Blue Angel (review)

multifactioned civil war is raging, and in the midst of it, AnU discovers a skeleton that might be the key to exposing the government's compUcity in the killings. Her efforts to prove the identity of the corpse provide the impetus for the action of the novel. AnU's story is in part the tale of the prodigal, a common theme in postcolonial Uterature and a role Ondaatje has played himseU. During the late '70s, the author, best known for his 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient, left his home in Canada to revisit Sri Lanka, recording his experiences in Running in the Family. In that book Ondaatje paints a vastly different picture of the land once known as Ceylon. Writing about his parents' heyday in the '20s and '30s, Ondaatje describes a countrywracked by social excess, not violence, a place where upper-class sociaUtes traipse drunkenly, if elegantly—and ultimately tragically—across a lush, vibrantly exotic landscape. In his new book Ondaatje stares at his country's current problems with an unblinking eye, and he has clearly been stricken by what he sees. But although he writes about his country's social unrest, he remains essentiaUy above the fray. One side in the present civU war happens to be responsible for the death of "SaUor" (AnU's name for her pet skeleton); however, in Ondaatje's novel, the government, the separatists in the north and the insurgents in the south are aU lumped together into a single malevolent force. We see the random terror more than the intense ethnic, reUgious, poUtical and class conflicts that spawned it. As he did in The English Patient, Ondaatje powerfuUy condemns the tendency of human beings to draw lines that separate them from one another. On the basis of the nuts-andbolts of good storytelling, Anil's Ghost is a less engaging tale than the one that earned the author international acclaim. In The English Patient, Ondaatje makes skillful use of the tension between the two main plot lines, past and present, to create a story that is both dreamy and suspenseful . The identity ofAnU's skeleton is even murkier than that of the English patient, but the mystery is not developed enough to make it seem all that important, and the casual way that Ondaatje eventuaUy reveals the name of the dead person reinforces this feeling. There are detours into the pasts of the characters , but these passages are mainly expository; the fact that they rarely congeal into scenes creates an odd sense of authorial distance—aU windup and no pitch. And despite the author's attention to character development , there is something a Uttle unsatisfying about AnU especiaUy. Anil's Ghost is a fine novel, a powerfuUy sad study of a once-beautiful land in chaos, and perhaps it's unfair to compare it with The English Patient. With that book, Ondaatje created a series of indeUble images—the plane crashing into the desert, the crumbling ItaUan vüla, the burned man upstairs—that any author would be hard-pressed to match. (RB) Blue Angel by Francine Prose HarperCollins, 2000, 314 pp., $25 In her latest novel, Blue Angel, Francine Prose incisively dissects the 200 · The Missouri Review world of the academy as it appears in microcosm at Eustace College, deep in the woods of Vermont. The book details the faU of Ted Swenson , a tenured professor of creative writing whose second novel—published over ten years earUer—was famous enough that he's stiU occasionally asked to give readings. Swenson himseU, in his late forties, happUy married (or at least happüy married enough), is struggling with the writing of his third novel. He and his wife, Sherrie, have a bitterly disenchanted daughter who's away at the state university. Swenson is conscious of the disappointments that permeate his Ufe: his own faUures of goodwiU, Eustace CoUege's position as "no one's first choice," the hüariously mundane conversations that constitute his fiction workshops. Yet he's not overtly in the grip of a midlife crisis. His Ufe seems to him good enough. Then everything falls apart when Swenson becomes obsessed with a student in his creative...