Form, content spar in magic realist First World War novel

Winnipeg Free Press

2 days ago

Now more than a century in the past, the First World War presents the novelist with the challenge of making comprehensible to 21st-century readers a world of hideous slaughter that was scarcely comprehensible to the public at the time. Erich Maria Remarque wrote his classic 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front in the first-person present tense, a literary device which served to put the reader immediately in the mind of young Paul Bäumer as he gradually descends from eager patriotic youth to despairing, doomed veteran.
With Angel Down, American novelist Daniel Kraus chooses to bridge this divide by elevating form and literary conceit to an extreme degree: told as one long, unbroken and incomplete sentence, the novel combines unceasingly horrific depictions of warfare and violence with magical realism to craft a deeply unsettling — yet occasionally beautiful — war narrative.
Kraus is a bestselling and highly acclaimed author with a penchant for horror, much of it aimed at middle-grade readers (the Graveyard Girls series, co-written with Lisi Harrison, and the Teddies Saga), as well co-writing, with Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water, a novelization of del Toro's film of the same name.
Angel Down
Most recently, Kraus authored 2023's Whalefall, a harrowing novel about a teenaged scuba diver who is swallowed by a sperm whale.
The protagonist of Angel Down is Cyril Bagger, an American soldier and inveterate con man wrestling with his inner demons, including a fraught relationship with his father. Along with four fellow soldiers, he is ordered to venture out into no man's land near the Argonne Forest to silence (that is, euthanize) a 'shrieker,' a fatally wounded soldier crying out for help.
They discover the voice they'd heard is instead coming from a petite, glowing woman in a red dress and blue cape whom they almost immediately refer to as an angel.
As Bagger and his compatriots make their way through the ruined French countryside with the angel in tow and attempt to catch up with their company, they begin to realize she has mysterious and miraculous powers, even as their situation continues to deteriorate.
Kraus makes his syntactical conceit thematically explicit (in a somewhat ham-handed fashion) at the end of the first chapter when Bagger, believing the war will never end, compares it to 'a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can't ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself…' Mercifully, Kraus breaks up this nearly 300-page incomplete sentence into 3-4 paragraphs per page.
While his meticulously constructed prose verges on the poetic and definitely places the reader viscerally into the First World War, Kraus does commit the occasional anachronism, as when Bagger admits to being a 'draft dodger' and soldiers are described as wearing 'dog tags'— both terms which wouldn't gain currency until decades later.
The novel's larger problem is the inescapable weight of its syntax, which is in constant struggle with its narrative. Given the near-hallucinatory nature of the run-on text, the reader can be forgiven for wondering if any of it is actually happening: if Bagger the con man is an entirely reliable narrator, or if the woman they're carrying around (and how would that work exactly?) is really an angel.
Undeniably powerful and disturbing, Angel Down is nonetheless both frustrating and exhausting. One can't help but wonder if this strange story might have had more narrative conference if had it been told more conventionally.
In being grammatically unorthodox to describe both an unimaginable war and the inexplicably miraculous, Angel Down ends up suffering from a battle between form and content.
Michael Dudley is a librarian at the University of Winnipeg.