Heaven caught in the wire

I thought it was about time I did some serious culture, so on the recommendation of a glowing review in the New York Times, I bought Daniel Kraus’s novel Angel Down, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The subject matter appealed to me: a novel set on the bloody battlefields of the First World War. I thought it would tie in rather neatly with the current series of The Rest Is History podcast.

However, as soon as I started reading, I realised that this was no ordinary war novel. In fact, no ordinary novel at all. The writing style is totally weird. Here is the first half of the opening paragraph:

“and Cyril Bagger considers himself lucky, he ought to be topped off, gone west, bumped, clicked it, pushing daisies, a new landowner, napooed, just plain dead, not only dead but scattered around in globs, for the last thing he saw was a shell dropping on top of him with the noise of colliding freight trains, a jim-dandy of a shot from Fritzy the Hun . . .”

This is fiction, Jim, but not as we know it.

The whole book is one long, continuous sentence, broken into paragraphs, with each paragraph beginning with the word “and” and closing with a comma. To be honest, as I read the novel, I was never quite sure what was happening. Strange words tumbled over one another, often with little obvious coherence.

I was completely confused — which, I suspect, was precisely Kraus’s aim. That is what war does to you. It is as though you, the reader, are also trapped in the mud, panic, fear and moral confusion of the First World War.

Nevertheless, I kept reading, often scanning each paragraph rather than dwelling on individual words – I guess that is how Kraus wants us to read his text. After all, I had paid £5.59 for the Kindle edition. And to my surprise, I finished the whole book in a few days.

The action centres on an angel, radiant yet entangled in the barbed wire of No Man’s Land, “snarled in concertina wire in a pose both pained and graceful”.  Here is the great surprise of the book: what on earth is an angel doing here as the centrepiece of a modern novel?

Surely the supernatural, the numinous, has long since been banished from our secular culture. And yet here we see heaven caught in the machinery of human violence, described with visceral intensity. Kraus is unsparing in his depiction of the gore and detritus of the battlefield; this is hardly Blackadder.

So we follow five soldiers sent into No Man’s Land to find what they later discover to be an angel. Each man sees in her something connected with his own desires, fears and wounds. They long for protection, favour, perhaps even salvation — but salvation on their own terms — as they continue to live their battered lives in terror.

This, I think, is where the novel becomes so arresting for the Christian reader – what on earth is God’s angel doing here?

As Tom Wright puts it: “Jesus doesn’t give an explanation for the pain and sorrow of the world. He comes where the pain is most acute and takes it upon himself.” That, perhaps, is why the angel in the wire feels so strangely Christian.

For our gospel does not give us a God who remains safely above the battlefield. At the heart of Christian faith is not an untouched angel, but a crucified Christ. God comes down. God enters the wire, the blood, the fear, the betrayal and the violence. The cross is not a divine escape from suffering, but God’s self-giving presence within it.

The temptation that preys on each soldier is the desire to use the angel for his own ends. And that is a temptation for all of us — even for Jesus himself. The difference is that Jesus resisted Satan’s Lenten enticements. 

Even so the angel does something wonderful for Private First Class Bagger, the same rank as it happens of my American GI father-in-law.

The setting of the First World War makes the presence of the angel even more subversive. The trenches were places where civilisation’s confidence collapsed. Europe — supposedly Christian Europe — descended into industrial slaughter. Barbed wire, gas, mud, artillery and shattered bodies became the landscape. In such a world, what does an angel mean?

Furthermore the novel’s strange style demonstrates war as relentless and disorientating. Panic gives no pause. Sin, once unleashed, runs on and on. Perhaps the form of the book enacts a world without breath, without peace, without hope.

And into that breathless world comes an angel — a sign of another order, another kingdom, another possibility.

That, for me, is where Angel Down finally lands. It is not simply a strange war novel with a supernatural twist. It is a disturbing reminder that God is not absent from the places where humanity seems most lost. The angel in the wire becomes a sign — fragile, radiant, wounded — of a holiness that does not float above suffering, but is found within it.

For Christians, that takes us inevitably to the cross of Jesus. There, too, heaven is caught in the machinery of human violence. There, too, the holy one is wounded, mocked and exposed. Yet there, precisely there, God’s love is most fully revealed.

So perhaps Kraus’s strange, breathless novel leaves us with an unexpected gospel-shaped hope. However deep the mud, however cruel the wire, however dark the battlefield, God’s grace befriends us.

Desmond Tutu’s words come to mind: “Goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness.” Flanders Fields is not the last word. Resurrection is.