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\u2019t a soldier, however; it\u2019s an angel, and she seems to appear as someone different to everyone who sees her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Daniel Kraus won this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down<\/a>,<\/em> 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 \u2018and.\u2019 It\u2019s 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 <\/em>with magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019 review<\/a><\/em> refers to Reis\u2019 willingness to \u201csingle-handedly prolong the war,\u201d 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<\/a>. 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 \u2013 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\u2019s bargain with the angel later in the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n