This is the strangest start to a novel I have ever read. Not in the sense of plot or concept (though those go feral quickly too) but in the way it refuses to breathe. Page after page passes without a full stop. Clause stacks upon clause. Image piles onto image. The reader is trapped in a syntax as endless and unbearable as the war it describes. It doesn’t read like a sentence so much as a haemorrhage. A formal decision, yes, but also a commitment. This is a book determined to wound the reader, not in passing, but structurally.
In Angel Down, Daniel Kraus renders the First World War not as history or tragedy or myth, but as literary migraine. The experience of reading it is almost physical: grinding, claustrophobic, grotesque. This book tires the reader. If you want a tidy arc of trauma and redemption, go back to Birdsong. If you want trench horror spun through the loam of Strange Meeting and then dumped in a charnel house, keep going. There’s no catharsis here. Just the slow composting of men and animals.
Cyril Bagger: Coward, Conman, Crucible
The soldier at the heart of the novel is Private First Class Cyril Bagger. He’s no hero. Not even a particularly good antihero. He’s a burial detail hustler who rigs poker games, dodges duty, drinks whatever’s flammable, and hallucinates a fly named Uncle Sam in his chest. This buzzing insect. Part shame, part nationalism, part dead father, is one of the more restrained elements in a novel full of fever. Kraus isn’t interested in dignity. He’s interested in what dignity looks like after it’s been buried under a week of mud and excrement, then pissed on by an officer who still believes in the word “élan.”
Bagger survives not because he’s brave, but because he’s cunning. He knows which orders to fake, which fights to avoid, which superiors to flatter or provoke. He is, in his own way, a perfect soldier for a war built on empire, incompetence and myth. Yet, despite the con, something flickers. In the boy-soldier Lewis Arno, Bagger sees a version of himself not yet ruined. There are moments of care here. It may be botched, selfish, drunken, but it’s real. Like Owen’s speaker in Strange Meeting, Bagger confronts his double, though not in hell but in the shallow pit between No Man’s Land and the corpse trench.
Grotesque as Truth, Syntax as Collapse
The book’s style is closer to Céline than Hemingway. There are echoes of Journey to the End of the Night, but drenched in bile and trench foot. Kraus writes in a mode that feels like a fever dream with teeth. Descriptions snap: “a doughboy nearly beheaded by a pelvic bone,” “a tongue in the trench like an asp viper,” “brains mistaken for yellow clay.” It’s comic, vile, unbearable. And oddly lyrical. Sentences loop and double back like a man who’s forgotten which direction the front is. Language breaks down just as bodies do. What’s left is pure affect.
The Shriek and the Angel
Threaded through the novel is an unceasing scream “a glissading lament,” “an organ’s voice,” echoing across No Man’s Land. No one knows what it is. The wounded? A weapon? The war itself vocalised? It doesn’t matter. The point is that it doesn’t end. The shriek becomes the novel’s keynote, its monophonic scream against meaning. It is the sound of a wound that will not clot. A howl against civilisation. And when Major General Lyon Reis sends a group of misfits to investigate. Ostensibly to rescue, in practice to silence, the novel shifts into something stranger.
What they find is not a man, but a figure: the “angel,” shrouded, ambiguous, possibly divine. She is carried, passed between men, desired, feared. Each sees what he needs: Reis sees a weapon, Arno sees a saviour, Bagger sees something like redemption, though it comes too late. Even Veck, the Black soldier with a flamethrower and nothing left to believe in, wears a horse’s severed head like a mask when it’s his turn to carry her. Ritual becomes parody. The angel does not speak. She might grant wishes. She might just be a woman, or maybe the devil. Either way, no one comes back the same.
The Impossible Art of WWI Fiction
I’m not convinced Angel Down is better than Kraus’s Whalefall. In fact, I’m not sure fiction can ever really contend with the First World War in the way fact, or poetry, can. What novel can compete with Owen’s “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”? What sentence can puncture as deeply as Sassoon’s clean fury? Angel Down knows this. That’s why it doesn’t try to match them. Instead, it detonates its own form. It makes the literary act itself obscene. If Birdsong is memory as sepia, Angel Down is memory as infection.
Conclusion: No Exit, No Full Stop
When the first full stop arrives — some forty pages in — it feels like a mercy. The book has already bled you. But even then, the war doesn’t end. The shriek doesn’t stop. The men keep dying. Or returning changed. Or not returning at all. There’s a fantasy at the heart of the novel. The fantasy of escape, of healing, of one man carrying another out of hell. It doesn’t last. But it’s there. And that’s enough.
Kraus has not written the great novel of the First World War. But he has written something stranger: a novel that admits it can’t make sense of the war, so instead turns itself inside out and bleeds and pukes on the page.
