The Escape

ANGEL (252 pp.)--Elizabeth Taylor --Viking ($3.50).

"Angel" is a monster. Her real name is Angelica Deverell, and as the reader first meets her in a grubby, turn-of-the-century English small town, it is possible to mistake her for just another awkward young girl idly dreaming of escape. But quickly and chillingly it becomes clear that Angel is one of those rare and frightening people who take their dreams literally, cling to them even in the high noon of growing up, and are ready to lie, cheat or step over corpses to make their fancies come true. Angel dreams of being beautiful, clever, successful, beloved, and of owning Paradise House, the stately manor where her aunt is a lady's maid. While the Walter Mittys of this world use such dreams only as cushions, Angel uses hers as deadly weapons. With demoniac energy she pours her imaginings into a series of extremely bad, extremely popular novels.

Angel really knows nothing of the high life she preposterously describes (in her books, champagne bottles are opened with corkscrews). Indeed, she knows nothing of life at all, and refuses to learn. She does not copy from other books: it all comes out of the recesses of her appalling imagination. She is arrogant, vain and unfeeling--a child in a permanent lifelong tantrum. When her huge, ferocious dog kills a small terrier, she insists it was the terrier that attacked; when the critics accurately describe her work as ludicrous, she insists (and firmly believes) that they are spiteful, jealous fools. In short, as one character says, she is in the grip of a force that is either "genius or lunacy."

Her novels bring her fame, riches, even Paradise House. Money enables Angel to capture a husband, and bore him to death. She turns his spinster sister into her slavish admirer. Her gentle publisher views her with pity and terror. Nearly everyone else is appalled by her selfishness, her indifference to the pain of others. But people cannot touch her, for Angel is totally without humor and icily armored against embarrassment, against all reality.

With a heroine as unlikely and unlovely as Medusa, Novelist Taylor (A Wreath of Roses--TIME, March 21, 1949) has magically managed to write a brilliant and extremely funny book. At the end of a long life, the pride and pretense that made Angel unbearable in success make her magnificent in failure. Her outrageous behavior is somehow transmuted into tenderness. Ill and dying, she has a moment of believing that she is a child again, back in her mother's tiny grocery shop near the brewery, with factory sirens about to shred the morning air, and all of life lying before her. But then "the panic lifted. Angel was overwhelmed with relief. She realized that it was not to be gone through again; after all, she was at home, in her own bed, with her own life behind her."

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