I thought I’d write today about three of my favorite angel books (not counting my own).
If a short poem were in the mix, I’d offer Billy Collins’s “Questions About Angels”; if a short story, Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”
Of course no list should omit Dante’s Divine Comedy, which ends with the most beautiful lines ever written—except you have to read all 99 cantos to really get it. But here are three extraordinary books about angels that I think everyone should read.
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
The story of Adam and Eve and the battle between the angel hordes. This epic poem gives the quintessential portrait of Lucifer, the raging fallen angel, from which all other accounts of him descend. Milton’s Satan is not black, bat-winged Dis of Dante’s Inferno, who is locked in ice as cold as hate. This Lucifer is a mighty force, willing to challenge even God for authority. The Archangel Rafael comes down and dines with Adam and Eve and tells about angels, including how they make love (commingling like wine), but it is furious Lucifer that you secretly root for in this magnificent epic poem.
Miss Garnet’s Angel, by Sally Vickers
This book opens with the elderly, uptight English spinster who rents a room in Venice and finds herself transformed by love and beauty. The novel, however, is so witty, so kind, so filled with delicious perceptions, including the mysteries of faith, that it transcends its hackneyed form. Miss Garnet’s angel is also Raphael, who appears in art on her street as well as in the ancient Biblical story of his travels with Tobias. The book offers us a stolen painting, the history of the Jews in Venice and the satisfaction of a haunting ending.
Angel Island, by Inez Haynes Gillmore (introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin)
In this feminist fantasia, five men are shipwrecked on an isolated island inhabited by five winged women whose “hair, brows, lashes glittered as if threaded with diamonds.” The men fall instantly in love. They would never harm these free, swooping creatures for the world—oh, no!—but they set about to capture them, cut off their wings, give them babies and go about the business of being, very predictably, men. When the babies start growing wings, the men are determined to cut them off too. I won’t reveal the ending. It’s enchanting, as angels always are.
And now it’s your turn. Do you have your own favorites? What would you add to this list?
