Negative Character Growth in Chekhov’s Ionych

I have been reading Chekhov again. Chekhov is one of those writers who brings me such joy, and this is because he knows how to write. He reminds one that it is possible to write well, something not all writers, and certainly not all Russians, do. I wanted to write about “The Lady with the Dog”, and had even started a plan to that end, but I was so struck by “Ionych” (the next story I reread) that I felt I had to begin with it. “Ionych” is fascinating because it is a story about negative growth. The country doctor, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, falls in love with a young lady, is teased and rejected by her, and then decides to become a thoroughly unlikeable person as a result, leading him eventually to reject her himself when she realises much later that she had made a mistake in turning him down.

Negative growth is interesting because we are generally used to characters growing in positive directions. Our villains turn good, our good get better. Where mistakes are made, they are the result of bad character – of cowardice, or anger. But stories rarely show how entire lives can become mistakes, and how good people can become bad. That’s why it’s worth looking at “Ionych” in more detail.

The Plot

Dmitry Ionych Startsev is a country doctor who has recently arrived in the vicinity of the town of S. An educated man, as doctors generally are, Ionych is welcome in what little society there is in S., though his countryside practice means he rarely has time to visit the town. The society in S. is very limited, as is always the case in Chekhov’s provincial towns. The highlight, however, is the Turkin family – husband and wife, and their daughter Ekaterina, who is also known as Kotik (Kitty). Mr Turkin speaks in a very mannered way and tells funny anecdotes, his wife writes novels and reads them aloud to guests, and Kotik plays the piano. All this means that they are able to put on entertaining evenings for the inhabitants of their town. 

Eventually, Ionych manages to find the time to visit them. He is particularly entranced by Kotik, with the “innocent child’s expression on her face and the smooth, thin waist”. Though there is some family tension, for Kotik wishes to go to a conservatory to improve her playing and her mother decidedly does not desire this, and some of the usual dreadful treatment of young girls that we are probably used to if this is not our first time reading 19th century Russian literature (Kotik is barely allowed out of the house, so that she is protected from any and all “bad influences”), still the evening is generally marked by peace and pleasantness for Ionych.

When Kotik’s mother develops migraines, Ionych is called into the town more often, spending plenty of time with the family. Perhaps the migraines are even a ploy to weld Kotik and Ionych together, because if she were married she would never be given the opportunity to leave her husband to study elsewhere. Whatever the case, Ionych is in love with dear Kotik. One day, however, Kotik decides to tease him, giving him a note requesting a moonlit meeting in a local graveyard. Ionych shows up; Kotik does not. But though he is annoyed, Ionych experiences a kind of Romantic revelation of the world’s beauty in the graveyard. When he next meets his love, Ionych proposes; Kotik rejects him. Indeed, she rejects him precisely because she wants the freedom that not being his wife would bring. The problem is not one of emotions. But either way, Ionych is defeated.

Four years pass. Ionych, who had begun his story walking around the countryside, now owns a practice both there and in the city; he has a large, expensive carriage too. At the same time, he has drawn away from people – he finds them stupid and boring. And they, in turn, have started calling him a “puffed-up Pole”, though he is not Polish. In short, where once he was poor and liked, now he is rich and disliked. Kotik, meanwhile, has aged into Ekaterina, and returns from the conservatory each summer, though Ionych avoids her. At home, she already feels a kind of stranger and ill at ease.

But eventually they meet, once more the handiwork of Kotik’s mother. This time is both a repetition and a rejection of what came before. “He remembered his love, his hopes and dreams, which had so worried him four years ago – and he was embarrassed at them”. Kotik’s mother reads again, Kotik’s father says the same idiotic phrases, and Kotik herself plays the piano – nothing has changed. But emotionally, everything is about to fall apart.

She looked at him and was obviously waiting for him to invite her into the garden, but he remained silent. “Oh how good that I didn’t marry her”, thought Startsev.

