Are fairy tales back in fashion? Certainly, the recent success of Disney's films Frozen and Maleficent seems to point to something. But most of the fairy tales we know have come to us via 17th century France or 19th century Germany, and have since been subject to so many retellings and rebellions that trends are difficult to map.
After the war, radical German writers objected, for obvious historical reasons, to the conservative groundwork they felt had been laid by the Grimms. Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim - who had survived two concentration camps - wrote his influential study, The Uses Of Enchantment, in 1976; Angela Carter was translating Charles Perrault from French then too, and she compiled two volumes of fairy tales from all over the world for Virago. By the time Carter turned the form inside out with her own stories in The Bloody Chamber (1979), the historian Jack Zipes was at work on his many unearthings of fairy tale history. It has never really stopped: Philip Pullman's retellings of Grimm, published two years ago, are masterpieces of haunting clarity.
Still, even the most mainstream example among these reflects a modern appetite for agency over apathy. When, in Frozen, the ailing Anna is told that only "an act of true love" can save her, we assume she needs to be the object of someone else's affection. We also take it to mean romantic love. But the prince turns out to be a toad, and she is healed at the last minute by saving her sister's life: in other words, the "act of true love" is one she bestows rather than receives. That such a sophisticated moral might, via Disney, have indefinite reach is something the Grimm brothers would have envied.
Gaiman, whose Coraline has become a generation's favourite, knows all about stories that live on a dark threshold. Philip Pullman said of fairy tales that they were "too easy for children and too difficult for adults", and Gaiman has been thinking about fairy tales for well over 30 years.
"The Bloody Chamber is such an important book to me," he says. "Angela Carter, for me, is still the one who said: 'You see these fairy stories, these things sitting at the back of the nursery shelves? Actually, each one of them is a loaded gun. Each of them is a bomb. Watch: if you turn it right it will blow up.' And we all went: 'Oh my gosh, she's right - you can blow things up with these!"'
When I ask Gaiman who his favourite fairy tale character is, he says he fell in love with Red Riding Hood when reading Carter. She was also Charles Dickens' favourite, but in order to interpret Gaiman's taste, you need to know that Carter's take on the tale was The Company Of Wolves, an ornately told story in which the heroine makes a relatively late appearance in a savage, sexual world, not a small child skipping along a path but a daring pubescent girl who strips naked, laughs in the face of danger and sleeps with the wolf - rendering him post-coitally "tender" - in her dead grandmother's bed.
Gaiman's least favourite fairy tale character is Goldilocks - or at least she used to be, until he found out who she really was. In Robert Southey's 1837 story, the intruder is an old woman - a vagrant - who is looking for shelter and stumbles upon a house that belongs not to a family of bears, but to co-habiting "bachelor" bears of three different sizes. The old woman's nickname, "Silver-hair", became "Goldilocks", and she was transformed over time into a protagonist more similar to the story's intended readers. Nevertheless, "as a kid I found it impossible to empathise with her," Gaiman says. "Frankly, back then my sympathies were always with Baby Bear: 'Some horrible lady just came and ate my food and broke my chair.' These days, now that I'm old, my sympathies are with Father Bear. I go: Yup, shoulda locked the door. Did I lock the door? I meant to lock the door."
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's 1812 book began as a philological project at the birth of a unified Germany when they began to collect folk stories. These were not, as has been supposed, the tales of the masses, but stories gathered from among the bourgeoisie. The project was a matter of cultural and national record - it was not intended for children. But it was soon clear that children had become its main readers, and Wilhelm Grimm, the younger of the two brothers, cleaned them up. In what was now the Motherland, it wouldn't do for children to see biological mothers as jealous of their own pubescent daughters. That's quite an agenda the Grimms had, I suggest to Gaiman, and ask him if he has one, fully expecting him to say no.
"Yeah, I do," he replies. "I want people to imagine. I think that your imagination is the most important tool you possess, and I think that in addition to being a tool, it's a muscle, and unless it's exercised, it atrophies."
He points to the lines he used as an epigraph to Coraline - remembered from G.K. Chesterton but loose enough a paraphrase to be his own: "Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."
The Sleeper and the Spindle (Bloomsbury $24.99) is out now.
