As I write this, we are approaching Christmas, a time for some of traditions – presents, pantomimes and ballet performances, for example. The latest novel by Erika Johansen reminds us of such things, but is a much darker take on many of those traditional tales.
To start with though, the story begins with many of the key ideas and themes of those traditional stories. We have two twins, Natasha and Clara, born on Christmas Eve. On the girls birth they are given a birthright by creepy godfather character Drosselmeyer, who is reputed to be a sorcerer, that they will be ‘like light and dark’ to each other.
And so this is true. As they get older, the girls are polar opposites of each other. Blonde Clara becomes the girl who has everything – looks, charm, suitors – whilst the plainer (in an older time we might have said uglier) Natasha is the forgotten one, the dark-haired, bookish, quieter one who sits in the corner at social gatherings and tries not to be noticed whilst all the while jealous of the attention her sister receives.
As they reach the age of sixteen, we find that the parents have been pretty ineffectual. Their father is a social climber, with a near failing business. Their mother spends much of her time drinking or talking to a medium in seances. Despite all of this, the girls seem to have coped with it all. At their birthday party Drosselmeyer returns. He brings with him gifts, a strange Nutcracker like an old soldier amongst them.
The nutcracker has unexpected powers. It allows Natasha and Clara to travel to a land made of sugar and snow, of sweets and other sweet delights. Following Clara, Natasha meets The Sugar Plum Fairy and begins to make her plans for jealous revenge on Clara come true. But we must remember that such gifts are really given for free and usually have a price to pay in return…
As the above description suggests, the story is based on traditional fairy-tale trappings. Erika taps into these various elements of magic, morality and horror to create a new version of the famous story by ETA Hoffmann, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) – or rather Tchaikovsky’s traditional ballet based on Hoffman’s story, The Nutcracker Suite, which is a now-often-performed ballet set at Christmas.
Using those fine storytelling traditions, we have the good sister and her darker twin dealing with jealousy and sibling rivalry, social climbing, the need for revenge and identity crisis, even ‘malice aforethought’, to borrow from crime fiction – but Johansen modernises them into something more palatable for the 21st century reader. Where what were relatively simple characters and situations now become more complex, where the lines between good and evil, right and wrong are blurred. Villains become more sympathetic, heroes are suspiciously good. What was quaintly traditional has now become a gothic soap opera writ large.
At times, the story is nightmarish in its depiction of things seen and unseen. Although set in Eastern Europe around the turn of the 19th century (there is a reference to Natasha reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and candles abound!) much of the setting feels like a Dickensian England with its depictions of vast machines and grim factories.
In fact, much of the story questions what seems real and what is not, both in terms of place but also in terms of character. There are people and places hidden from plain sight, things to be loved and feared. The hidden, dreamlike land is also at times either beautiful or nightmarish, ranging from pristine sugar-coated landscapes to sickly dreamlike sequences that would feel quite at home in a Dali or a Borges painting.
To be fair, traditional fairy stories have always had an element of the unpleasant to them – a nastiness, some horror, something ‘lurking in the woodshed’ to create suspense and to set a moral against. Who remembers another traditional ballet, The Red Shoes, for example – a story by Hans Christian Andersen, where a young peasant girl is forced to keep dancing by a pair of possessed shoes and has her feet amputated in order to stop the dancing? The original Grimm’s Fairy Tales are very different to the children’s versions remembered more today, and are another case in point.
The horror therefore I had little issue with, but the main obstacle I had was where Johansen combines this 19th century setting with contemporary social values. For example, the (not-too-graphic) bedhopping of various suitors in and out of the twin’s boudoirs feels like a contemporary element that seems to fit uneasily with the 19th century setting. Although I am sure such things happened in the 1800s, the way which they are depicted here feels a little forced and more akin to something like Fourth Wing than The Nutcracker. Some of the internal monologue given by Natasha – for the story is mainly from her perspective – also feels a little jarringly modern at times too, which dissipates the mood otherwise carefully created in the otherwise baroque setting.
In summary then, for those with fond memories of seeing The Nutcracker Ballet at Christmas, this story may seem familiar, but it will not be the story you remember – The Kingdom of Sweets is not as sugary a confection as the title might suggest. Nevertheless, those in the 21st century looking for a deeper, darker version of an old fairy tale may enjoy this one. It’s a bit of a slowburner to start, but I think that it is worth persevering with until the end.
THE KINGDOM OF SWEETS by Erika Johansson
Published by Bantam Books, November 2023
ISBN: 978-1787632363
368 pages
Review by Mark Yon
