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Title: Angels and Insects : Two Novellas by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 0-679-75134-3 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 March, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 (21 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Intriguing novellas in Victorian settings
Comment: The first book I read by A.S. Byatt was Possession, which remains one of my all-time favorite books. Then I wanted to read more of her work. Angels & Insects won't be an all time favorite, but I enjoyed reading it and prefered it to the F. Potter trilogy and most of the short stories. Both novellas have interesting, detailed Victorian settings and fascinations (insects, spiritualism), layers of stories (insect studies, poems), surprises and quirky characters. "Morpho Eugenia" is the stronger novella. I enjoyed the ants, William and the satisfying ending. I liked "The Conjugal Angel" better than most of the reviwers here, perhaps because I like Tennyson's poetry.
Angels & Insects the movie is an adaptation of "Morpho Eugenia" and quite good. The costumes are dazzling.
Rating: 3
Summary: Byzantine
Comment: Two novellas by Byatt, the author of a particular favorite book of mine, Possession. Both stories share some commonalties with that work: an historical setting made real through the use of documents (poems, stories) that signify the date of their creation by their style. Both stories are set in the past, near the turn of the 19th century. "Morpho Eugenia" (the insects of the title) is a little mystery story about a naturalist who has lost all of his specimens during a sea-wreck and is forced to work as a catalogist for a wealthy amateur, working through the amateur's bought samples. The naturalist is loosely based, it seems, on David Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection with Charles Darwin. He finds that his patron's family is nearly as interesting as nature, especially one young lady cocooned from the world. But cocoons hide things.
The second story is more like Possession in that it plays revisionistic (or maybe impressionistic) with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and his sister Emily through the medium of a medium (that is, a clairvoyant). The point around which the story revolves is Arthur Hallem, the subject of Tennyson's "In Memoriam," a friend of his youth and the betrothed of his sister, who died on a sea voyage when Hallem was twenty-two. Emily, now married, has lingering doubts about her choice of marriage, wondering, if she should have, as her brother's poem snidely implies, spent her days in perpetual maidenhood. Are we destined to have only one soul mate, the other being with which we form 'the conjugal angel'?
Byatt's style is Byzantine. Her scholarship into literary istory has informed her pen to leak the century from its nib, and is not for those married to modernity. Yet her subjects are fresh and vibrant, pictured with painful clarity in the harshest of lights. Her characters ache in-between the lines.
Rating: 4
Summary: Another Byatt Gem!
Comment: Angels and Insects is my third Byatt book. Naturally I approached the book with certain expectations: that it would contain poetry, utilize a broad and deep set of metaphors, probe existential meaning, and require me to think. Right. And I am still thinking, trying to understand all of the connections between the two novella and why Byatt chose this particular format - two novellas linked by a common character who is minor to both.
As others have stated, the two novellas present wonderfully rich situations that allow the characters to explore the fundamental issues that confronted women and men at the dawn of modernism. A description of the Tennyson siblings childhood home provides a metaphoric description for the Victorian age: "Everything was double there, then - it was real and loved, here and now, it was glittering with magic and breathing out a faint cold perfume of a lost world, a king's orchard, the garden of Haroun al-Raschild." Darwinism, naturally, informs one level of discourse. Swedenborg plays an important role. Add a shake of Carl Linnaeus, a dash of the Bible, and some good hardcore Victorian poetry and you have a proper Petri dish environment for discussion. And the topic appears to be: what is man?
Given that Byatt is anything but a "black and white" thinker, I am prone to believe that her title provides an answer. There is a duality, a "compositeness," and a depth to our experience. Perhaps that is why Byatt cannot escape from Victorian and Romantic poetry, which probes meanings and begins to ask the questions about man that inform modernism. In Tennyson, in particular, with echoes of Shakespeare and Keats, we find the essential voice to examine the question. There we find an insolvable tension between the dead and living, between life and art, between the ephemeral and eternal, between angels and insects.
After one reading, I don't pretend to understand all that this book is about. But I have had great enjoyment tracing some of the questions about in my mind. And, as always, I have an endless appreciation for the structures around which Byatt winds her tales and for the fascinating connections her fiction present to us.
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Title: Possession : A Romance by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 0679735909 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 October, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Virgin in the Garden : A Novel by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 0679738290 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 15 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: STILL LIFE by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 0684835037 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 0679736808 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 24 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 0375415343 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 10 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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