Word: angeles
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gardiner has a stage presence above and beyond that of the other players, and as the play continues she becomes a demonic guardian angel to the child in the story. Surprisingly, the child doesn't get a real face or body in the play until the last few scenes, while trying to come to terms with the parents who raised him to be something...
...heart, though, In the Line of Fire is a conversation between two sides of a smart, troubled mind. In a series of phone chats, Leary toys with Horrigan, hovers like a dark angel or a guilty conscience, lets the agent see his fun- house mirror image in an assassin's paranoid logic. Why kill the President? "To punctuate the dreariness." At the end of the cold war and the American century, Leary says, "there's no cause left worth fighting for. All that's left is the game. I'm on offense; you're on defense...
...Byatt's recent book, Angels and Insects, is a somewhat uneven pairing of two novellas. The first, "Morpho Eugenia," is a feast for naturalists. This story's butterflies and ants provide the insects of the book's title, while "The Conjugial Angel," the second and weaker novella, is organized around seances, and of course provides the title's angels. Both stories are set against the backdrop of Victorian England's exploration of the natural and supernatural world; shipwreck and return play important roles in both stories; and both shift between two lines of narration: in "Morpho Eugenia" it is between...
...Conjugial Angel" is the weaker half of Angels and Insects. The story's conceit is to pair fictional characters with figures from literary history, and Byatt has much more success in evoking the fictional characters than in breathing life into the historical ones. As a result, the novella has something of the feel of a clumsily-executed insertion of live-action characters into a well-drawn animated piece. Alfred Tennyson, his sister Emily, and the ghost of their beloved Arthur Hallam (his best friend and her fiance, and the subject of the poet's In Memoriam) move through Byatt...
Throughout the book, Byatt immerses her readers in the social mores and concerns of the mid-nineteenth century, resembling her nineteenth century predecessors perhaps more than she does other twentieth-century authors. Despite the frustrations of "The Conjugial Angel," "Morpho Eugenia" makes Byatt's latest effort worth reading, and a welcome respite from the pressures of post-modernity...