From the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague comes an even more accomplished and entirely surprising new novel. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story, an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear.
The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, with the Barton household on the brink of collapse. Mother, father, and daughter provoke one another, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family’s tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast and sympathies shift.
In the dark of night, a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house, hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorizing her fragile mother. Are these visions real, or is there something more sinister, and more human, to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors, but with her arrival the complexities of motive and desire only multiply. The mother’s failing health and the father’s many secrets fuel the growing conflicts, while the daughter flirts dangerously with truth and fantasy.
While Angelica is reminiscent of such classic horror tales as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House, it is also a thoroughly modern exploration of identity, reality, and love. Set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism’s acceptance, Angelica is also an evocative historical novel that explores the timeless human hunger for certainty.
“Angelica, Arthur Phillip's spellbinding third book, cements this young novelist's reputation as one of the best writers in America, a storyteller who combines Nabokovian wit and subtlety with a narrative urgency that rivals Stephen King" –Washington Post
Elizabeth Hand
Angelica, Arthur Phillips's spellbinding third book, cements this young novelist's reputation as one of the best writers in America, a storyteller who combines Nabokovian wit and subtlety with a narrative urgency that rivals Stephen King's … his profoundly unsettling achievement is to demonstrate the terrible hold that childhood traumas have not just on their victims but on those who seek to help them: the slippery and dangerous nature of memory, and the futility of believing that we can ever exorcise a demon when the demon's story is our own.
— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Set in Victorian England, Phillips's impressive third novel uses four linked viewpoints to explore class, gender, family dynamics, sexuality and sciences both real and fraudulent, ancient and newly minted. Joseph Barton, a London biological researcher, orders his four-year-old daughter, Angelica, who's been sleeping in her parents' bedroom, to her own room. Joseph's wife, Constance, resists this separation from her child and the resumption of a marital intimacy that, given her history of miscarriage, may threaten her life. Soon Constance notices foul odors, furniture cracks and a blue specter that appears to attack Angelica while she sleeps. When she reports these supernatural visitations to the unimaginative Joseph, the rift between them widens. Desperate, Constance turns to actress-turned-spiritualist Annie Montague for help. Phillips (Prague) captures period diction and detail brilliantly. At its strongest, the multiple-viewpoint narration yields psychological depth and a number of clever surprises; at its weakest, it can slow the book's momentum to an uncomfortably slow (if authentically Victorian) pace. Author tour. (Apr.)
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Library Journal
American expatriates in post-Communist Budapest (Prague), tomb robbers in the Nile Valley (The Egyptologist), and now ghosts—the award-winning Phillips is a writer of uncommon versatility. In this Victorian tale told with a modern sensibility, Constance Barton is determined to protect her daughter, the eponymous Angelica, from her sexually voracious husband, Joseph. Spiritualist Anne Montague comes to the rescue and taps into tidy sums from the grateful wife, whose husband, Joseph, seeks to protect his daughter, Angelica, from her deranged mother, Constance, who has hardly shared his bed since their daughter's birth. Thus we do notcome full circle, for Angelica relates the fourth part of the novel from again a different viewpoint. Readers can expect to be mightily confused and amused by this ghostly thriller-spoof, which gives Henry James a run for the money. Phillips's control of language and exquisite writing (you are actually transported to the London of Dickens) is worth the price of admission. Highly recommended for everyone who has ever worried that there is a ghost under the bed. [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/06; for an interview with Phillips, see p. 68.]
—Edward Cone
Kirkus Reviews
A symphony of psychological complexity and misdirection in four increasingly tricky movements displays the varied wares of the gifted Phillips (The Egyptologist, 2004, etc.). In a brooding family drama set in turn-of-the-century London (presumably the turn from the 19th to the 20th), former shopgirl Constance Barton begins to withdraw from her husband, Joseph (a medical researcher who had formerly served with the British Army), and into protective intimacy with their bewitching four-year-old daughter Angelica, whose birth had been preceded by several miscarriages. Fearful of enduring another failed pregnancy, Constance forsakes her husband's bed, pleading that the sensitive Angelica needs her constantly. And, appalled by evidence of the "cruelty" of Joseph's researches (i.e., mutilation and vivisection of animals), repelled by his evident masculine needs, Constance persuades herself that she sees proof of both malign ghostly presences invading their home and the more-than-fatherly interest shown toward Angelica by Joseph (born Bartone, hence of hot-blooded ancestry). Is Constance mad, or does she alone sense the presence of unspeakable evil? Phillips juggles possibilities almost as adroitly as did Henry James in this novel's likely inspiration, The Turn of the Screw-and he ups the ante in successive narratives focused on the duplicitous spiritualist ("Anne Montague") engaged by Constance, who quickly falls under this formidable older woman's not-entirely-professional influence; "Joseph Barton" himself, who gradually emerges as rather less a villain than an ingenuous victim; and finally "Angelica," years after the novel's major events, when she has learned-but still does not fullyunderstand-the personal histories that set her formerly loving parents at incompatible odds. A further mystery is found in the identity of the narrator, neatly revealed late in the story (though less of a surprise than Phillips perhaps intends). Elegant writing abounds, as do probing characterizations and flashes of wit (the two nicely conjoined in the figure of self-important, gourmandizing consulting psychologist Doctor Miles). An impressive step forward for the versatile Phillips, who continues to engage, surprise and entertain.
