Dutton Books (hardback), 1981
434 Pages
What It's About
In her highly acclaimed novel Bellefleur; Joyce Carol Oates traced the American dream to its origin deep within our individual imaginations. In Angel of Light, she explores our political heritage and give us a novel of mounting drama with all the import of Greek tragedy. It is a story of loyalty, betrayal, revenge, and finally, forgiveness.
Opening Sentence
It is on a windy morning in early March, a day of high scudding dizzy clouds, some nine months after their father's ignorable death, that his only children, Owen and Kirsten, make a pact to revenge that death.
What I Thought
I thought Angel of Light was a good read but not one of JCO's best.
This big, complex novel deals with a lot of issues including family relationships, betrayal, revenge, paranoia and politics. There's plenty of drama, intrigue and tension to hold your interest from start to finish. The most enjoyable parts for me were the moments JCO focuses on the dysfunctional Halleck family; Owen and Kirsten's desire for revenge and the lies spun by Maurice, Nick and Isabel revealed in flashbacks. I found the political stuff tedious for the most part.
There are a lot of time shifts in this novel and JCO doesn't always pull them off. The novel moved back and forth between different periods of time, giving the reader a vast amount of information each time, some which seemed to be a repetition. This started to get confusing and was quite clumsy at times. The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is a brilliant example of how to use a complex time structure in a novel. JCO never quite makes this work. More than once I got very confused about who was who and whether I was reading about something happening in the past or present. If the time shifts had been a little tighter I would have rated this novel higher.
I enjoyed this novel much more towards the end when things start to get pretty dark and the truth about Maurice's death is revealed. JCO really nails it in the last hundred or so page and I got to see how great the novel could have been.
Angel of Light isn't one of JCO's best novels but it is a good read and insight into how talented a writer she can be.