When angels mate with humans

Angelology
Danielle Trussoni
Penguin
452 pages
Rs499

A young nun discovers a secret correspondence, sparking off a fantastical search for a magical object that takes us from a secluded convent in Milton, New York, in 1999, to an elite academy in Paris during World War II, to a doomed expedition in the Rhodope Mountains of tenth century Bulgaria, and to a time even before all this — when a group of angels despatched to oversee activities on earth in the early days of its creation, broke all the rules and mated with humans.

Danielle Trussoni’s Angelology is an ambitious tale of the ancient battle between the hybrid descendants of that mating — the cruel Nephilim — and a secret society of ‘Angelologists’, who are determined to thwart the Nephilim’s goal of enslaving mankind.

It combines two genres of fiction that have become hugely popular and lucrative — fantasy, in which humans and ‘other’ beings inhabit the same world (most recently described with great success in the Twilight series), and Dan Brown’s brand of thriller that weaves conspiracy theories and codes with Christian religious beliefs. The offspring of this literary mating is not exactly what Trussoni might have hoped for. 

Trussoni is skillful in her sensory descriptions, such as the “sharp feline whine” of old brass hinges, or a Nephilim folding her wings into her back “with the ease of a geisha snapping closed a rice-paper fan”, but labours under the weight of her research, using unfriendly tools like documents, long conversations and lectures to describe the interesting history of angelology. 

And while she gives us appetising details about the Nephilim— they are seven feet tall, with brilliant blue eyes, no nipples or navels; their wings are an extension of their lungs, the bigger the wings, the purer the breeding; their inordinately long life — she is strangely fuzzy about how they manage to live alongside humans. 

Describing a showdown sequence at the world-famous Rockefeller Center ice skating rink in Manhattan, New York, when the central characters are surrounded by a murderous army, she glosses over the scene with, “Yet to the ordinary person the creatures appeared to be little more than a band of oddly dressed men performing some bizarre ritual on the ice”.

Bizarre, indeed.

Though Trussoni generates some suspense, you are likely to predict the end. And if you’ve been sucked into the numerous trilogies and series that have come before this, be warned, a sequel is on its way.