There was a time in the 1990s when angels were impossible to escape. Guardians, muses, articles of trade, they covered T-shirts and bathroom accessories, bloomed on restaurant walls and peered from the edges of book jackets. Lately they may seem to have drifted away, but they’ve merely wandered into the literature of self-help and healing. It is now possible to buy “How to Hear Your Angels,” “Working With Angels,” “In the Arms of Angels” and “Angels 101,” as well as angel dictionaries, encyclopedias and art books.
One snowy day near the end of the last millennium, a young nun working in a Hudson Valley convent library discovers a secret correspondence between a former mother superior and the philanthropist Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller. After some further research and with a smitten art historian, Verlaine, at her side, the nun, Sister Evangeline, is drawn into a centuries-old struggle against the Nephilim — a fight in which both of her parents, now dead, were once engaged (hence the visit to the caged monsters). In under two days, she and Verlaine will quest after missing letters, books and an object so precious and singular that it has been commemorated in both angel iconography and the ancient myth of Orpheus. They will also find out what it means to wrestle with angels.have been hallmarks of the genre from “The Name of the Rose” and “Possession” to “Angels and Demons” and “The Historian.” “Angelology” is richly allusive and vividly staged, with widescreen-ready visuals, a dewy but adaptable heroine and a dashingly cruel villain.
Despite their extensive scholarship, neither Evangeline nor Verlaine is prepared (who could be?) for the Nephilim. The modern-day “Famous Ones” are nasty, selfish creatures who live in opulent apartments. Gorgeous, sensuous and wealthy, they are jealous of humans and vindictive toward God, cold to one another and rude to their servants, who belong to lesser angelic orders. During World War II, they attended Nazi parties. But even angels decline; their wings, which may be extensions of their lungs, sometimes rot away to ugly black nubs stuck in open sores. It is happening now to the formerly magnificent Percival Grigori — who, at the height of his powers, fell for a woman.
Some of Trussoni’s most exquisite writing touches on that old love story, which takes place in a flashback to a dreamy Montparnasse that could have come from the pages of Anaïs Nin. In 1939, two teenage girls — one brilliant and beautiful, the other plain but harder working — receive special assignments at the Angelological Academy. One involves archival research, another an expedition to the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria, where scholars hope to recover the golden lyre that Orpheus gave to angels imprisoned in a measureless cavern. The repercussions of the girls’ activities, both academic and amorous, could keep the Nephilim in check or let them triumph definitively over humans. And both lives are tangled with Evangeline’s; the first girl will become her grandmother, the second a fellow nun with a story to share.
Certain questions linger: Are angels corporeal, or are they concentrations of luminosity? In the absence of navels and nipples, do they still have the equipment with which to breed and be born? With Nephilim displaying their wings the way baboons show off some other parts, what is the relationship between human bodies and spirit? And how can the music of a lyre bring it all together?
Like angels, the answers must be all around us. Evangeline discovers some of the convent’s greatest secrets in its basement libraries; the athenaeum of the now vanished academy was also a web of forbidden rooms and hidden texts. In fact, all the world’s an archive, as will become clear as Evangeline and company track Mrs. Rockefeller’s angelological activities.
Trussoni’s own research and invention are impressive, but what with diaries, letters and memoirs to be read, lectures recounted and revelatory conversations held, the narrative’s pace sometimes slows — though, to her credit, she avoids the false tension of interrupted conversation and “I’ll tell you more tomorrow.” And her portrayal of the fighting over lost texts is inevitably more dynamic than her explication of them. When Evangeline’s grandmother gets involved and the Nephilim army starts to swarm, the confrontations build to Miltonic proportions. The spirited female characters dig deep for unexpected strengths, and graciously allow Verlaine to participate. These moments are, as Sister Evangeline has imagined angelic encounters, “instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of ethereal beings.”
Trussoni resorts to a few conventions, notably a James Bond-style showiness: the present-day angelologists go about their secret business in a vintage Porsche with a license plate that reads “ANGEL1.” There is, in fact, enough attention paid to car models for a Bond novel and enough information about fabrics for an episode of “Project Runway.” Sometimes it’s best to blink and move on, accepting that level of detail as part of another duality — the intermeshing of the physical world with the immaterial realm of spirit, nicely evoked here. It is a real pleasure to read sensory descriptions of the “sharp feline whine” of old brass hinges and the “musky smell of perfume that has begun to soften with age.”
Sensual and intellectual, “Angelology” is a terrifically clever thriller — more Eco than Brown, without the cloudy sentimentalism of New Age encomiums or Catholic treatises. It makes no apologies for its devices, and none are necessary. How else would it be possible to bring together the angels of the Bible and Apocrypha, the myth of Orpheus, Bulgarian geography, medieval monastics, the Rockefellers, Nazis, nuns and musicology? And how splendid that it has happened.
