Gaiman’s attempt is a tribute to the primeval storytellers, who perfected the craft of narration.

Cobwebs curtain the town; the townsfolk and their princess are plagued by sleep; frozen like statues. The neighbouring queen puts off her own wedding to rescue this town. In Gaiman’s fairy tale, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are neighbours. I read The Sleeper and the Spindle the way it is meant to be read — along with a 10-year-old. The little one read out to me while I did the dishes. “Sleeping people are not fast. They stumble, they stagger, they move like children wading through rivers of treacle, like old people whose feet are weighed down by thick, wet mud.”

With the precision of a potion-maker, Gaiman weaves together Sleeping Beauty and Snow White to deconstruct sexism. Here, Snow White fears marriage and wonders how it would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, if life was a time of choices. In this deconstructed version there are no damsels in distress; no knights in shining armours. Instead there are princesses who call off their weddings, wear a mail shirt, carry a sword and gallop away on a horse braving unforeseen danger.

Writers have toyed with the conventional fairytale earlier to re-examine Androcentric culture. In ‘Transformations’, Anne Sexton compares the fragility of Cinderella’s cheeks to cigarette paper. Further in her revision of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, she points out that female narcissism spurts from being objectified by a male-dominated civilization, which is the quintessence of Gaiman’s retellings too. Long before its release, The Sleeper and the Spindle’s middlespread — stunningly illustrated by Chris Riddell — was caught in a controversy. It portrayed two women — Sleeping Beauty and Snow White — locked in a tender kiss, while their tresses cascaded over the expanse of the page. Shushing all the LGBT curiosities the kiss only aims to erase innate feminine virtues of fragility and vulnerability. Gaiman’s explanation was simple, that he didn’t have patience for stories in which women had to be rescued by men. For the past three decades, Gaiman has wanted to re-imagine fairytales. Under his spell, familiar stories turn dark and startling. Though none of the recent books echo the gothic texture of Coraline, the illustrations help bridge the disappointment.

In fascinating strokes of black and white, Lorenzo Mattotti helps Gaiman overhaul Hansel and Gretel. The story, which originated during the Great Famine, is a crusade of hunger over moral sentiments. It tells the story of a woodcutter who is forced to abandon his children. In the illustrated copy that I purchased from the raddiwala in my childhood, Hansel and Gretel were abandoned in the forest by their father after being cunningly instructed to do so by their step-mother. Much to my surprise, in the original published in 1812, both biological parents are equally culpable and the cannibalistic witch is an allegoric apparition of the wicked mother.

Angela Carter, a British writer known for magic realistic writing, says, “For most of human history, ‘literature’, both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written; heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition are all the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.”

Gaiman’s attempts are a tribute to the primeval storytellers, who perfected the craft of narration. With a fluctuating faithfulness to the originals, he magnifies narrative elements while toning down the gore to carefully prepare children to face the sly world for what is. In spite of retaining witty stock characters and whimsical charm, these fairytales will incidentally tell your daughter that she is a hero who does not need a Prince Charming to liberate her.

The Sleeper and the Spindle; Neil Gaiman, Bloomsbury Publishing, Rs.450.

Hansel & Gretel; Neil Gaiman, Bloomsbury Publishing, Rs.640.