Angels and Insects (ISBN 0701137177)

Fly like an angel, sting like a bee:
A.S. Byatt is best known for her lush, time-spanning historical romance "Possession." In "Angels and Insects: Two Novellas," Byatt revisits the intellectuals of the Victorian era. She dips into Victorian interests in spiritualism, insects, poetry and love -- not to mention their darker sides as well. "Morpho Eugenia" introduces us to a young naturalist named William, who until recently had been studying insects in the Amazon. He was shipwrecked, then rescued by the wealthy Alabaster family. While continuing to study butterflies, he marries the beautiful eldest daughter Eugenia and for a time, lives the good life. The only problem is that unknown to him, Eugenia is wrapped up in a lifelong tangle of obsession and incest. "The Conjugial Angel" introduces us to a group of mediums who gather to call up spirits. Mrs. Papagay is still in love with the dead Arturo. Emily mourns her dead lover, immortalized in her brother Alfred Tennyson's "In Memoriam" -- except she has married again. Now she struggles with her past emotions, her present doubts, and her longing to communicate with her love again. As in her prior works, Byatt's writing is almost dizzily lush. She has a good sense of detail, describing ribbons, moths, butterfly wings, and the flames of gaslights. But pretty words are not all that Byatt has to offer -- she makes use of poetry (her own, and that of others), Darwinism and religious faith, Swedenborg, a family whose opulence covers their decay, and the nuances of love. Not to mention the dialogue: Eugenia's rambling explanation about her relationship with her brother is chilling. Perhaps best of this collection is that Byatt has a fantastic grasp on period descriptions and dialogue -- it all sounds like a novel from the 19th centuy, with the polish of a modern book. Which is not to say that "Angels and Insects" is perfect. Byatt spends a little too much time on the moths and too little on the Alabaster family. And she's not at her best in "Conjugial Angel," which lacks the punch of the first novella. It's moving at the end, but takes awhile to get there. Delving into such topics as survival of the fittest, poetry and love, Byatt produces a solid pair of novellas written in her usual sensuous prose. Despite some flaws that bog it down, this is a unique read.

Fine Use Of Mid-Victorian Setting:
Two novellas, both set in Byatt's favorite period, the Victorian era. The first novella carried, in my opinion, the weaker second, but both are good reads. The first story was later shot as an NC17 movie. It is about a biologist who comes back to England after a decade in Brazil and begins to write his great work on the civilization of ants. He falls in love with the daughter of his host family and marries her. For several years all seems well, if slightly askew, somehow, to him, and at the end of the novella, we learn exactly what is wrong with life in that house and what has been wrong all along. (Slightly shocking, really, giving the unsuspecting tone to the plot that led up to it.) The second novella is about the late-Victorian mania with séances and spiritualism. In it a woman whose husband, captain of a whaling ship, is presumed drowned at sea, and she is encouraged by her sister to seek the aid of a noted medium. Both these novellas may easily be partaken of in a day, and make superb reading material for a long flight or rainy evening spent alone.

Another Byatt Gem!:
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.

For a beautiful, lucid read...:
...look to A.S. Byatt. Hers is a voice that carries you until the book's final pages. Having read Possession, Byatt has catapulted herself toward the writer of distinction that she truly is. I love Morpho Eugenia -- the words carried me. And even though The Conjugal Angel isn't as impressive as the first novella, the sensuous and lucid language is a work of art nevertheless. I have got to spread the word on this exceptional book! I hadn't expected the writing to move me so much. What more could I say other than the fact that this is an excellent piece of literature. Ms. Byatt, I applaud this marvelous effort...

Prisoners of ideology:
Angels and Insects is an intriguing pair of novellas. At one level it examines the complexities of human relationships, especially those incorporated within marriage and the family. It identifies tension, dissipates it, anticipates expectations and then seeks resolution of conflict when they are not realised. In Morpho Eugenia, William, a suitor, pursues his beloved and she becomes his wife. They breed with regular success, but there is a darkness that separates them in their marriage, a darkness that becomes light when William comes home from the hunt unexpectedly. In The Conjugal Angel we enter a spirit world. For the inhabitants of the world, the spirit reality is as tangible, as rational a universe as any other. It is a world with familiar landmarks that reveal themselves easily to the accepting mind. Powerfully and engagingly interpreted by an influential writer, their significance enters the participants' assumptions, their existence never questioned. Angels and Insects is set in the mid-nineteenth century and, as such, deals with concepts, both social and intellectual, which are quite foreign, quite removed from those of the contemporary reader. In Morpho Eugenia, we have a scientist exploring the revolutionary ideas of evolution and applying these not only to the natural world he researches, but also the private human world, both physical and emotional, that he inhabits. Needless to say, his radical ideas are not shared by many close to him. In The Conjugal Angel, we encounter a group of people motivated by a reality they all share. But, for the contemporary reader, it is a reality that is utterly foreign, its literature and its analysis both apparently bogus in today's judgment. Thus, eventually Angels and Insects is a novel about ideology. It illustrates how ideological assumptions about the nature of existence can drive an individual's and a society's approach to life, and how it can convince people of the truth of illusion, or vice versa. And in considering the works of contemporary poets, Angels and Insects illustrate how the literature of an age can become suffused with its ideology and, indeed, how this can feed back into the substance of life to reinforce assumptions. As ever, A S Byatt's use of language is virtuosic, making the process of reading Angels and Insects a delight throughout. It is an ambitious project which almost achieves its design. The shortfall, however, becomes a frustration.