(btj.b Wikimedia Commons)
Angel Down
By Daniel Kraus
Atria
285 pages
No one can accuse the writer Daniel Kraus of a lack of imagination. In his previous novel, Whalefall, a scuba diver gets swallowed up by a whale and has only an hour’s worth of oxygen in his scuba tank to escape the belly of the beast.
In Angel Down, his new novel set in France and Belgium during the First World War, a band of infantry misfits led by Private First Class Cyril Bagger emerges from the trenches and encounters a blinding celestial presence ensnared in barbed wire. Somehow, this ill-fated group frees the angel from entanglement and spirits her back to Allied HQ at great risk to their lives—both from German mortar shells and machine-gun fire, and as it turns out, one other.
(Wellcome Images, Wikimedia Commons)
And there’s more: Angel Down unfolds in in one long sentence, broken into individual paragraphs spaced a line apart. Each paragraph begins with “and” and ends with a comma. It’s a bold approach that works better than you might think, immersing us in the mud and gore of the Western Front in 1917.
A low-level con artist, Bagger does all he can to avoid becoming a casualty. His survival strategy entails service on latrine and grave-digging duty, as far as possible from the hellscape of No Man’s Land.
Still, as Angel Down opens, he discovers it’s not quite far enough:
“and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun, and kind of ironic, seeing how the whole reason Bagger prefers burial duty is artillery shells can’t reach this far behind the front line trench, but this shell sure did,”
Kraus is a veteran novelist and, with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, co-author of The Shape of Water, based on the Oscar-winning film. With more than 20 works of fiction to date under his belt, the author’s new novel feels like a big step forward in a genre-bending direction.
Kraus doesn’t flinch from confronting the grim effects of early 20th-century industrialized warfare. Early on, Private Bagger contemplates the dead and dying soldiers all around him (Warning: Strong stuff):
“and while there’s no telling which boy bled this blood, what kind of blood is a different matter, fourteen days into this cyclone of cartilage and lead, Bagger has developed a sommelier palate for the tart fizz of brachial blood, the fudgy sorghum of femoral, the meaty sludge of heart wounds, the rancid reek of any gut juice at all, and the warm salt lick of arterial blood he now licks from his lips,”
The novel’s breakneck pace might be untenable in some other work of fiction, but here the frenzied voice seems completely apt. Vivid sentences propel the story forward, holding the reader’s attention like a vise, as when the misfit soldiers first hear the angel’s unnerving cry:
(Photo Credit: Depositphotos.com)
“and the shriek, good lord, the shriek pervades everything, so shrill it rings harmonies from the dead, altos of discarded guns, sopranos of spent stick grenades, booming basses of riddled canteens, so blistering a dissonance that Bagger’s relieved when he has to crocodile through a marshy crater, it’s quieter in water, even with Arno gagging beside him,”
Using nouns to serve as action verbs (“he has to crocodile through a marshy crater”) illustrates the colorful, if not flamboyant, language on every page of Angel Down. Unfortunately, that same impassioned tone works less well with dialogue, which often comes across as stilted and overly articulate.
For example, the battle-scarred soldiers are justifiably dumbfounded by the angel’s appearance, but then fall into bickering over how to exploit this otherworldly figure (“I know a man in New York, tours the continent selling medicines, he’s a friend, a personal friend, and showing off this thing? This angel? He could go big with this”). As we’re constantly reminded, these men are deep in the nightmare world of combat and death. Longwinded arguments about how to make a quick buck, while under heavy artillery bombardment, seem implausible.
Angel Down is not for the squeamish, but as a fresh take on the literature of warfare, this new novel by Daniel Kraus stands out.
Author Bio:
Highbrow Magazine Chief Book Critic Lee Polevoi is the author of two novels, The Confessions of Gabriel Ash and The Moon in Deep Winter.
For Highbrow Magazine