Wise Children by Angela Carter comes bedecked in praise. In the novel’s introduction, Ali Smith calls it Carter’s “most glorious, most cosmic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance.” On the back cover we have Edmund White calling it her “best book”, while Salman Rushdie assures us that it “deserves all the bouquets, diamonds and stage-door Johnnies it can get.” Even Ruth Rendell says that “there is not much fiction around that is as good as this.” In short, Wise Children has a lot to live up to.

I haven’t read an awful lot of Angela Carter, though what I have read, I’ve enjoyed immensely. I treasure the first edition hardback of Nights at the Circus that I found tucked away in the corner of a Glasgow second hand shop two or three years ago. But as I picked up this, Carter’s last novel before her death at the age of 51 in 1992, I felt a certain apprehension. The praise is just so effusive – could it possibly be that good? Well, I can’t claim it as her best work – I haven’t read enough of her to say that – but what I can say is that this is the best book I’ve read by her so far.

In one of the many newspaper quotes that adorn the first pages, the Guardian does a nice job of summarising the plot:

“Dora and Nora Chance are the illegitimate twin daughters of the great Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard. Disowned by his family and, by extension, the whole “legitimate” theatre to which he belongs, they set out on a career as chorus girls, working their way through the music halls and, after achieving a brief moment of celluoid immortality, ending their dancing days in a dispiriting succession of post-war revues with titles like Nudes Ahoy! and Nudes of the World.”

In a basic linear sense, that’s the story of the book. Now in their seventies, rattling around the big old former guesthouse in which they were born and raised by the guesthouse’s landlady, Dora Chance is writing the story of her and her twin sister’s colourful, and occasionally bawdy, lives. She is our narrator and her voice – the novel’s voice – is the best thing about Wise Children. Even when recounting the bad days of diminishing work and of being rejected by their biological father Melchior, she is witty, brazen, and completely un-bitter. Her warm colloquialisms (“Our washers were leaking, I can tell you. How we blubbered.”) lend the narrative an almost conspiratorial, confidential air, such as that between twins. And there are so very many sets of twins in this novel.

It is telling that at the end of the book there is a list of characters, which fits both the sheer number and complexity of twins, children (illegitimate or not), marriages, and tangled human relationships interweaved throughout, as well as the story’s theatrical backdrop. There are so many lies, affairs and goodness knows what else, that parentages seem to change all the time. Children are lost and found, relatives seemingly come back from the dead, lives are played out to an audience of hundreds (thousands?) and, rather appropriately, the closest thing the Chance girls have to a grandfather is the old clock in the hallway.

Wise Children is a good old romp through the bright lights and shady corners of the twentieth century theatre world. The Lucky Chances may not have ever really got a lucky break, but what lives they led. As Dora optomistically, deliriously repeats throughout her narrative,”What a joy it is to dance and sing!”