Angel Down

France, autumn 1918, the Meuse Argonne offensive. Private First Class Cyril Bagger, a bishop's son turned card sharp who has been working burial duty, is ordered by Major General Reis to go out into no man's land and find the source of a shrieking that has been driving the men in the trenches to madness. Four other soldiers nobody will miss go with him: Arno, young and still innocent; Popkin, a brute; Goodspeed, twitchy and nervous; and Veck, wrecked by shell shock. What they find tangled in the barbed wire is not a wounded soldier but an angel, giving off light, and she looks different to each of them. Bagger sees a woman in red and blue. Others see a mother, or a lover they left behind. Convinced that Reis means to use her, the five desert and carry her across the battlefield, dodging artillery and arguing about which of their wishes she might grant.

Kraus writes the whole novel as one unbroken sentence, with paragraph breaks but no full stop, and it opens in the middle of that sentence and closes on a comma. That sounds like a stunt and reads like a forced march: the prose piles up facts, images and fears without pausing to sort them, so the reader is never let out of the mud, and the effect is closer to a fever than to a war story. The violence is graphic, the angel never stops being ambiguous, and under the horror the book keeps asking why men go to war at all and what, if anything, could stop them. Publishers Weekly said Kraus breathes new life into the war novel; Kirkus called it surprising; Ben H. Winters in the New York Times found it mysterious and full of grace even as it walked the fields of death.

It suits readers of All Quiet on the Western Front and of the weirder end of horror in roughly equal measure, and anyone who enjoyed the relentless forward motion of Kraus's Whalefall. It is short, about three hundred pages, and best read in a sitting or two, because the sentence does not want you to stop either.