Synopsis:
Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.
What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.
Review:
I often talk about the first line of the books I read, because first impressions are important, and I’m here to tell you that the first sentence of Daniel Kraus’ “Angel Down,” is particularly memorable, as it’s also the last, and even then is incomplete, not unfinished or forgotten, but never-ending,
and, let me tell you, 45 seconds into trying to write even this one review as a continuous sentence (some completely unnecessary and self-flagellating homage) that what Kraus has done is quite the feat, and I’m aware you’d perhaps like to know what the damn thing is about, or the themes, and that will come later (albeit with significant grammatical difficulty) but what you really need to know right now is that “Angel Down,” is the most literarily ambitious, beautiful, biblical, wholly unholy, horrifying torrent of cosmos and violence and militarised trauma that I’ve ever had the simultaneous joy and horror of laying my eyeballs on, and that they nearly melted in my sockets, impressive doesn’t cut it, and if you are looking for something new and different and truly repulsive, but so full of introspection, “Angel Down,” is indeed the book for you- it’s out July 29th from Titan in the UK (thank you for my ARC) and Atria Books in the US, and it’s a poetic obliteration that you should surrender yourself to,
and yes I’m really keeping going with this, so buckle in, we follow Private Civil Bagger during The First World War, who along with rest of the dregs of his division, are sent to stop the mysterious shriek coming from no-mans-land, and what they find is beyond comprehension- not the wounded soldier or flaming goner that they anticipated, but a fallen angel, and of course the group’s first priority is to transport her to safety (rather than the decidedly more straightforward bullet through the head or slit throat they anticipated) and yet despite this seemly good-natured act, each of the men also has an unwavering need, a real selfishness, vying for the creature’s attention and adoration and possession, perhaps even going insane for it, and not one of them is ready to meet God, especially in the mud,
and of course war and conflict is a perennial stain ripe for critique, yet “Angel Down,” does not care for military manoeuvres or eradicating the Nazis so much as it does for human nature more broadly- it’s less about the conflict itself and more about the people in it, their inherently flawed nature, their cowardice, their selfishness, their utter scumbaggery,
and really with all this in mind, is it any wonder that despite the atrocities of The First World War, that we proceeded to get ourselves into another only twenty years down the line, a vicious cycle of bloodshed and loss and trauma that the novel reflects grammatically and structurally too, the seemingly endless nature of human conflict reflected in the single looping sentence that is “Angel Down,” in its entirety,
and yet that rather pessimistic but well-earned view of human nature is perhaps offset slightly by the quiet faith Kraus seems to have, not in humanity at large, but in you, the reader, the person holding the book, a belief in the intelligence, open-mindedness and perseverance of those who pick up this novel, because whilst I hate to assume (it makes an ass of u and me) I feel pretty comfortable telling you that this isn’t a reading experience you’ll have had before, and it may take you a moment to adjust to- I know it did me, but once you manage to sync yourself with it, and you will, you’re swept into something truly magical, that transcends the traditional reading experience entirely, with prose to die for, some truly, jarringly visceral imagery, blood, wings, mud, fire and that propulsive, polyphonic structure, that single breath that carries you from the first page to the last,
and I suppose before I take myself off to wallow in the inevitable, impending bookish hangover, I should implore you to not be deterred by my rambling stream of consciousness, this ridiculous, delirious string of words I’ve decided to spew onto the internet on a Thursday afternoon, because Kraus’ “Angel Down,” is not only more coherent and deliberate, but it has also unmade me in a way that words can’t express, it just about razed me: scorched a hole in my centre and left something humming there- it’s quite the revelation.
Leave a Reply