What a terrible thought to read. But it gets worse, for Kotik invites him into the garden herself. She admits that the conservatory had failed her, for all the young ladies she knew were able to play the piano, and she was nothing special. She tells him how she thought of him while she was in Moscow, how ideal he was. But he does not propose. He thinks of his money, back at home, and the flame she had rekindled in him is snuffed out. Everything annoys him. He goes home and never sees the family again, ignoring their messages to him.

Later still Ionych drives about town “like a Pagan God”, so rich is he. People call him Ionych, rather than his full name. He has become his name – and not the personal, familiar, Dmitry. Yet although he is lonely, bored, and finds everything distasteful and uninteresting, nothing changes. He does not realise that he has made a mistake. Meanwhile, over at the Turkins, nothing has changed either, except that everyone is a little older. Ekaterina has become Kotik again, and no doubt will stay like that, sad and unmarried, the rest of her life.

Negative Growth

This is the story of Ionych’s decline into caring only for his money. We might ask whether Ionych always showed signs of badness and a quickness to judge – one thing the narration (in Ionych’s voice), notes early on about Kotik is that she is “probably pure”. But this is I think insignificant, because everyone has a little bad in them, but few have that badness gain strength over the course of their life as Ionych does. To encounter an example of negative growth in Ionych is therefore a kind of surprise. Just as in real life, we rarely encounter negative growth in fiction. Characters, especially main characters, tend to become wiser, learning from their mistakes. However secular we are, we like to see redemption take place for the evil, and manifestations of grace.

But badness can get worse. We often talk about regrets as something bad, and certainly they are when they consume a life and distract it from the present. But regrets can also make possible the righting of past mistakes. Without the interiority that regrets imply, we cannot hope to grow. Ionych ends up shutting himself down once those four years have passed. Kotik briefly makes him think of the past, but his embarrassment leads him to destroy his interiority to protect himself. This also destroys her hopes of another proposal. At the end of the story it is the narrator who tells us that Ionych is lonely, because Ionych cannot do it himself. In fact, he is probably not even aware that it might be the case.

Experiences change us. Ionych’s walk in the graveyard shows that he had a developed sense of imagination, but his rejection means that he fully embraces a terrible, limited, materialism. As a story, “Ionych” tells us about the consequences of not paying attention to ourselves and the people we are becoming. Oftentimes experiences, especially those involving rejection, are difficult to bear. We always try to make the most of them, of course, but often this can lead to us distorting ourselves in ways that are unhealthy. With no love, we decide to focus on work, for example. We lose one “success” for another, but don’t realise that the relative values of each success are vastly different. Ultimately, “Ionych” is above all a warning of the consequences that befall anyone who does not remain watchful of who they are and who they are letting themselves become.

Ionych can be read in English here: http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1292/

Cowboy Time: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Wild West. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series; Butcher’s Crossing is one of my favourite books. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world.

Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. It is the origin story of a real cowboy.

A desert.

The Plot: The Cowboys and their Trip

All the Pretty Horses takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, a time long beyond the end of the Wild West by most reckonings. The story begins with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the last male of the Grady line. Although his last name is Cole, after his father, John Grady’s respect for his grandfather leads him to go by his grandfather’s name instead. It is the first act of controlling one’s own identity featured in the book.

All is not well for the cowboys in the post-war period. The ranch where John Grady grew up is being sold, and both his mother and father are unable to provide parental support. Even his relationship with a local girl doesn’t seem worth bothering over anymore. Meanwhile, the landscape of great open spaces is becoming enclosed and dotted with oil derricks, as America consolidates its post-war economic ascendency. And so, with his friend Lacey Rawlins, and their horses, Redbo and Junior, in tow John Grady decides to head to Mexico in search of a better life.

“If I don’t go will you go anyways?”

John Grady sat up and put his hat on. “I’m already gone,” he said.

McCarthy has such verve for pithy, cinematic one-liners, and indeed his prose style as a whole owes much to cinema, with its emphasis on framing shots of its characters, often from unusual angles. People are often described not as they are, but how they are seen reflected within a window or glass object. In addition to being very cool, this flourish draws our attention to a certain distance between reality and our perception of it. Which is one of the key ideas of the book.

