I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It sounded so interesting! Unfortunately, the execution didn't quite live up to the premise, and I never sunk into what was going on. I frequently had moments where I wrinkled my brow because the narrative conceit the author was going on just didn't work for me, in the context in which it was done.
When you tell me this is a contemporary fantasy about angels vs. humans, and done with a noir flair? I was very interested. I love noir. I tend to enjoy noir tropes being applied to different circumstances, as long as it is done well. So I started this book expecting to thoroughly enjoy it. Alas, that was not where I ended. I didn't hate it either, it's just that this feels like it's two-thirds of a good book, and one-third...not. Premises aren't fully thought through. Narrative conventions don't hold up to the merest bit of scrutiny. It's just not fully baked.
There are two main characters here - one, Bayliss, is a low level angel who has been given an important task - when Raphael, one of the most important angels, is murdered, he needs to pick a human to take Raphael's place. Preferably one who won't kick up a fuss and will just keep their head down. That one ends up, accidentally, being Molly. Bayliss was out to get her brother killed in an accident and thus turn him into an angel, but Molly stepped in the way, and so, it's her.
Molly is not a pushover, and is pissed that she's dead, ready to push the limits of being an angel, despite what Bayliss says. And as she does, the full extent of the angelic murder plot are slowly revealed, involving people on earth with a penchant for having angel wings grafted on their backs, and a dodgy indulgence system. Also with Molly's own struggles to connect with people she's left behind, when she learns that pushing too hard can lead to brain aneurysms.
You know what? That's all fine. It's where we then try to push noir and noir tropes on top of this story that it starts to fall apart. And it's start at the beginning. Bayliss tells us that, through his centuries on earth, he dealt with the isolation by getting into Raymond Chandler. Which...doesn't account for all the time before that. If he's prone to fads, what were his other coping techniques? The noir is fun, but he constantly reminds us that it's not really like that, it's just the lens he's putting on top of his interactions with angels. It's strangely alienating.
If you get past that, the take on angels is interesting. Angels (and cherubim and all the rest) don't know what the greater power is out there, they just know the Metatron appeared at some point and bound them close to earth, where the consensual reality they create helped stabilize physical laws so that humans could come along. This means that the angels really hate humanity. They see them as part of the bars of their prison. Also, there's no afterlife. Just Molly, and that's a special case.
Here's the spoilery bit, though. It turns out that Bayliss has been lying the whole time, not just to Molly, but to the reader. The problem with trying to use an unreliable narrator technique here is that there's no one he's trying to fool or lie to in his sections of the book. It's not addressed to anyone in particular. It's not addressed to potential readers, a la Murder of Roger Ackroyd, still the gold standard in unreliable narrators. Yes, I get why he lies to Molly, but there seems to be absolutely no reason that the text we're reading should conform to those lies. It's not there to fool anyone, except on the meta level of the author trying to fool the reader.
And this drives me crazy! Give Bayliss someone to be writing this to, someone to whom he also needs to lie, or have it be a detective's report to Molly or whatever the fuck, and then his lying makes sense. It is the disjuncture between the fiction and the stated purpose of the fiction that is the problem. Unreliable narrators can work great, when they're narrating to someone. Take that out, and it's pointless. There was no reason to write it that way. It would have made no difference to the story unfolding if it was the truth of what happened instead, with that juxtaposed to what was told to Molly.
(It's also not great unreliable narrator. I can't think of a single thing that, once the gimmick is revealed, I suddenly see in a new light. It's not a new spin on old things, it's just that most of them seem to never have happened. There's nothing here that rewards the reader for having been interested.)
(Also, I have used too many italics, and have read Emily of New Moon and am now expecting Mr. Carpenter to appear in a puff of smoke and say something withering.)
If this had just undergone a little more thought, if it had jelled more, this might have been a really interesting book. As it was, I was always dissatisfied, even before the reveal. Nothing seemed to fit together right.
No comments:
Post a Comment