Scan barcode
A review by charlottesometimes
A Quiet Belief in Angels by R.J. Ellory
1.0
The protagonist, Joseph Vaughan, appears to be suffering from some type of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Or at least that's the only explanation I can come up with for his turgid prose, literary pretensions and ability to focus the story resolutely on himself for a full 400 pages. The reader is told of roughly 30 murders (it's hard to be precise, as the uniformity of victim and circumstance leaves little material with which to differentiate them), a series of tragic deaths, a false imprisonment, the destruction of at least two families and the tale of Joseph's mother's descent into madness. All of this is related exclusively and entirely as it directly personally affects Joseph. All the most memorable facts from a child's history of Early-Mid 20th Century USA are trotted out as a backdrop to the fascinating life and terrible suffering of our hero. Civil Rights protests and a Holocaust of which the characters are oddly well-informed at a very early stage serve as stage-dressing to Joseph's single-minded obsession with catching the man apparently responsible for the death of every female he has ever met. A constant stream of girls and women enter his life as combination muse/breeding instrument, and are summarily dispatched for increasingly spurious reasons. At no time do we get any inkling of what any of these characters think or feel. They are essentially just extra building-blocks in the ever-growing and incredibly boring wall of pain and suffering that makes up Joseph's life.
To compound the all-round awfulness Joseph is that most horrifying of creatures, the protagonist-author. We are forced at regular intervals to read extracts of his turgid prose, as well as to hear the encouragements of all his friends, family and acquaintances as they eagerly await his production of the next Great American Novel. This confluence of the author’s and his protagonist’s narcissism results in several instances of such epic self-regard that I began to feel quite embarrassed to be privy to Ellory’s private ego-stroking.
Meanwhile the story drags on, its twee faux-American language and bloated self-love dragging it down at every turn. Finally the author, having obviously decided that the length and pomposity of his work has now reached a sufficient level for it to be declared classic, hurriedly bashes out a nonsensical dénouement, before concluding with a pathetically self-regarding ending in which Joseph is lauded as a Great American writer, presumably meaning that all those women and girls didn’t suffer in vain, as they are immortalised as weeping ciphers whose cries of pain provided the chorus in the operatic melodrama that was the life of Joseph Vaughan. The end.