Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | AS Byatt on the lure of the fairy tale

Everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance - and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.

Lüthi even points out that folk tales have certain colours - red, white, black and the metallic colours of gold and silver and steel. The fairy tale world is called up for me by the half-abstract patternings of Paul Klee, or the mosaic definition of Kandinsky's early, "Russian" paintings of horses and forests. Lüthi makes the point that green, the colour of nature, is almost never specifically mentioned in folk tales.