The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories by A S Byatt Chatto & Windus $170 ARE you a one-time Booker Prize winner, author of several other tupperwarish oeuvres, now stuck for something to write about and in need of a convenient vehicle to convey your cleverness? It's simple. Here's what you do. Take a well-known fairy story, The Sleeping Beauty, for example - but preferably some obscure Middle-European variation for added mystique.
Then simply change the social status of one of the characters: make the handsome prince a penniless tailor or member of the sandwich class - et voila, c'est already profond.
Now put him in a deep forest, engineer some unlikely occasion to reward his nauseating goodliness and send him off to rescue a frozen nymphette-princess imprisoned by a 'black artist' in a glass coffin, which disintegrates D M Thomas-style, upon the insertion of a heavily-symbolic glass key.
Add a twist to the story by making the tailor her dissatisfied house-husband and hey presto, you have a do-it-yourself moral so amorphous, that it can mean anything you want it to: a child molesters' charter, a necrophiliac's love-song, a petition for world peace, several pages of eminently recyclable paper, even a precious, bloodless little pastiche which plants the fairy story firmly back in the pantomime territory of the Brothers Grimm, cut off from the roots of its true origins.
Fairy stories are all very well as long as you realise what they aren't: squeaky-clean pieces of mental bubble gum for the minds of unquestioning children.
This is what the Grimm Brothers made of them for a prudish market of inhibited Victorians; these misread re-writings are what Byatt is happy to perpetuate with her regurgitated cover versions.