John Grady and Rawlins are always thinking of themselves through the lens of the Wild West and its myths. When they encounter a fellow escapee, a boy called Jimmy Blevins riding on a horse that is almost certainly stolen, they wonder whether they look like desperados to him. When they get new boots they are particularly excited because it appears that now they will really look like cowboys.

John Grady and Rawlins make it to Mexico. They start work on a big hacienda, or large estate. And John Grady falls in love with the owner’s daughter, a beautiful young lady named Alejandra. When she reciprocates his feelings, the scene is set for a passionate and illicit romance, but McCarthy allows us no rest, sending his story into Mexican prisons, through gunfights, and much more besides. Along the way John Grady becomes a real cowboy – scarred, rough, and more than a little heroic.

Truth

Becoming a cowboy is not just a question of going to Mexico, or stealing a horse. It is to engage in the mythmaking process that characterises the Wild West. If Blood Meridian was a shattering of our illusions about the West, All the Pretty Horses shows us how myths can instead be constructed. Thrown in jail because of his association with Blevins, initially John Grady speaks the truth as he understood it, explaining that he has nothing to do with Blevins’ criminal misdeeds to the police captain. It does not work. “You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it”, says the captain. The character of the captain represents authority, embodying the truism that history is written by the victors. John Grady tries to protect his personal truth at first, but it is impossible to maintain that against the strong powers of the world.

When revenge comes, John Grady no longer describes the truth. He says what needs to be said to create a legend – he makes a legend out of himself, without consideration for whether strictly speaking what he says is true. For after all, who cares about the truth? Certainly not the captain, whose whole life is built upon the shame that came from a single moment of cowardice. The Wild West is a place where survival is difficult for those who are merely themselves. But for those who can stretch themselves into the boots of a myth, so long as they can shoot a rifle too, those people will flourish. Perhaps.

Nature and the World

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

These words come from Alejandra’s grandmother, and they speak the central truth of All the Pretty Horses. Whatever hopes we may have, whatever dreams, they will prove worthless and firewood for an uncaring world. Early in the novel there is a bush into which countless little birds have been blown and impaled by the force of a great storm. It’s nothing special, just another description among many, but it too hints at the nature of the world. If there is a God, and the characters of McCarthy’s novel aren’t entirely sure on that front, then He doesn’t seem to care very much for his creation.

If anything, McCarthy sees the world as shaped by Man, and Man’s violence. I use the old-fashioned Man in part because McCarthy’s world is a Man’s world, and men are to blame for it. All the Pretty Horses is full of the traces of destruction men have wrought. From the oil derricks to the breaking of the horses, there seems no place where we have not brought pain and destroyed sacredness. The wild horses are deprived of their “communion” once they have been captured and broken. I know McCarthy is guilty of using biblical language liberally, but here it is entirely valid – we have broken the natural, spiritual bond of the animals, all that we might make use of them.

At another point McCarthy describes a storm thus: “as if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Our world is made unnatural, industrial, by the simile. Yet who can say that the world we live in now is natural anymore? So much of it is covered by the traces of Man and his violence. The deepest desert has scraps of blue and black from discarded plastic. It is hard to be proud of ourselves, knowing both what we are capable of, and what we as a people have already managed.

The Values in the World

All the Pretty Horses does not suggest things will get better, either – it is no narrative of progress: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold”, and our hearts are not build for peace. We may transition from horses to pickups, from carriages to airplanes, but in the end one thing remains – we are a violent species, and we like war.

Yet unlike, I think, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses is a relatively positive book, finding in the amoral world values worth holding on to. First of all, and unmistakable, is beauty. It is somewhat silly to mention it, but even the novel’s title suggests this. And McCarthy’s style is awesome. It takes some getting used to, especially because it is so brazen in its approach – deliberately biblical, experimental, raw. But once we start running along McCarthy’s tracks, so to speak, we notice moments and phrases of such beauty that they make one want to cry:

“She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.”

