week after reading Caleb Carr's first successful novel, The Alienist, I delved into its sequel, the unimaginatively titled The Angel of Darkness. Being a sequel, Angel takes place in the same area with the same characters, a few years after Alienist. Unfortunately, this means that most of the freshness and magic that helped to make Alienist such a good book is gone in Angel. Angel's other problems are that the characters aren't new either, and that it's told from a different character's POV, who is a much less colorful story teller.

I wrote this review before I had introduced my numerical categorized review system, so the following figures are recreated from memory, 1.5 years later. Compare these scores to my review of The Alienist. I strongly recommend that one. This one... not so much. 

Angel isn't a bad story, and if I'd read it before The Alienist, I would have given it much higher scores. It suffers in comparison since it's much the same; just not as good at much of anything. The biggest drop in score is in the humor category, and it's odd. There aren't any jokes in Angel, so it's not even making any effort to be funny. Alienist wasn't full of jokes either; but it was very funny in the descriptions of how chaotic and insane the daily life in turn of the century NYC was.  There's none of that in Angel, and it could have used some to spice things up and give a change of pace.

The Angel of Darkness is the name of the novel that is the sequel to The Alienist. Both (naturally) books are by Caleb Carr.  I read The Alienist last week and blogged about it two days in a row, and now I've read Angel, so might as well have a brief say about that.  I'll combine this blog with the other two and make a review out of it, when I eventually get around to doing some article'ing again.  New Years resolution... not forgotten.

Anyway, Angel takes place about a year after Alienist, with all the same characters. It's much less interesting initally, and really doesn't get going to any extent until about 150 pages in.

Critics say that often about books, when there is a lot of background info to impart, and that's basically why I'm saying it about this book.  I often don't agree with that criticism, since you need to know the background info or build up for the action or conflict to make any sense or have any importance.  But in Angel, it's still way too long before things get going.

The Alienist starts off with a hell of a bang; a very lurid and gory description of a murder scene, and goes from there at high speed.  Even the long sections of exposition and scientific theory are pretty interesting, since they are all from the perspective of 100 years ago, back when, many things we know of as valuable tools in criminal investigations today, were just being invented and first utilized.  Those sorts of sections are interesting in Angel as well, but they are often familiar after similar things were discussed in Alienist.  And there are fewer of them.

One thing I did notice being much trimmed in Alienist were the "history of famous buildings" lectures.  In Alienist it's almost like a tour guide narrating at times, since every time some new hotel, office building, government building, ship yard, bridge, water tower, etc, is first seen, there is a paragraph or so about when it was constructed, why, and some other interesting tidbit about it.  Generally these things are under construction when seen in the book, and I have no idea if they were all really going up just when the book is set, or (more likely) if they were all built in that general era, and Caleb has just combined the time frame a bit to spice up the narrative. At any rate, there is zero of that sort of thing in Angel, at least not that I noticed.  There is a little bit of discussion of the settling of upstate NY, which is still quite the wild wilderness at the time of this novel, and a courthouse in Saratoga, NY, but I assumed that was entirely fictional, or else a composite of how things were built at the time, since it's not given any special name or reason to be described, other than that they have a trial in it.

My suspicion is that he (the author) got some criticism of too much history of buildings in the first novel, and therefore eliminated that from the second one.  Less of it would have been fine, but I don't think he needed to eliminate it entirely.

To compare Alienist to Angel, I think Alienist is definitely a better book.  Certainly more entertaining to read, and a more compelling plot, with a lot more action and a feeling of racing against the clock.  The ending in Alienist was way over the top and didn't feel tense to me, since everything was in flashback so I knew the principles survived, and suddenly come the very ending, the evil killing madman was no longer the real bad guy/adversary.  The ending felt cheated.

