This novel, Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor, is a peculiar one in that it is so wonderfully awful to read. By this I don’t mean it’s a bad book—I wouldn’t rate it so high if I meant that. I mean it is horrific with the kind of horror we encounter when the main character is disagreeable. And to such a degree! Who on earth would want to meet Angel Deverell? She’s so full of herself. She’s so exclusively about Angel and only Angel. Why would we want to read about her?
The story begins when Angel is an adolescent and follows her through her life. In her teens, she decides to be a novelist. She becomes one and is hugely successful. However, her novels are trash romances and mocked and dismissed by the literary world. It enrages her but she deludes herself by seeing Angel Deverell as an unappreciated great writer.
Angel creates her own world, a fantasy she lives within, reflective of the stories she tells. At one point another character observes that she puts herself at the centre of her stories and even Angel acknowledges this is the case. Similarly, her life is one of her stories, in her mind, and so she easily ignores what doesn’t fit her fantasy. She’s thoroughly isolated and only rarely is aware of it. It’s a lonely life, one made tolerable by her delusions. Angel’s life goes from rags to riches to rags again with Angel blithely ignoring the circumstances of her life.
Ms. Taylor suggests what makes her, and the novel, so compelling when she writes, “She was not a subtle woman, and perhaps it was poverty that underlined for her that pitiableness in Angel which only Theo, and once or twice Esmé (who had tried to shut his eyes to it), had ever seen.”
There is a great deal of humour in the novel. It could almost be called comic. And it’s almost tragic in the way the lives of some characters unfold. The few people Angel has in her life, seldom appreciated by Angel, suffer from her ego and delusions. Each of them, in his or her own way, is broken in some manner and condemned to loneliness except for that companionship—or at least a sense of place—they find with Angel.
Elizabeth Taylor’s great accomplishment is the artful way she evokes pathos in this story of someone who is, for the most part, unlikeable. Angel is a wonderful book, though perhaps a bit difficult to get into because Angel is such an unlikely main character. But as the story unfolds you’re pulled into the strange, solitary life of Angel Deverell.
