Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt

"Whom can I tell that I should not destroy in the telling."
Two novellas, joined thematically and stylistically, Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel comprise of Angels and Insects. Byatt returns here to familiar territory for her, the world of ideas in contrast with fantastical spiritualism or overwrought romantic love. Both novellas are set within the milieu of Victorian England, evoking not only the intellectual context but also the general "spirit of the age" that dominated cultural output and social interactions. Morpho Eugenia is in some ways a straightforward dramatic, mysterious love story of Victorian sexual indiscretion writ large and in other ways sets itself volumes apart in its evocation of the personal level upon which the upheaval of Darwinian ideas created rifts in the sense of Victorian self.
Our protagonist is William Adamson, an amateur entomologist whose studies and adventures have taken him to all corner of the earth, he embodies the classic colonial adventurer hero, a symbol of sexual and intellectual experience that disrupts the peace of the Alabaster house. Taken in by the Alabaster family, whose patriarch seems to want to have William around as a theoretical sparring partner for a kind of pseudo religious tract concerning Darwin's philosophies, William promptly falls in love with the tragic and beautiful Eugenia. Byatt at times gets away with the kinds of cliches that I would find obnoxious in other works, just by the sheer power of her prose and in the arch way in which she constructs her more ridiculous characters. Adamson himself inspires empathy and admiration while a character like Eugenia reminds one of a far less intelligent and effective Emma Bovary, if only in her last dying moments (Emma's not Eugenia's). She has a wry sense of humor typically embodied by a strong, contrasting female character - in this case Matty Crompton.
The novella spends a good deal of time setting up what seems to me, a largely overemphasized metaphor of the ant queen. Capitalizing upon the naturalist's tendencies of Adamson, Byatt sets forth long and often arduous descriptions of ant colonies.
I have not seen the movie adaptation - although based on the way in which Posession was filmed/ruined, I'm wary. Here is the trailer for your assessment.



The Conjugial Angel stands in stark contrast to the first novella. Still ostensibly concerned with Victorian morality, this time through the lens of spiritualism. Much less of a story than a kind of study on the relationship between the spiritualist impulse and the attachment to poetics, The Conjugial Angel attempts a meditation on mourning and loss through a fictional take off of Tennyson's In Memoriam. While interesting, the story never gets off the ground or finds its tone, never quite expanding from a philosophical distance.