1. Angels & Insects

Angels & Insects is by A.S. Byatt, who is perhaps better known as the author of Possession, and is the compilation of two novellas, Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel. The two novellas stand in clear contradistinction to one another, with the first exploring themes of science and faith and the second, spiritualism and the supernatural. As in Possession, she presents stories against a richly textured historical background, setting these in Victorian England, with Darwin's work informing the biological sciences explored in Morpho Eugenia and Swedenborg's writings influencing the spiritualists in The Conjugial Angel. These two novellas provide distinctly different glimpses into Victorian England, but ones which are perhaps complementary in their approach to questions of faith and belief.

William Adamson, the shipwrecked, penniless naturalist who is the protagonist of Morpho Eugenia, observes English society as something of an outsider, having spent a decade in the Amazon and being separated by class barriers from the family where he is staying, the Alabasters. At the same time, he observes the social lives of insects, particularly ants, and often draws parallels between their societies and the human ones that he has experienced. While modern scientists might hesitate to draw such clear analogies between insect and human societies, Adamson's musings were appropriate for the era, and function in the larger context of his debates on Darwinian evolution versus creationism with his patron, Harald Alabaster.

In The Conjugial Angel, Lilias Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy are working as mediums to the spirit world for a group of people who wish to make contact with the departed. This novella features some discussion of the theology of spiritualism, but devolves in several places into long, lyrical passages of poetry. The effect of contact with the spirits of the departed is explored primarily through two characters: Mrs. Hearnshaw, who had lost five children, and Mrs. Jesse, who married another man after her first love died tragically. There are several very vivid encounters with the spirit world, primarily through Sophy, who has disturbing visions of Mrs. Jesse's dead betrothed, but in the end, Byatt throws shadows of doubt on the truth of these contacts with spirits and the focus of Lilas and Sophy is brought back to the world of flesh and blood.

Throughout both novellas, Byatt's prose is lush and beautiful, as sensual as the language of the poets she praises. Her narratives, however, sometimes are obscured by the beautiful language, instead of being enhanced by it, and her plots overall (in both these novellas and in Possession) suffer from long interruptions of other poetry and prose, whether it beby quotations from William Adamson's treatise on the ants or quotations from Tennyson's poems. In these interruptions, the story seems more like a term paper written for a college course, heavy with citations and block quotes, and the plot drags on limply through the interruptions. In spite of this, however, Byatt's style is somewhat reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's - her writing style is not the same, but like O'Connor, she uses the twist of a surprising ending to great effect. Because of these surprise endings, there are no real pat answers, and both novellas are full of food for thought, and rich with human nature and questions of philosophy and religion.