Larry's Angels: Larry reads Angelology

[Larry of the Lawn]

Okay, I'm going to take a crack at Angelology by Danielle Trussoni.

Here's the copy off the back cover so you know what we'll be diving into here:

Sister Evangeline was just a girl when her care was entrusted to the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Now, at twenty-three, she discovers a 1943 correspondence between the convent's late mother superior and the famous philanthropist Abigail Rockefeller that plunges her into a secret history stretching back a millennium: an ancient conflict between the Society of Angelologists and the monstrously beautiful descendants of angels and humans, the Nephilim. Blending biblical lore, the Miltonic fall of the Rebel Angels, the apocryphal Book of Enoch, and the myth of Orpheus, Angelology is a luminous, riveting tale of ordinary people caught up in a battle that will determine the fate of the world.

Okay things start off just before dawn in a convent in Milton (for realz) New York, as Sister Evangeline begins her daily routine. It's December 23, 1999:

Evangeline woke up before the sun came up, when the fourth floor was silent and dark. Quiet, so as not to wake the sisters who had prayed through the night, she gathered her shoes, stockings, and skirt in her arms and walked barefoot to the communal lavatory.

Substitute "students" for "sisters" and "partied" for "prayed" and you've got your typical college dorm instead of a convent.

We are then treated to a page and a half description of Evangeline staring out the window at the Hudson River while washing her face and putting on a plethora of nun garments. She is often described as half asleep.

Some highlights include her turtleneck, bandeau, black veil, wool blouses and skirts, cotton underpants, etc. And unlike Trussoni, Evangeline is pretty economical with her routine, check out her efficiency in dressing herself:

She stepped into a pair of nylons and a wool skirt, buttoning, zipping, and straightening in one quick, unconscious gesture

I've never gotten so much out of one unconscious gesture. Is this a foreshadowing of the existence of superpowers in our heroine?

Several pages are consumed in describing the St. Rose convent and the Maria Angelorum Church. The convent is plain and simple, but the church is lavishly decorated with gold, ornate architecture, and completely littered with angels and cherubs. You can't throw a brick with out striking a rosy-cheeked Seraphim.

The architecture is variously described as Neo-Rococo, Romanesque, and opulent.

But the convent's namesake had a violent past, which Evangeline relates as she prepares to enter the Adoration Chapel:

St. Rose's life had been short. Just after her third birthday, angels began to whisper to her, urging her to speak their special message to all who would listen. Rose complied, earning her sainthood as a young woman, when after preaching the goodness of God and His angels to a heathen village, she was condemned to die as a witch. The townspeople bound her to a stake and lit a fire. To the great consternation of the crowd, Rose did not burn but stood in skeins of flame for three hours, conversing with angels as the fire licked her body. Some believed that angels wrapped themselves about the girl, covering her in a clear, protective armor. Eventually she died in the flames, but the miraculous intervention left her body inviolable. St. Rose's incorrupt corpse was paraded through the streets of Viterbo hundreds of years after her death, not the slightest mark of her ordeal evident upon the adolescent body.

You'd think this might be a warning about messing with angels, no?

Then it's back to the majesty and opulence of the chapel, but don't worry, we'll have more incorrupt adolescent bodies paraded around soon enough. But for now, the air is heavy with incense, halos, harps, trumpets, tiny wings and all things angelic. Evangeline says it's like "being in the center of an enameled Faberge egg."

What she's doing here, is meeting up with her prayer partner, Sister Philomena, to pray for an hour. Apparently there has to be a pair of nuns praying nonstop, and supposedly the prayer chain has lasted for over two hundred years, which is some kind of Guiness Record. Well done, ladies! As far as I can tell, Sister Philomena is about a hundred years old.

After some serious praying, Evangeline heads down to her office, located in

the most decrepit part of the convent, a drafty section of the first floor down the hall from the library itself, with leaky pipes and Civil War-era windows, a combination that led to dampness, mold, and an abundance of head colds in the winter. In fact, Evangeline had been afflicted with a number of respiratory infections in the past months, causing her a shortness of breath that she blamed entirely on the drafts.

Apparently her office is in the next cell over from where they keep the Amontillado.

She basically is the mail clerk for the convent and handles all their correspondence. She is always chipping ice off the windows (?) with her letter opener.

