Evidence of things unseen.

Angelica
Arthur Philips

Angelica was the last of the spooky books I read in October, after Yes My Darling Daughter and Her Fearful Symmetry, and I didn't really like it. There are many explanations for exactly why I didn't:

• I was lamed out by Yes My Darling Daughter's suckitude.
  
• I was still thrilling from Her Fearful Symmetry, one of the best ghost stories I'd ever read.
  
• I was put slightly off the mood of the season after my Halloween party plans fell through.
• I had a low-level fever for the several days I was reading this book.
  
• It's just...not that good?

I don't know if it can be the last one. Everybody and her mother loved Angelica, so maybe it's just me. But it's such a cold book, and I can't put my finger on exactly why.

It could be that the themes of female oppression in this book were just too strong, and off-putting. Angelica is a novel that revolves around the fact, and doesn't work without the fact, that women in the early twentieth century were treated just a little above horse doo doo. Constance Barton, erstwhile shopgirl, now married to Dr. Joseph Barton, and mother to Angelica, is pretty much steam-rolled by her husband, and it's not because he's overbearing or anything like that, it's Just the Way Things Were back then. Poor Constance has been so squished inside her corset that she's seeing funny things: a spectre looming over the bed of her four-year-old daughter, performing unspeakable sexual acts on her sleeping body. Even more horribly, the demon has the face of her husband, who is currently in the process of convincing Constance to resume her conjugal wifely duties, even though she's had several miscarriages and another pregnancy could kill her. Is Constance projecting her feelings about her husband onto her daughter? Is she worried about being replaced in his affections by Angelica? Or is she, and her family, actually being haunted by a malicious poltergeist?

The story is told from several different perspectives: Constance, Joseph, Anne Montague the charlatan and/or exorcist who comes to cheat Constance out of money/help rid the house of evil demons, and finally, the grown-up Angelica, who is reflecting on her childhood. Or, at least: I assume she is. I set the book down somewhere before reading the final chapter, and now I can't find it. It's probably somewhere in the house, but I don't know how doggedly I'm going to look for it. Usually I hate it when I don't know how the story turns out, but in this case, I'm not at all pressed to resolve it.

The story is just the sort of Wilkie Collins-esque romp I'd enjoy, but...in a lot of other respects, it's not. It's really perverted, and makes Collins into the Disney of gothic novelists. Some of this shit is legitimately unnerving, but beyond a comfortable extent. That in itself is not bad, but add to that the fact that the book is so ambiguous as to whether or not these events were happening, it made for an extremely difficult read. I don't want to be told that she's crazy, or that this is real, but some subtle signposts would be appreciated. Maybe everything's wrapped up in the last chapter I didn't read, and so this criticism is unfair, but then again, maybe it's not. Maybe you shouldn't lead your readers on a three hundred page goose chase and then hit them with a resolution in the last ten pages. I just feel like a well-rounded novel would give you a little bit, and a little more, and a little more, a slow build, and then pull back the final layer and reveal all.

Oh, did I mention that there's a part of this book where dogs are horribly mistreated? I can't stand that. I saw a cat get hit by a car on my way to school last week and I had to pull off the side of the road and sob. So it could be that part early on biased me.

And another obnoxious thing is that Angelica herself is such an unrealistically precocious four year old that it strained credulity a bit. She speaks in perfect, grammatical sentences, is extremely perceptive of grown-up emotions, et cetera. I know there are some four year olds out there who are like that, but we have absolutely no evidence that a child neglected by her father and sheltered by her dim-witted mother would be so advanced for her age. Ugh. Just thinking about it makes my teeth set on edge.

Maybe, maybe I'll find this book one day, read the last chapter, and love it. But as it stands now, I don't like the 3/4 of it I've read, so maybe not. Probably not.

Rating: (semi-inadvertently) abandoned.