Angel
by Elizabeth Taylor
Virago, HK$128
Before you ask, Angel isn't written by Elizabeth Taylor the actress, wife of Richard Burton and friend of Michael Jackson, but by another Elizabeth Taylor. This Taylor was born in 1912 and worked as a governess and librarian before publishing the first of 11 novels in 1945. Despite being championed by literary lions such as Ivy Compton-Burnett, Taylor fell out of fashion only to be championed by modern writers including Anne Tyler, Antonia Fraser and Philip Hensher, who has compared her to Chekov and Charlotte Bronte. Another fervent admirer is film director Francois Ozon (see story Page 12), who has adapted Angel for the silver screen in a movie starring Charlotte Rampling. Reading the novel now, it is not hard to see what all the fuss is about. Taylor writes beautifully constructed stories about ordinary people that balance tragedy and wit, pathos and vulgarity and high manners with low comedy. In Angel, she tells the story of Angelica Deverell, who rises from a lowly birth thanks to a series of successful works of slushy romantic fiction. Part of the joke, of course, is the difference between Angel the novel and Angelica the novelist. Indeed, Taylor's finely judged sentences and sensibility leave you wondering whether she is being cruel or kind to her heroine - or both at once.
