Fallen and bad angels
By Susann Cokal |
March 7, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
THERE was a time in the 1990s when angels were impossible to escape. Guardians, muses, articles of trade, they covered T-shirts and bathroom accessories, bloomed on restaurant walls and peered from the edges of book jackets. Lately they may seem to have drifted away, but they've merely wandered into the literature of self-help and healing.
It is now possible to buy "How to Hear Your Angels," "Working With Angels," "In the Arms of Angels" and "Angels 101," as well as angel dictionaries, encyclopedias and art books.
Danielle Trussoni's first novel, "Angelology," should not be confused with any of these. Her rousing story turns on bad and fallen angels, particularly the offspring of matings between humans and heavenly beings. The hybrids known as Nephilim first appear in Genesis 6: "The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose," and when "they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." This might not sound so bad, but in Trussoni's handling, the Nephilim are "beautiful, iridescent monsters" who belong in cages. With shimmering golden skins and vast white wings sprouting from their backs, they frighten a nine-year-old girl named Evangeline. And how much more terrifying to hear one of the creatures declare, "Angel and devil. ... One is but a shade of the other."
Trussoni's previous book, "Falling Through the Earth," was a memoir of growing up with a father haunted by his past as a "tunnel rat" who searched-below-ground for guerrillas during the Vietnam War.
As an adult, Trussoni took her own trip to Vietnam and envisioned his life there, writing a tripartite biography--autobiography both redemptive and unsettling.
With "Angelology" she revisits the subterranean burrows and the concern with paternity and inheritance, twisting them into an elegantly ambitious archival thriller in which knowledge dwells in the secret underground places, labyrinthine libraries and overlooked artifacts that have been hallmarks of the genre from "The Name of the Rose" and "Possession" to "Angels and Demons" and "The Historian."
"Angelology" is richly allusive and vividly staged, with widescreen-ready visuals, a dewy but adaptable heroine and a dashingly cruel villain.
Sensual and intellectual, it is a terrifically clever thriller, without the cloudy sentimentalism of New Age encomiums or Catholic treatises. No apologies are necessary for its devices. How else would it be possible to bring together the angels of the Bible and Apocrypha, the myth of Orpheus, Bulgarian geography, medieval monastics, the Rockefellers, Nazis and nuns? And how splendid that it has happened.
It is now possible to buy "How to Hear Your Angels," "Working With Angels," "In the Arms of Angels" and "Angels 101," as well as angel dictionaries, encyclopedias and art books.
Danielle Trussoni's first novel, "Angelology," should not be confused with any of these. Her rousing story turns on bad and fallen angels, particularly the offspring of matings between humans and heavenly beings. The hybrids known as Nephilim first appear in Genesis 6: "The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose," and when "they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." This might not sound so bad, but in Trussoni's handling, the Nephilim are "beautiful, iridescent monsters" who belong in cages. With shimmering golden skins and vast white wings sprouting from their backs, they frighten a nine-year-old girl named Evangeline. And how much more terrifying to hear one of the creatures declare, "Angel and devil. ... One is but a shade of the other."
Trussoni's previous book, "Falling Through the Earth," was a memoir of growing up with a father haunted by his past as a "tunnel rat" who searched-below-ground for guerrillas during the Vietnam War.
As an adult, Trussoni took her own trip to Vietnam and envisioned his life there, writing a tripartite biography--autobiography both redemptive and unsettling.
With "Angelology" she revisits the subterranean burrows and the concern with paternity and inheritance, twisting them into an elegantly ambitious archival thriller in which knowledge dwells in the secret underground places, labyrinthine libraries and overlooked artifacts that have been hallmarks of the genre from "The Name of the Rose" and "Possession" to "Angels and Demons" and "The Historian."
"Angelology" is richly allusive and vividly staged, with widescreen-ready visuals, a dewy but adaptable heroine and a dashingly cruel villain.
Sensual and intellectual, it is a terrifically clever thriller, without the cloudy sentimentalism of New Age encomiums or Catholic treatises. No apologies are necessary for its devices. How else would it be possible to bring together the angels of the Bible and Apocrypha, the myth of Orpheus, Bulgarian geography, medieval monastics, the Rockefellers, Nazis and nuns? And how splendid that it has happened.
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