Uneven Angels

A.S. 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 the ants and the humans, in "The Conjugial Angel" it is between the "real" characters and the fictional.

However, the most obvious link between the two stories feels forced: Captain Papagay, an extremely minor character in the first story, who appears only in its final paragraph, "reappears" in the second story as an important absence. Why these two figures should be the same person is unclear. As a result, the coincidence feels contrived and detracts from the other elements that bring these two stories together.

"Morpho Eugenia" will satisfy readers of Possession, Byatt's prize-winning last novel. It is the story of William Adamson, a naturalist back from a decade of butterfly collecting in the Amazon who marries into the family of his aristocratic patron. Detailed accounts of ant colonies benefit from Byatt's richly detailed descriptive style, and the life of the ants provides a strong counterpoint to the life of her human characters. Indeed, she is often at her strongest when describing the ants:

The Wood Ants all over that part of Surrey chose Midsummer Day for their nuptial flight. No one was prepared for this in 1861--indeed, the young adults and the school-room inhabitants were all partaking of a strawberry picnic on the lawn when the swarming began, and hundreds of frantic, tumbling creatures, male and female, dropped out of the sky and into the cucumber sandwiches and the silver cream jugs, scurrying away in attached pairs, drowning in strawberry juice and Orange Pekoe, scrambling across spoons and lace doilies.

The study of the ants which Adamson undertakes similarly functions as a disruption of the plot's family drama and provides a distraction from his feeling of imprisonment in the family. His entrapment is a comment on Victorian class structures, from which, through an unexpected twist of the plot, he is ultimately able to escape by returning to the Amazon. Byatt makes subtle use of the American Civil War as background both to the ants' warfare and slave-making, and to the inhuman treatment of one of the family servants by her employers.

"The 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's pages alongside the mediums Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay (the latter being the widow of the briefly-glimpsed Captain Papagay who sails William Adamson off to the Amazon at the end of "Morpho Eugenia"). The passage concerning the Tennysons and Hallam seem little more than recitations of literary history, the passages from In Memoriam are poorly integrated into the body of the text, and Emily and Alfred seem less alive than their fictional companions, seeming to have no existence outside of their mourning for Arthur.

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.