We get a description of a pendant she inherited from her maternal grandmother Gabrielle; it's a golden lyre pendant that she always wears.

She checks the mail and there is a request from a V. A. Verlaine, asking if he could come down to the convent and go through their archives. He's researching Abigail Rockefeller, and found a bunch of letters sent from Mother Innocenta (the head nun from 60 years ago) and he's looking for the letters that Rockefeller sent to Innocenta.

Evangeline writes him back a short, curt, refusal, saying it's against policy to share the convents archives with anyone.

Then there's a bunch of pages where Evangeline starts playing the detective and goes in to the archives, with lots of descriptions of fire damage from the past and acid-free boxes and papercuts and dust; in short all the hazards mortal and trivial of the archivist trade.

She finds, *gasp*, some letters between Innocenta and Rockefeller that mention their "mutual interests in the Rhodope Mountains". Evangeline's adrenaline starts pumping, and she returns to her office, whereupon she retrieves the refusal letter she wrote to Verlaine, and chucks it ceremoniously into the fireplace.

END CHAPTER ONE!!!! Don't worry, after a bunch of Dan Brown stuff, shit will get Biblical later on...

[TempusFugit]

Awesome writeup Larry. Thanks.

[Datepalm]

Yessss. Anything that uses the phrase "monstrously beautiful" without being, like, Dante or something, is fair game.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Yessss. Anything that uses the phrase "monstrously beautiful" without being, like, Dante or something, is fair game.

My initial recollections of this book were that it was sort of pulpy, but the first chapter was surprisingly well edited. Hopefully, for the sake of this thread, that polish wears away as the pages turn....

Here's the brief prologue, for some more well-preserved corpse prose, until I get through the next couple chapters:

Devil's Throat Cavern, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria

Winter, 1943

The angelologists examined the body. It was intact, without decay, the skin as smooth and as white as parchment. The lifeless aquamarine eyes gazed heavenward. Pale curls fell against a high forehead and sculptural shoulders, forming a halo of golden hair. Even the robes--the cloth woven of a white shimmering metallic material that none of them could identify exactly--remained pristine, as if the creature had died in a hospital room in Paris and not a cavern deep below the earth.

It should not have surprised them to find the angel in that preserved condition. The fingernails, nacreous as the inside of an oyster shell; the long smooth navel-less stomach; the eerie translucency of the skin--everything about the creature was as they knew it would be, even the positioning of the wings was correct. And yet it was too lovely, too vital for something they had studied only in airless libraries, prints of quattrocentro paintings spread before them like road maps. All their professional lives they had waited to see it. Although not one of them would have admitted so, they secretly suspected to find a monstrous corpse, all bones and fiber shreds, like something unearthed from an archaeological dig. Instead there was this: a delicate tapering hand, an aquiline nose, pink lips pressed in a frozen kiss. The angelologists hovered above the body, gazing down in anticipation, as if they expected the creature to blink its eyes and wake.

Weird that 'angelologists' doesn't register on my spell-checker.....

In the next installment we will meet V.A. Verlaine, who is so interested in the Mother Innocenta / Abigail Rockefeller letters, and his shady employer Percival Grigori.

[Lyanna Stark]

Naaaaice!!

Ooooh and dressing superpowers. That's a new one.

Angelology sounds vaguely like Granny Weatherwax's "headology", but I have a suspicion it's not going to pan out exactly the same.

Bulgaria too tho? Could this maybe also include vampires as some point? *is hopeful*

The lifeless aquamarine eyes gazed heavenward.

I'm liking this a lot already.

Weird that 'angelologists' doesn't register on my spell-checker.....

The Powers Above clearly have a Hand in checking your Spellchecker.

[Galactus]

Angelology is actually a real thing, in old medieval times and such.

How can something be both neo-rococo and romanesque? And if it's in the US, how can it be romanesque in the first place? At best it would be romanesque revival.

[MinDonner]

Oh awesome. Angelolology! It's an OLOGY people, that means it's Science!

How baggy must those nylons have been, for her to just "step" into them?

