Angels and Insects

(This column was published in the November 4, 1996 Buffalo News.)

   "Angels & Insects" is the title of both a book by the remarkable 
Englishwoman, A. S. Byatt and a motion picture now available for rental at 
some video stores. I recommend each of them to you, the film with a 
qualification: some readers of this column might be turned away by scenes of 
explicit sex that are, however, necessary to the plot.

   Butterflies, moths, and especially ants play important roles in this story, 
as objects of study by the protagonist, an entomologist, and as metaphor for 
the Victorian family he has joined. As Byatt says, "To ask, what are the ants 
in their busy world, is to ask, what are we, however we may answer...."  The 
mother is the ant queen, the household servants the worker ants waiting on the 
family drones.

   There are other comparisons to be drawn here as well: the slavery being 
fought in the American Civil War with the subjugated workers of the English 
cotton mills, the Amazonian Indian mores with 19th century English society, 
religious with Darwinian views of humankind.

   The story's hero, William Adamson, has spent years on a collecting voyage 
in the Amazon Basin but on his return trip a shipwreck has lost him all but a 
few valuable specimens. He is saved from indigence by an amateur collector he 
has been supplying. Harald Alabaster, the wealthy father of a landed family in 
rural Britain, takes him into his household as a kind of protege. The family 
provides him not only a home and opportunities to work at his profession, but 
also, despite his lower class antecedents, marriage to a beautiful daughter.

   It all seems a fairy tale come true -- to us as well as him -- but 
something seems Gothically wrong with this idyllic setting. Byatt writes, 
"William found himself at once detached anthropologist and fairy tale prince 
trapped by invisible gates and silken bonds in an enchanted castle." 

   Compared to the slam-bang tempo of current cinematography, this film 
proceeds at a leisurely Masterpiece Theater-like pace, but I found myself 
carried along by beautiful scenes and a story richly realized by fine 
performances. There is one scene in particular that brought to my mind those 
violent set pieces of modern motion pictures that take weeks to organize and 
film. Here instead of an auto or train crash we have a young woman about whom 
suddenly dozens of lovely butterflies cascade. Anyone who knows insects -- and 
Byatt describes the work required to set up this scene in her novella -- must 
appreciate how this too took much preparation and careful recording. Needless 
to say, I found the result far more satisfying.

   I saw the film before I read the book, an order I recommend to you. I 
expect that then, like me, you will also wish to read the novella, "Morpho 
Eugenia"  from which it is taken, the first of two in the book "Angels and 
Insects."  The motion picture is a faithful rendition of Byatt's story, but 
the richness of her prose and the added arguments and even fairy tales make 
the book well worthwhile.

   Byatt is a literature professor at University College in London whose 
earlier novel, "Possession: A Romance," won the prestigious Booker Prize. She 
acknowledges her extensive resources, but here she has transformed those 
sources into text that is not only informed but also remarkably crafted. I 
offer one more illustration of that prose: Mr. Alabaster "reminded William 
briefly of Portuguese missionary friars he had met, out there, with feverish 
eye and ravaged faces, men who failed to comprehend the incomprehension of the 
placidly servile Indians." 

   A superb film and a great reading experience.