Cyril Bagger is a malingerer and a coward, hanging back in every battle his troop encounters in the hellscape of France during World War I, which leads to his selection for a group of five disposable heroes who are ordered to go retrieve a shrieking wounded soldier from the battlefield. The shrieker isn’t a soldier, however; it’s an angel, and she seems to appear as someone different to everyone who sees her.
Daniel Kraus won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, the slightly experimental novel that puts us in the trenches with Bagger and company. The entire novel is written as a single sentence, broken frequently into paragraphs and chapters, with every paragraph starting with the word ‘and.’ It’s a fast-moving, extremely graphic work, contributing to the growing body of grotesque novels of the Great War, but ultimately the gimmick wears out its welcome, and the remainder is 1917 with magic.
Bagger is our protagonist, and as the book begins he and four other idiots are selected for what appears to be a suicide mission by the mad modern Major General Reis, who was born with just one arm. (The New York Times’ review refers to Reis’ willingness to “single-handedly prolong the war,” which I have to assume is a tasteless reference to the birth defect.) When Bagger and the teenager Arno, who is desperate for anything resembling a family and clings to Bagger as a combination of a father figure and an older brother, reach the weeping angel, Bagger is overcome by the light that pours out of her and assumes she is one of the fabled Angels of Mons. When they bring her back to the trench where the other three knuckleheads await, it becomes clear that everyone who sees this angel sees something different – something they want or need, like a carnival attraction, a mother, a girlfriend left behind in the U.S., or later a weapon to win the war. Bagger sees her as some sort of salvation, but she also turns out to have supernatural healing powers, which allow him to strike a devil’s bargain with the angel later in the story.
Kraus’ strength here is in the ways in which the angel becomes a device to reveal the interior thoughts, desires, or intentions of his various characters, often in horrifying fashion. No one, save perhaps Bagger, sees her as an independent being with agency. Every character has been ground down by war to a sharpened point, and their needs become paramount, even if they are malicious or deranged or outright insane. The angel, who is never named, becomes a sort of prism through which each character is refracted, broken down into their component parts so we can see how thin the whole actually is.
The use of the literary device of a single sentence screams “gimmick” to me, although the frequent breaks prevent it from turning into Finnegan’s Wake (he says confidently, having never read past the first page of that inscrutable work). It does not add anything to the text, and starting every paragraph with “and” for 280-plus pages results in the word disappearing from view; you just stop seeing it and start with the next word. I also found Kraus’ florid descriptions of the violence to be too over-the-top, even though many reviews have praised that aspect of the novel; if you’ve ever cringed at the sound of someone’s head getting crushed or bashed in, like the death of Michael’s stepfather in The Wire, there are dozens of sentences in Angel Down that evoke that revulsion.
I don’t know that the canon of World War I literature needs more entries, and Kraus’ choice of that conflict in and of itself should at least invite some skepticism going into the work. He creates one strong character and some intriguing if shallow secondary ones, but leans too heavily on verbal sleight-of-hand and depictions of violence to pad the often superficial narrative. It’s a quick read, at least, but not an especially deep or satisfying one.
Next up: I’m reading Jo Walton’s The Just City at the moment and finding it unusually dry compared to her other novels.
There were several things that bugged about the book, which I thought was only fine. I saw a lot of people label it as horror, perhaps as a justification for the violence and/or the descriptions you mention. But I’m not sure it fits that genre. I thought the dialogue didn’t ring true for the era. The whole one paragraph thing/starting each sentence with “and” has been done before and better, I think most recently with Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. Finally, the ending- I won’t spoil it for those reading or going to read it- but I’ve seen so many suggest it was amazing. It was really the only thing that could happen, right?
Yes, that was the only way this book could end, and three pages of “and,” aren’t enough to make it some kind of amazing ending.
I’m reading Lazlo Krasznahorkai’s “Herscht 07769” which is similarly written in one long sentence. There aren’t any paragraph breaks although there are a few chapter breaks, which is just the next line being turned into the title of the next chapter. Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year.
It’s definitely a gimmick–Krasznahorkai’s prose (at least in translation–I don’t speak Hungarian) doesn’t need it. The stream-of-consciousness writing seems to be an attempt to mimic quantum physics, which plays a major role in the book. I think he could have achieved that without the one-sentence gimmick.
Otherwise, the book is good as a simpleton tries to understand the Big Bang, panics about it and keeps writing letters to Angela Merkel about how the universe will cease to exist unless the UN does something. Meanwhile, he navigates modern post-DDR Germany and a neo-Nazi Symphony Orchestra that thinks Johann Sebastian Bach is the true epitome of Aryaness.