Angel is almost the opposite. It's very slow in the beginning, and most of the middle drags as well, with lots and lots of investigation into the bad guy's recent past and then ancient past.  There is a relatively boring court room section near the end that I didn't hate, but that didn't really do much for me, and then an action finale that was sort of gratifying, but felt tacked on.  Like the logical conclusion of the novel would have been with courts and laws and legal technicalities, but Caleb figured that wouldn't do for dramatics (he's clearly not any sort of turn of the century John Grisham, since the courtroom stuff is flabby) so he had to figure a way to have a huge fight scene and a shoot out.  I was also disappointed that, like Alienist, there is a absurdly-happy ending.  Not that the ending is absurdly happy, but the fact that it's at all happy is absurd.  Very Hollywood, like in every action movie when the good guy gets his ass kicked the whole time, but somehow is able to win against all the superior bad guys when it really counts. (I'm obviously making this somewhat vague to avoid being a spoiler about it all, though a detailed discussion would be more enlightening.)

Perhaps the biggest difference between Alienist and Angel is in the tone it's told in.  Alienist is narrated by an adult reporter, telling the story years later, while Angel is told by Stevie, who was a major character in the events of both books, but was just 13 years old during them.  Very mature for his age, having been living on the streets and stealing for a living and running with kid gangs since he was 8, but still a kid.

However, he's narrating the book as if he's writing it 25 years later just as Alienist was written by the reporter 25 years later.  Obviously both were written in the 1990's by Caleb Carr, but both books start off with the narrator thinking about the old events, and then explaining why they are now writing them down, and what their circumstances and situation are at the time.  A clever bit is that in the opening of Angel, Stevie talks to the reporter and talks about his book, which is The Alienist, sort of. If it had been a book actually written in about 1920, that is.  The reporter is having no luck getting it published, due to the shockingly graphic and horrible events it details.

Anyway, Caleb Carr does an interesting job putting the narration of this one from Stevie's PoV, and he is consistent with it.  It's from the adult, literate, well-read Stevie, but it is definitely in a different voice than Alienist was.  The problem with this is that Alienist was a much better-written book, in terms of how entertaining and cool the descriptions of things were.  I quoted several funny ones in the two Alienist blogs last week, and I'd like to produce some Angel quote to join them, but there weren't any sections of the book that were funny, and none that caught my eye as being especially well-written.  Nothing crappy, but nothing that stood out as higher quality.  Which was a disappointment, after the stuff in the Alienist.

The thing I found most interesting about both books, and what I unfortunately don't know the historically veracity of, was how the 1896 version of NYC was presented. It's a filthy, corrupt, crime-choked, debauchery, basically.  The kid gangs and bars, very public abuse of every sort of dangerous narcotic, as well as alcohol and cigarettes, gambling, dog fights, crime galore, murder without any punishment, gangs ruling major sections of the city where police fear to tread, and more.

Talking to a friend in Scotland a few days ago, she remarked that while downtown that day, she caught the aftermath of someone being hit and apparently killed by a bus.  No body was sighted, but she came along in time to see a huge blood stain on the street and a street cleaning vehicle out brushing it up.

So just a short time after the accident, there would have been no sign of it at all.  Whoever was hit no doubt had highly-trained emergency medical professionals on the scene in minutes, and they were whisked away to a hospital.  Police would have closed off the scene and kept back onlookers, the evidence of the bus would have been preserved, and once the scene was cleared a street cleaner was summoned promptly to clean up the evidence/mess. Just as things would be done in most every civilized/Western nation on earth, at this time.

I couldn't help but compare that to the descriptions of everyday life in The Alienist and Angel, where there are bodies left to lie where they die, packs of 8 and 10 year olds fighting to the death over a scrap of territory, 13 year old girls and boys working full time as prostitutes, constant deaths and injuries to street cars and horse drawn wagons, and no police to help with anything critical, no ambulances but what you could pay or summon for yourself, hardly any laws against anything, and just a general state of near-anarchy.

And that's how things are in much of the world still, today.  Just that the gangs have Uzis and hand grenades rather than boards with nails through them, and they are smuggling millions of dollars worth of cocaine in their own airplanes, rather than selling rubbing alcohol as beer to people too drunk to know better, and pocketing a few bucks on the difference, and dragging anyone who dies out back and dumping them into the East River.

But again, I don't know how true to life the events in Alienist/Angel, are, but I like to think/pretend that they are entirely truthful, since it makes for a more colorful state of affairs.  Not to mention giving me something to write about.

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