So far it's coming across as sorta Catholicism-Porn - all those sumptuous descriptions of the gilt and trappings and whatnot. I've seen this before with other Catholic writers who, at the drop of a hat, will start waxing lyrical about the glorious churches and singing and incense and OMG YOU GUYS ITS BEAUTIFUL!! - you can pretty much see where the Puritans came from. So I'm pretty curious as to how this angel-encounter will play out against the spiritual backdrop. If the church had been stuffy and uncomfortable, 'twould have been a perfect backdrop for Sister Protagonist to forsake her vows and realise that true spiritual ascendancy lies in banging one of the angelic horde. But now I'm not sure. Will they just enjoy a chaste rapturous communion at the velvet-bedecked altar among the rococo cherubs and gilded cornices? Or does it just not count as a sin if it's with an angel?

[Galactus]

^ I foresee boinking and then feeling terrible about it. So we have the sin-porn and the actual porn.

This discussion incidentally wants to make me write Martin Luther porn. Probably not a good idea.

[lacuna]

She stepped into a pair of nylons and a wool skirt, buttoning, zipping, and straightening in one quick, unconscious gesture

I guess you could say it's a habit.

Thankyouverymuch, I'm here all week!

[Datepalm]

How can something be both neo-rococo and romanesque? And if it's in the US, how can it be romanesque in the first place? At best it would be romanesque revival.

I read this line out to my sister, who then spent ten minutes ranting about postmodernism, and finally threw up her hands went "and if it's 200 years old, it's just roccoco!"

It actually doesn't seem too badly written/plotted/characterized so far, but it gives such a delicious sense of still-waters-run-deep. It is so clear that this going to go to some bad, bad sex 'n god places, and I can't wait.

Martin Luther porn - i'd go make common cause with Lummel over in UK politics. "Oh, Martin," said the pope, who was not quitting, "I want you to nail me like a thesis!"

[Alytha]

Have you found out yet if the Angels are male, female, or not sexually equipped?

Although, for plot's sake I guess at least some of them are male.

[Lummel]

Martin Luther porn?

Plainly it falls to me to save the reputation of the great reformer and saviour of the Church from its Babylonish captivity. Let me make it perfectly clear that Martin Luther would have written his own porn just as soon as he wiped the beer from his lips with the back of his hand and finished up chatting with his Kumpels. This was the man who when teased by the Devil went and got himself a wife from a nunnery, the man who told Phillip of Hesse that bigamy was consistent with Biblical practise, his porn would have been muscular, multi-partnered and beer fuelled.

[Alytha]

Don't forget the burps and the farts. There's this famous quote where he's asking why people aren't burping and farting, aren't they enjoying the meal?

Granted, that one was about food, but maybe it's an acceptable reaction to any pleasurable experience...

[Lummel]

Oh definitely. Martin Luther porn would be earthy porn. Lots of burping, farting, vigorous, direct, a chorale of bodily functions.

[Old Man Aegon]

I read Angelology when it was new and Im not quite sure what I think of it.

I liked the mythological backstory we get but much else was just "meh".

I liked the story to a certain point. which I dont want to spoil here :)

[Galactus]

Martin Luther porn?

Plainly it falls to me to save the reputation of the great reformer and saviour of the Church from its Babylonish captivity. Let me make it perfectly clear that Martin Luther would have written his own porn just as soon as he wiped the beer from his lips with the back of his hand and finished up chatting with his Kumpels. This was the man who when teased by the Devil went and got himself a wife from a nunnery, the man who told Phillip of Hesse that bigamy was consistent with Biblical practise, his porn would have been muscular, multi-partnered and beer fuelled.

Oh yes, he also, IIRC, wrote bawdy poetry basically taunting his fellow monks that he was married now and it was awesome.

[Datepalm]

Woah, Martin Luther was a lot cooler I thought. He broke nuns out of monastaries in herring barrels?

[Galactus]

"and if it's 200 years old, it's just roccoco!"

200 years would put it around 1812 or so, rococo would be a bit passé then (that's more mid-late 18th century now) and Empir being all the rage for interior decorating?

[Galactus]

Woah, Martin Luther was a lot cooler I thought. He broke nuns out of monastaries in herring barrels?

Yes, if it wasn't for the y'know, antisemitism and betraying the peasants and all he'd be awesome.

[Lummel]

Woah, Martin Luther was a lot cooler I thought. He broke nuns out of monastaries in herring barrels?

How else do you get nuns out of nunneries? If your nuns are in monasteries then you've got a bunch of different problems.

Yes, if it wasn't for the y'know, antisemitism and betraying the peasants and all he'd be awesome.

Hey, nobody’s' perfect ;)