Mar 17 2010
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
A week or so ago I promised as a service to my readers to referee the dueling New York Times reviews of Angelology by Danielle Trussoni. Put aside the fact that one was technically in the New York Times Review of Books and the other in the paper – or the fact that they were not really side by side reviews – and focus instead on the very different reaction the book produced.
But first, let’s allow the publisher to introduce the book:
Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her father entrusted her to the Fran
ciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in upstate New York. Now, at twenty-three, her discovery of a 1943 letter from the famous philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller to the late mother superior of Saint Rose Convent plunges Evangeline into a secret history that stretches back a thousand years: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim.
For the secrets these letters guard are desperately coveted by the once-powerful Nephilim, who aim to perpetuate war, subvert the good in humanity, and dominate mankind. Generations of angelologists have devoted their lives to stopping them, and their shared mission, which Evangeline has long been destined to join, reaches from her bucolic abbey on the Hudson to the apex of insular wealth in New York, to the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris and the mountains of Bulgaria.
This was in fact the blurb that intrigued me enough to read the book (generously provided by the publisher in this case). But the same book produced two very different reactions.
Janet Maslin calls it “a class-obsessed, scholarship-spouting, minutiae-strewn thrill ride that follows the ‘Da Vinci Code’ model as loftily as it can.”
In contrast, Susan Cokal: “Sensual and intellectual, “Angelology” is a terrifically clever thriller — more Eco than Brown, without the cloudy sentimentalism of New Age encomiums or Catholic treatises.”
So if I had to choose side in this debate who would I declare the winner? I would have to side with Cokal but I can understand where Maslin is coming from to a degree.
More below.
