a feeling of pathos n some stories, but others make you wonder in delight as a shower of bubbles with changing colours alights around you.
Audrey L

Response 6
This book is well described by its subtitle, ‘Tall Tales and Twisted Fairy Stories’.

I don’t read a lot of short stories, and magical fairy tales aren’t really my thing – however, I felt Heather O’Neill’s writing was assured and imaginative in these sometimes witty, surreal, disturbing or gritty tales. There is a dreamy, magical quality overlaying the starkness of some of the stories.

I wonder if the storytelling voice was too uniform for individual tales to be very memorable. Clearly, therefore, this is a book best treated as a dipper-in rather than as one to be read over a short period of time. In that way, each story can be properly absorbed. As it was, reading it relatively quickly left me with rather a confused picture of what I’d read.

The story that stood out for me was ‘The Man without a Heart’.

Response 6
An intriguing selection of somewhat surreal short stories, which seem to explore the nature and meaning of being human. The other-worldly aspects seem to have been inspired by Old Testament biblical imagery and narrative (Jonah, Job and Ezekiel – and possibly Genesis – being prominent) though may have been informed by the Deutero-canonical book of Enoch (in which Angelology is extensively developed).

The writing style is not exciting; the grammar is, presumably, Canadian rather than English, and the frequent use of North-American idiom relating to stores, products and quotidian items makes reading less pleasurable than it might otherwise have been.

The concepts are interesting, but I found the prose did not live up to their promise.
David S.

Response 7
These fantastical short stories vary from charming, witty, sad, to dark, powerful, disturbing and shocking, covering themes including childhood, love, science, identity. They vary in quality, and would be best appreciated read separately.
Sue N.

Response 8
Usually, I am not a fan of magic realism, but once I came to grips with the fantasy of the first story, I was entranced by the scope of O’Neill’s imagination. Her take on old fairy stories is often wryly amusing and clever, and her new fables resonate on the reader long after reading.

Psychologically profound, her characters, often little girls, speak to the reader directly, using diction which is natural and credible.

Many of the tales are about childhood and the effects, often tragic, of neglect and deprivation on the character in adulthood. O’Neill takes aspects of human nature, from quirky to cruel, which we all recognise, but pitches her stories on a magical level. Flights of fancy, taking us from heaven to the depths of the ocean, are imagined in a wonderful series of metaphors, breathtaking in their range from cats to angels. The breadth of wordplay is often dazzling.

I felt most of the stories worked well – you never know where they are going to lead you – but some failed to engage, and some became, for me, too fanciful for me to suspend my disbelief and became tiresome. O’Neill’s style was at times too weighted down by metaphor, I found. Some tales, however, were downright comic and others presented her own witty take on social and political themes.
Wendy C.

St Regulus Book Club

I really enjoyed this book. It was easy to pick up and read in bite sized chunks, because they were an imaginative take on fairy stories and folk tales. I would recommend her and look forward to reading more.

Once I got the idea that these were tall tales and adult fairy tales, it was easy to be absorbed into the magic of these imaginative and creative stories. The stories are loosely based on old favourites, which we remember from our childhood, they are told in some cases in traditional settings – listening to a grandparent for example and then they are given a contemporary twist, introducing dark and thought-provoking concepts, like sexual awakenings and exploitation, wartime hardships and occupation, loss, abandonment, poverty, addiction and loneliness. The stories range from the disturbing and humorous to sheer fantasy and escapism. They are, surprising and unpredictable, especially when she combines fantasy figures with angels and fairy tale characters in adult and seamy settings , which work surprisingly well.
They are mostly set in the 1940s, which places them within our understanding as a lot of wartime experiences would have been told to us by our own parents and grandparents, so the memories of our own childhood is there again. I enjoyed spotting the traditional analogies (Ferdinand for example – one of my childhood favourites) and then being taken along by the inventiveness of the stories and the beautiful use of language and images.

It was interesting to see how far Heather O’Neill took her flights of fancy – which is of course perfectly allowable in the realms of fantastical fairy and folk tales. I liked the stories where toys and fairytale characters talked to each other; where angels moved in sordidly realistic settings; and contemporary concepts like cloning, isolation and scientific experimentation were introduced into magical settings. Because the realism is so believable, the prose so clever and irreverent, we accept them unconditionally. The fact that we are reading about talking dolls and bears, a WW2 soldier brought back to life by a toymaker, an angel spending a night with a young girl and a town populated by cloned Nureyevs is all perfectly acceptable and a brilliant achievement.