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Guy Patrick Cunningham is a writer and critic living in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Angelica by Arthur Phillips
Reviewed by Guy Patrick Cunningham
Posted: May 30, 2007

With his first two novels, Prague and The Egyptologist, Arthur Phillips managed to achieve a low-key type of success, finding an audience and earning praise from critics, while never attaining the cultural profile of his generation’s brightest lit stars like Jonathan Safran Foer or Dave Eggers. People read Phillips, but his work never dominates the public conversation about contemporary fiction the way others do. That’s too bad, because Phillips is the rare author who manages to integrate experimental technique into his work without ever compromising readability and story.

Just as Prague brings to mind the work of Milan Kundera, Phillips’s latest work recalls that of a past master—in this case Henry James, whose Turn of the Screw is an obvious precursor. In both stories, we encounter a young woman convinced that spirits are plaguing a child under her care. Here it is Constance Barton who is convinced her four-year-old daughter Angelica is the target of malevolent apparitions. And as in James’s famed novella, we know to distrust the existence of these “ghosts” almost from the beginning.

Phillips doesn’t hew to James too closely, though. In a unique twist, we have an unreliable narrator who is certain of her own unreliability. The reader gets a hint of this right up front, as the narrator, as yet unidentified, begins her tale by saying, “I suppose my prescribed busywork should begin as a ghost story, since that was surely Constance’s experience of these events. I fear, however, that the term arouses unreasonable expectations in you.” This ambivalence is the heart of the novel. Later we see the same events through the eyes of a spiritualist who consults on the “haunting,” and through Constance’s husband Joseph. Revelations, including some that are truly horrifying, are constantly undercut, as each fresh look ends up obscuring more than it reveals.

The interlocking and contradicting fragments of the story itself are a joy to pick through and puzzle over, and if Phillips were only interested in playing narrative games, he’d still have written an enjoyable and intriguing novel. But unlike many postmodernists who let themselves get lost in technique, Phillips uses the fractured telling of his tale to explore the psychological implications of each “telling.” So when Constance sees Joseph’s face on the spirit “haunting” Angelica, we know that we’re leaving ghosts behind us for a bit and entering Freudian territory.

Of course, we’ve seen this before—and not only in James. But Phillips transcends earlier stories by introducing us to a truly innovative title character. Though she may be an innocent, Angelica does not see the world in the clear-eyed sagacity of so many other literary children. In fact, it’s the four-year-old Angelica’s lack of insight that gives the novel its uncertainties. As we eventually learn, the adult Angelica is herself the one reconstructing these events. In so doing, she is adamant that her own childhood self had no insight into what was going on, declaring, “Faith in the pure heart and innocent eye of the child is a worrying symptom of something quite awry in our world, a sheepy loss of confidence of ourselves as adults.” 

We never see a clear, closed version of the “haunting” precisely because the then-four-year-old Angelica could not understand just what it was that her parents were experiencing. The novel’s unsentimental view of childhood so sets it apart from what we’ve come to expect in fiction, that it’s hard not to see the adult Angelica’s dismissal of “sheepy” adults as commentary on our own times, rather than on Angelica’s Victorian London. Taking matters even further, the young Angelica herself appears to “haunt” the Barton family, as the psychological strain of parenting drives a wedge between Constance and Joseph that results in chaos and (perhaps) tragedy. Both see the girl as a rival for the other’s affections. Constance sees Joseph’s decision to give Angelica her own room (for the first time in the little girl’s life) as an effort to break the ties between mother and daughter. Joseph despairs that Constance has “replaced” him with their daughter. Thus, we are given a portrait of a Victorian marriage in collapse.

But even this is subject to revision, as Angelica calls into question even her own version of events. In a passage that exemplifies the novel’s serial undercutting of itself, Angelica describes her mother’s jealous laughter when Angelica declares that she and her father will “marry some day,” only to reverse herself:

Yet no sooner do I write this than I am certain the memory is impossible, for that is a comparison I could not have made at the time. I was but four years old, so what could I have known of rivals and scorn? I think it far more likely that her laughter in my memory has been tailored to dress a role she was not playing then, but which I grew to understand only later, in other contexts. Memories are injected after the fact with subsequent wisdom.

Again, it is Angelica’s ambivalence that gives the story its power. Since no one particular version of events dominates, the reader encounters both Joseph and Constance (along with the proto-feminist Anne Montague, who serves as Constance’s sole confidant) on their own terms. Though we learn not to trust any of the book’s revelations, we still feel them. Here narrative reliability illustrates the weakness of human memory, the way past experience taints the way one sees current events. It gives the novel a depth that most “ghost stories” don’t have, and proves again that Phillips is a voice worth listening to.

Copyright © 2007 Guy Patrick Cunningham