That last clause is so unbelievable. I mean, it doesn’t even have to mean anything – it just sounds so good that I cannot get it out of my head.

And besides beauty, there are virtues too. Even old-world Wild West virtues. John Grady sticks up for the little guy; he tolerates no abuses of unearned authority; he is heroic and fearless. He falls in love and doesn’t let society get in the way, and he is a good friend to Rawlins. Even if his world is dying, John Grady is still a good guy by its own value system.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting…

Conclusion

I write this review in the desert sands of Jordan, the place of my own little Wild West adventure. All the Pretty Horses is one of those books I know I will read again. It contains that richness that always disheartens me when I try to write about books for this blog – there is simply too much to say, and what I write can do justice to almost nothing of the book’s power.

I love the easy themes, of loyalty and friendship and love, just as much as I love the darker, or more complex ones, hidden beneath the surface of the work, such as the ambiguous position of American power, or the bleak and empty moral content of the world. Most of all, perhaps, I love the language. Whether it is the pithiness of John Grady’s one-liners or the epic sweep of McCarthy’s landscapes and storms, All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful book.

Two Postmodern novellas – A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

A friend of mine is named Antonia, after A.S. Byatt, which was reason enough for me to want to read the author. If any writer can inspire someone so much that they are willing to name their child after them, then that author must be doing something right. I asked my Antonia where to begin with Byatt (thankfully, Antonia is a fan of her namesake) and she suggested I try this collection of two novellas, Angels and Insects. The two stories here, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel” are both set in the Victorian period and engage with anxieties relating to the advance of science and its relation to the spirit.

“Morpho Eugenia” tells the story of how a young explorer’s experience of the Amazon and study of Darwin draw him into conflict with the patriarch of an English country home who does not want to see science undermine his religious beliefs. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is the story of a group of spiritualists at a séance and the relationship between Emily Jesse, née Tennyson, and her dead fiancé, Arthur Hallam, who was immortalised through her brother Alfred’s poem “In Memoriam”.

Byatt is often named as a postmodernist English writer, and Angels and Insects provides ample evidence for that claim. These novellas are formally inventive, with scientific quotations, real characters, stories-within-stories, and plenty of poetry. At the same time, their settings and topics make them cousins to the German novellas of the nineteenth century, which like Angels and Insects were highly symbolic works, densely packed and interpretatively complex. Byatt’s intelligence is unmissable – she clearly did her reading, whether it be on mediums or on entomology. But is there a heart here, too? I propose to focus on the first story, “Morpho Eugenia”, to answer.

Morpho Eugenia

Morpho Eugenia is a clever and decidedly strange novella. It begins with William Adamson having returned to his benefactor’s home from an expedition to the Amazon, penniless after a shipwreck. Lord and Lady Alabaster have a great many children, and William finds himself falling in love with the eldest daughter, Eugenia. A marriage would be inappropriate, because of the differences in their stations, but William so impresses Lord Alabaster that eventually he grants him his daughter’s hand, and the two end up wedded together. At the house and surrounding estate, William works to sort through Lord Alabaster’s collection of scientific specimens – though the old man does not leave the house himself, still he has his passions and interests.

In addition, William helps Lord Alabaster with a book the latter is working on. Lord Alabaster is determined to prove the “argument by design” – that nature’s complexity proves God’s existence. William, a Darwinist, is to help Alabaster by challenging his ideas. William’s final role is to provide some education for the younger Alabaster children, and to this end he builds various exhibits in the house – anthills to be monitored, and the like. In this he is helped by the servants and by a young woman attached to the household, Matty Crompton.

Insects and People

At first “Morpho Eugenia” appears to set itself up to be a standard tragic love story, as so many novellas are – I thought of Storm’s “Aquis Submersus” and Hofmann’s “Sandman” when William wrote in his diary that fatal phrase “I shall die if I cannot have her”, referring to Eugenia. Instead, William marries Eugenia quite successfully, and they produce many children of their own over the course of the story. But at this point the story seems to take on another classic novella idea – that of madness. William has returned from a world untouched by civilization, as his fellow Englishmen might understand it, to a luxurious country estate. Yet from the first moments, when William takes part in a ball, he finds himself noting many similarities between the two worlds- from the elaborate dresses of Amazon women and young British ladies, to the dances themselves.

