Phillips creates multiple voices in Victorian ghost story
Angelica
By Arthur Phillips
Random House, 331 pp., $25.95
Arthur Phillips is one brainy, clever, talented writer -- but we already knew that from his 2002 debut, "Prague," and his compulsively playful 2004 follow - up, "The Egyptologist." He's also mentally peripatetic, not a bad thing for a novelist. "Prague" focused on a new lost generation of young American expats seeking financial and personal fulfillment in post-Communist Budapest, while "The Egyptologist" channeled Edgar Allan Poe and Vladimir Nabokov in a murder mystery set in the Egyptian desert in 1922.
Who could have predicted that Phillips's new novel would be a study in hysteria set in Victorian London? "Angelica" is a combination ghost story, psychological inquiry, and murder mystery, with strong echoes of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" and Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's 1895 case histories of Anna O. and other hysterics.
"The Egyptologist" features one of the most amusingly unreliable and self-deluding narrators in literature, whose name, Ralph Trilipush , is an anagram of his creator's. The eponymous narrator of "Angelica" is less outlandish -- and far more subtle -- but perhaps no more reliable. "I suppose my prescribed busywork should begin as a ghost story, since that was surely Constance's experience of these events. . . . The scene opens in unthreatening daylight, the morning Joseph cast the child out of their bedroom," she begins reasonably enough.
It's tricky not to give away too much but safe to reveal that the reader gradually realizes the narrator is that 4-year-old, banished from Constance and Joseph's bedroom, now fully grown. In the time-tested tradition of "Portnoy's Complaint" and "Catcher in the Rye," to name just two markedly different 20th-century examples, Angelica's "prescribed busywork" -- the narrative we are reading -- is addressed to her doctor. He believes that by teasing out everything she knows about her early childhood, Angelica will hit on the truth of her past, which will free her from her neuroses. Told in four sections -- Angelica's take on each of the four main participants' point of view -- the Oedipally infused story focuses on the fateful week following Joseph Barton's attempt to reclaim his bedroom and his wife and assert control over his daughter's education.
At 143 pages , Constance's section , a study in hysteria within the overarching study of Angelica's hysteria, dominates. Constance is convinced that Joseph, an English medical researcher of Italian stock who rescued her from an impoverished, orphaned, shopkeeper's existence, has moved Angelica into a room of her own because he wants to resume sexual relations with his "unconjugal wife."
Poor Constance, alas, has developed a crushing fear of sex. She suffered several miscarriages before producing Angelica, and nearly died from complications of childbirth. Her doctors have warned her that another pregnancy will kill her. Because of this -- and a fraught childhood -- she sees Joseph, along with the rest of his gender, as sexual predator and tyrant, a dark force "betraying by his very appetite the absence of all tender love for her. . . . He would risk her life for his desire."
Nights in the Bartons' over-furnished house become a haunted game of cat and mouse, with Constance posting watch in Angelica's room while Joseph tries to command or cajole her upstairs, which only heightens her alarm. Finally, convinced that any form of "conjugal submission" causes referred pain in her daughter, Constance, increasingly desperate and sleep-deprived, calls in an actress turned spiritualist named Anne Montague to roust the evil spirits.
The second part of "Angelica," detailing Anne's point of view as Angelica sees it, presents a darker spin on Joseph's behavior and a more skeptical view of Anne's motives. Sniffing the opportunity for a steady income -- and no lover of men herself -- she uses skills learned onstage to manipulate Constance. Part three features Angelica's take on Joseph's at times surprising perspective , while Angelica herself has the last word .
Phillips masters the alternately delicate and overwrought language and conventions of Victorian ghost stories, in which a "candle unfurled a spiral of smoke, and its wax wept and froze into marble tears," while the common stretch marks of pregnancy are described as "silver lightning bolts scratched by dead children along her hips and belly."
With a writer as talented as Phillips, we are willing to follow him pretty much wherever his interests take him -- at least for a while. But it takes a long time for Phillips to unfurl his sails in "Angelica," and the reader needs to tack constantly to catch the wind. Even when the patterns and complexity of his design emerge, I couldn't help wondering what compelled Phillips to write this book.
Despite considerable polish, "Angelica" lacks the sparkling, infectious wordplay of Phillips's first two novels. Its charms are more subtle, rewarding the patient and pensive reader more than the eager page-turner looking for a spooky, suspenseful ghost story or gripping psychological thriller.
Layering four perspectives on the same few events slows down the narrative, but it also raises far-reaching questions about the elusiveness of cause and effect and, especially, certainty. How much can we really know -- about the past, in particular? How can one tell what actually happened when "truth was thrice filtered -- through wish, memory, and honesty"? How do we effectively patrol what Phillips refers to as the border between memory and dreams?
Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for newspapers. 
