Fallen Angel

1,137 words

Alex Kurtagić
Angel
London: Spradabach Publishing, 2022

Angel is a novel that follows the eponymous characters’ misadventures as he attempts failingly to negotiate life as an impoverished university student in the present-day United Kingdom. Angel is physically unprepossessing to the point of emaciation, a romantic who is out of place on a university campus that is replete with social justice warriors, hideously shrill feminists, activist professors, climate change zealots, loan-sharking foreign students, slovenly roommates, rigidly officious administrators, and very few allies. Angel is met with disaster and mishap at every turn.

The novel is the latest from Alex Kurtagić and published under his new imprint, Spradabach Publishing. It is a doorstopper of a book, weighing in at just under 1,000 pages.

Our protagonist, Angel, is hesitant, weak, diminutive, and weedy. His voice is a high-pitched effete squeak, if he ever gets a word in edgewise. He is often ignored when he is not being bullied or intimidated. He is, however, a romantic devoted to the study of English literature. Coming from an upper-class family, Angel has expensive tastes and dresses accordingly. Unfortunately, because of his near-constant misadventures and the predations of the modern world, he is eventually reduced to wearing rags. He becomes the skeletal embodiment of what was once Western man.

His furtive hesitancy is painful and constant. Unsure of how to interact on a very basic level with anyone he meets is comedic, yet infuriating. His character is allegorical of the depths to which white Western mankind has sunk; although his lineage is potentially aristocratic and his family is wealthy, his manner is weak. His interactions with females are contradictory: He is oblivious, even rude; in one particular case he is cloyingly sycophantic.

Angel is being crushed by the sheer weight of the modern world’s destructive force. When he is not wasting away or being treated with indifference, he is pulverized by the outside world’s malevolence. Whether it is the technological distance imposed by the nihilism of social media, the cause du jour of Leftist student radicals, or his own painful timidity, Angel is being crushed.

This confluence of factors, along with the forlorn hope of wooing a parasitical love interest by spending extravagantly on her, his resultant penury, and his mother’s unwillingness to send him more money drives him to the nadir of depression:

His flesh was rotting. Soon maggots would have their feast. And even if they could uneat his tissues, what purpose would it serve? She had stemmed the flow of money, and thereby humiliated him and prevented his ever seeing Madison again. Nothing left on Earth to live for. It’d all been stolen. He’d been despoiled. Picked clean. Pulverised.^[1]

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There are exceptions, of course. The novel’s feminine nurturer, Amelia, is lovely, caring, pretty, and empathetic. Amelia seems to love Angel almost unconditionally, and there are numerous instances where she takes pity on him no matter his failings. Amelia is intelligent and has not succumbed to the gravitational pull of feminist radicalism. The author describes her social media page as “. . . an oasis of warmth, sanity, and pleasant aesthetics.”^[2]

The slovenly nature of Angel’s room is indicative of not only the degeneration of manners in modernity as well as any notion of self-respect, but it is also a result of Angel’s complete lack of self-assertion. He is far too timid to protest about his roommate’s slovenliness, boorishness, crassitude, and impropriety. Their room is strewn with garbage; it is not just untidy or cluttered, it is an abomination that gets worse as the novel progresses:

The space between the door and his bed had, overnight, become an obstacle course. Not only the usual empty cans and bottles, the discarded sandwich packaging, the pizza boxes, the messy Subway wrappers, the greasy serviettes, the plastic bags from the off-licence, the smelly socks, the dirty underwear, the shorts, the hoodies, the pens, the pieces of paper, and the highlighter markers got in the way, but also spilled liquids, ketchup, crumbs, dried-up onion rings, limp lettuce, cigarette butts, ashes, a brassiere, women’s jeans, a jumper, and several condoms had been added to the landscape. Finding a safe place to put his foot required flexibility, balance, long legs, small shoe size, and good aim. The semi-darkness contributed to slowing him down further. As a result, it took him a full minute and a half to cover the short distance.[3]

There is undoubtedly a rebarbative element to Kurtagić’s writing, especially in passages such as these. It is apparent when he describes Angel’s encounters with squalor or when he must cope with starvation, sickness, fatigue, or some other deprivation. His compulsive checking of social media and his complete inability to do any studying whatsoever have a comedic but nightmarish quality. It is as if through excessive, repellent descriptions Kurtagić is bludgeoning the reader with the way the modern world is pulverizing Angel into dust.

In one instance, Angel, bent over with hunger, slouches toward the cafeteria but is set upon by a mob of climate change zealots. When he hesitantly tries to defer signing their petition until after he’s eaten, they denounce him as a climate change denier:

Angel showed his palms, eyebrows airborne, and said with a high voice, ‘I was going to sign, I was just having salad, I was going to sign, I was just having salad!’

But Chinstrap was beyond words, and his fist collided with Angel’s face, sending him to the ground.

Angel felt the impact on his back and found himself staring at the sky. A second later, the sky was blotted out by screaming faces. Chinstrap bent over him and grabbed Angel’s shirt, ripping two buttons. But the fist he was about to rain on him never made it to the launch phase, for two men from campus security grabbed his attacker and pulled him away. This diverted everyone’s attention and, the climate activists seeing one of their own violently restrained, massed around their comrade, to shout slogans and imprecations at security.

Left to his own devices, Angel got up and ran.[4]

I was riveted by this novel. Even though the ending was more tragic than I would have liked, I understood it to be a comment on the dangers of political extremism along with the aforementioned critiques of university life, the state of both masculinity and femininity, and the modern world itself. Trying to survive in the modern world as it is currently constituted is like dealing with a narcissistic parent who is invariably going to find fault in whatever you do, regardless of how careful you are. There is no common good, manners are non-existent, radicalism leads to constant conflict, and squalid slovenliness is pervasive. While many readers will be repulsed by some of Angel’s transgressive subject matter, its dark humor and scathing insights will resonate with many.

Notes

[1] Angel, 707.

[2] Angel, 464.

[3] Angel, 388.

[4] Angel, 418.