As time goes on, these comparisons become more and more forceful. Eugenia, whose name connects her to the butterfly, morpho eugenia (of the novella’s title) is described like an insect in her pregnancy: “his wife slept alone in her white nest, and swelled slowly, developing large breasts and a creamy second chin.” When Eugenia keeps producing twins, the comparison gets even stronger – she seems less and less human to him. Meanwhile, the aristocratic house and the anthills are also a site of obvious comparison. For the powerful figures of both places are served by countless servants, darting through dark corridors. William’s sanity seems constantly under threat of splitting in this world, and he longs for the Amazon he left behind. 

But with that said, I think Byatt’s story hints at a madness that never truly arrives. William does not do anything in the novella, and his thoughts ultimately remain more or less under control. Perhaps the place where the insect-human comparison is most forceful is in the story’s treatment of the aristocracy, who are depicted as either indolent, or selfish, or outright cruel. Edgar Alabaster, who despises his new brother-in-law, is once found by William as he forces himself upon one of the servant girls. When William tries to stop him, Edgar declares that she – still a child – is “a nice little packet of flesh”. What appears to be William’s unstable psyche is used more effectively for social critique, suggesting that human beings may not be nearly so respectable as our insectoid brethren.

Religion and Science

William’s father, a butcher, believed in a God of hellfire and brimstone. William himself has little sympathy for religion as a result. Both stories in Angels and Insects are set after Charles Darwin’s work had revolutionised our understanding of the development of life on earth, and many of the key characters feel the impact of Darwin’s views upon the validity of their faith in God. Lord Alabaster has collected crate upon crate of animal and insectoid specimens from around the world, and he asks William to “make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other” during his stay. His decision reflects a feeling that religion can no longer order the world, and that it must surrender that right to science. At the same time, Alabaster – who trained as a priest – is unable to relinquish his faith. Over the course of the novella, he makes spirited – but unbelievable – defences of God’s creation. At one point he suggests that love provides evidence of God’s existence. But William is ultimately only annoyed by these suggestions, based as they are not on reason at all.

There are many who refuse to believe in a world without God. When William raises the possibility to Alabaster the latter is aghast: “I cannot believe that, Mr Adamson. I cannot. It opens the path to a dark pit of horrors.” And “Morpho Eugenia”, with the constant presence of insects, reducing human beings into creepy-crawlies, certainly hints at what a horrific world such a godless world would be for some of its inhabitants. And yet at the same time, it falls into the clear anti-aristocratic undertone of the work. If there is no God, then why do the idle rich inhabit great country houses, while servants toil and suffer rape and abuse without a word of complaint. The Alabaster house becomes a microcosm of the world, and it shows how fragile that world is.

Formal Ingenuity

“Analogy is a slippery tool” says William at one point. “Men are not ants”. This is perhaps one of the key phrases of the novella. Another is “things are not what they seem”, which Matty Crompton offers. Byatt is great at confusing us by the sheer density of her reference and allusion. She quotes from the scientific treatises of the day freely alongside poetry, so that we feel she is hinting at much more than what she spells out. Men may not be ants, but “Morpho Eugenia” asks us to what extent a comparison is valid, and what kind of a comparison. Each metaphor is developed constantly, and always taken in new directions. My only complaint is that Byatt’s descriptions are far too rich, too colourful, so that she can belabour her ideas too heavily at times. The story would have been better, shorter, in other words.

To be told that things are not what they seem is to encourage us always to be on the lookout for new interpretations. Byatt includes a story, written by Matty Crompton, alongside scientific descriptions written by William himself. Each of these appears only tangentially related to the story, at least at first. But we know that something is there, and if we have the energy for it, certainly the story has a wondrous richness to it that will reward further thought and analysis.

