Witch

I've been working my way through some fairy tales recently. This is not because I've given up on trying to read a proper grown-up book, but because I saw Philip Pullman's recent collection of Grimm stories in the bookshop, and thought I'd give it a go. I'm not sure how many I ever read as a child, though I have distant memories of a few battered old books of fairy tales with illustrations that worried me. And years later I read more up-to-date versions to my own children. Or actually I probably read only a handful of stories many hundreds of times, given that infants seem to relish the same bedtime stories repeated endlessly night after night. But by then the stories had lost some of their terror, and the illustrations were less worrying.

So it is refreshing to re-visit them in Mr Pullman's re-telling, where he keeps in some of the grisly details that more squeamish translators glossed over. I suppose fairy stories have the advantage of being short, and pithy: there is no waffling, no circuitous setting the scene or getting to the point: you are just thrown into the middle of a complex web of intrigue with wicked stepmothers and talking animals and things happening in threes. They connect you back to your childhood, as well as to the darker world of traditional folk tales with their own ruthless black-and-white morality and hard-fought happy endings.