Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, by Marina Warner <br></br>Murderers I Have Known, by Marina Warner

Marina Warner crosses centuries and cultures with a magically light touch, says Stevie Davies

There was once a beautiful sylph named Marina, who lived near the fountain of Much Feigning, famed as a sage and sibyl. Her art flourished on crossroads and on borders, "points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures" (as she liked to remark to her enchanted hearers). She wore her vast learning lightly, retrieving uncanny tales that mutated, pupated, hatched and doubled with astounding energy. Some held that Marina inhabited a "a zone of dreams" and wondered when a prince would come to awaken her to the common daylight.

Marina Warner's new mythographical work, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, originated in the Clarendon Lectures she delivered in Oxford in 2001. It coincides with the current exhibition, Metamorphing, which she co-curated at the Science Museum. Warner is a modern Renaissance woman, at ease in a multi-disciplinary world of art, literature and science. She positions herself in a cultural flux whose circumference is nowhere and centre is everywhere.

Fantastic Metamorphoses is the child of Ovid, who fathered in Western society the myths that Christianity alternately demonised and synthesised. Warner intriguingly suggests that, with European colonisation of Africa and the Caribbean, these myths met an exotic plethora of lore that came whirling into European culture even as it cracked its angry whip to expel them.

Columbus, for instance, left behind the Jesuit monk, Ramón Pané, to study the lore of the Taino tribes. Pané's Account of the Antiquities of the Indians imported creation myths in which women are born as fruit, and the guava-fed dead party with the living. Warner's method of invoking these myths is deft and dextrous: unable to prove direct influence, she adopts a method known as "congening": the unwitnessed assimilation of one culture by another.

Although Warner has been quoted as saying that hers is an Enlightenment activity, her method approximates here to the exuberant excesses of Renaissance syncretists: mythographers happy to conflate anything with anything else, if some point of comparison existed. In its zest for the random fruits of research, Renaissance syncretism, nurturing new variants of ancient tales, produced a delicious, organised chaos. This is close to the yolky, juicy, sappy and fructifying cornucopia on which Warner feasts her readers.

Speak of fruit, and we enter the territory of Eden's apple, Persephone's pomegranate. From Pané, Warner glides to Bosch's fruitarian diptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which beaky birds and cherry-mouthing lovers burst from strawberries, and a lover couples with a girl with a damson for a head. By way of Hesiod and Ovid, Pané and Peter Martyr, Warner urbanely establishes for this fruity glory a scholarly provenance in the classical Golden Age and Taino creation myths, while describing with childlike relish the wacky particulars of Bosch's vision.

European aspirations and anxieties are mirrored through fantasies of maladaptive change. Chapters on mutation, hatching and pupating, splitting and doubling, permit Warner to rove between incompatibles. We dip into the world of the 17th-century scientist Maria Merian's fascinating studies of butterflies in Suriname; flit via Apuleius's butterfly to Kafka's insect, the undoing of personality from butterfly to bug. Then off to Africa and the Caribbean to peruse 19th-century colonial anxiety as it sucks in African beliefs about soul migration, revenants and zombies.

We touch down in Romantic Germany to hear Schubert's setting of Heine's unforgettable "Still ist die Nacht". We move to phantasmagoria, spectres and doubles, hauntings by daguerreotype, film, spooky tapes that retain the voices of the dead, the ghostly pathways of the internet. The virtuoso tour de force ends in reflections on the positive daemons of Philip Pullman and the feminist Gothic of Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood.

Warner's plot is always a fabricated structure, a teeming hatchery of plotlets, dividing and multiplying. Her supple, humorous and warm style wears its scholarship lightly, remembering that the origin of story is folkloric.

Conversely, her own fiction can appear arcane, for the style serviceable in scholarship lacks human depths. Her new volume of stories, Murderers I Have Known, inhabits the cosmopolitan crossover territory between fairy-tale and realism. Its globe-trotting heroines tend to be polyglot intellectuals, artists, likely to exhibit Warneresque hybridity. Most tales are slight and dissolve upon the tongue, elegant conjurations of metamorphosis, like the fantastic tape-recorded case of a girl with nightmarish bells on her fingers.

Warner reprises the themes that beguile her in moments of reverie that, if they rarely reach beyond the whimsical, are never less than exquisitely turned. The crucial lack of depth is, however, transcended by the poignant Gothic of "Natural Limits". A bereaved woman finds release through a memento mori into a tender rite of communion with the dead, also an affirmation of life. The widow "took some of Tom's dust and ashes and sprinkled them like pepper on the mayonnaise ... but reverently, carefully". Like Fantastic Metamorphoses, the stories respond elegantly to art works, but risk a bravura lightness at two removes from experience.

Stevie Davies's latest novel is 'The Element of Water'