The Heart of the Story

Yet I cannot say it came together perfectly. Leaving aside the overly flowery descriptions, and the occasionally clunky dialogue – characters often speak as though they are scientific treatises themselves – another problem in “Morpho Eugenia” is a certain absence of heart. William’s love for Eugenia turns out to be false, and this is understandable. There’s an easy moral in that about the fallibility of the heart and whirlwind romances. But the actual meat of the story has very little to get us emotionally invested. William’s madness never goes anywhere, meaning that we just have to read repeated unpleasant descriptions of women as egg-laying ants and vice versa without there being anything at stake. In the final ten pages of the story there is a turnaround, suddenly there is a character worth caring about and some action we might call heroic, but it is rather too late. There’s too much mush beforehand.

The Conjugial Angel

The second novella of Angels and Insects, “The Conjugial Angel”, is focused on a group performing seances to communicate with the world beyond. This kind of thing was popular in the latter part of the 19th century – there’s a bit of it in Anna Karenina, for example – and was inspired by the works of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had apparently visited Heaven and had a guided tour. There are several characters at the séance, but the focus is on Emily Jesse, who was once Emily Tennyson, sister of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Emily was once engaged to Arthur Hallam, about whom Tennyson wrote his great long poem “In Memoriam”. That poem is quoted liberally throughout the text, which is nice because it’s a lovely piece of work.

During the séance Emily hopes to hear from Arthur. Though she has now married – and been married for decades – still she treasures the memory of her first love.

Representing the dead

I do not want to go into the details of “The Conjugial Angel” – it has an even weaker plot than “Morpho Eugenia”, and the themes do not come together quite so well. However, what it does do of interest is depict the dead. Authors regularly use real figures in their stories – after all, it is part of the appeal of historical fiction. But using dead people is another matter. Even today, in our comparatively godless world, there is something of a taboo on the dead – we try not to speak ill of them. Byatt brings Arthur Hallam back as a spirit to guide the automatic writing at the séance, and I felt more than a little uncomfortable by the whole idea. I began writing in my margins that this was hugely inappropriate and morally absurd.

But then Byatt gives our medium, alone at home, another vision of him. I shall not spoil the details but it is one of the most extraordinary sequences I have yet read in a work of fiction. There was a gruesome, terrifying intensity to it. I felt as though Byatt truly had brought the dead man, maggot-stained, back to life, and I was so impressed. For that reason alone this novella is worth reading.

Conclusion

German novellas, which I know well, are focused on individual characters much more than on the plot or society which form the centres of novels. The force of a strong character can sustain a novella-length work, but rarely manages to sustain something longer. The plot of a novella cannot be a situation, because these are better suited for short stories; while a drawn-out plot often needs the development of a novella to truly draw us in. For that reason, though novellas are jewel-encrusted – densely symbolic and full of things to think about – they work best when driven by a character. The character of William Adamson does not provide sufficient backbone in “Morpho Eugenia” to make us want to keep reading, however clever the work is. The really interesting character is hidden from view until near the end, at which point we’ve already decided whether we’ll read the story or not.

I anticipate criticism from those who’ve read the story that even this is part of Byatt’s argumentation, such as: the character cannot be more prominent, because the story is drawing our attention to certain oppressive structures, class and gender among others. Even so, a story must make us want to read it. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is burdened by the focus Byatt places on the different characters. Emily Tennyson’s story is the most interesting, and with less of the trimmings and lengthy descriptions, it could have been even more effective.

Byatt is extremely intelligent, and I like her formal ingenuity. But my criticism actually has nothing to do with her postmodernism, and everything to do with the foundations of stories, such as they have existed for thousands of years. Her descriptions are too long, too florid; her characters don’t always speak like human beings; and the stories would be more effective, thematically and from a storytelling perspective, if they were a bit shorter and more focused.

Yet all the Angels and Insects collects two provocative and interesting examples of the novella genre, and it is a book well worth trying.