Angels in the Rain

B.J. Busch is Associate Librarian (Access and Information Services) at
the University of Alberta.

It’s not as though the author meant this work to be coherent. One doesn’t expect coherency from a novel depicting a dreamlike demi-world as seen through the mind’s eye of an automobile crash victim. It’s just that it all seems so gratuitous and egocentric. The reader has the right to expect the loaded gun to go off sometime before the ending, and in this work it never does. Here one encounters a mish-mash of literary characters, childhood deliriums, Florence Nightingale and her hospital at Scutari, gangrenous soldiers, angels, a pregnant wife, owls, bananas, and top hats. The story, such as it is, takes place from November 11 — when the “hero,” Brendan Quinlan, is critically injured in a car accident — to Christmas day, when he emerges from a coma. Brendan has many adventures in his unconscious state, including meetings with his double, Robert Louis Stevenson. None of them, of course, make much sense, although fans of Stevenson might have some fun picking out allusions. There is a lot of color imagery, especially red, which doubtless is related to (surprise!) blood. One keeps expecting it to mean something, since the author hits us over the head with it again and again. Early in the novel there is a strange break in the third-person narration as the narrator-angel speaks directly to the reader in the too cutesy, “As I was saying once before — I don’t know whether it was to you...” which seems oddly out of place in the context of the whole novel, as though someone neglected to use the blue pencil. The writing style is actually quite good, but one keeps wondering what the author is really trying to say. Even novels about wandering minds need a central focus.