Angels Of Music

Eric’s Angels -
Full Throttle

Angels Of Music
by Kim Newman
Titan Books
ISBN: 9781781165683

Warning: Some mild spoilers for some literary references and cool jokes in this one.

Once again I find myself lured into the fantasy world of one of the UKs greatest literary storytellers, Mr. Kim Newman. This novel is one of a number of this great writer's works I’ll be reviewing on the blog this year (if my health doesn’t finally fail me), either by revisiting past classics or catching up to what he’s been doing over the last ten years or so. I was up for reading this novel when it was first announced because I already had read some of this tome under the guise of short stories that Mr. Newman had published in Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier's annual publications, the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections (for reviews of a number of those books, head over to the book section of my index page and take a look). Indeed, there is a dedication to these two publishers at the opening of the book and, although Mr. Newman is certainly known for his popular genre mash-ups such as the Anno Dracula series of novels, I can’t help but think that the many famous characters in this novel, which spans 40 years in the history of Paris from the late 1890s to the early 1930s, are partially inspired by those Shadowmen collections, which take that modus operandi as their central mission statement, so to speak. Although this, of course, could well be inspired by Mr. Newman’s past works as much as anything else (or Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton universe, for that matter).

Either way, I’m glad that the writer has decided to expand the adventures of his Angels Of Music in the form of a novel and, it’s so much more than I was expecting from it. It is, in its basic structure, a collection of short stories regarding the various ‘waves’ of the title characters over the history of a specific agency I shall detail in a minute but, where some writers when attempting similar tricks of expansion seem to come up with merely the sum of their many parts, Newman manages to weave these stories together in self referential form so well that, when we get to the final tale, everything presents itself as one perfect story arc... and so this book, in this way and many others, is a triumph of this form of structural building, I would have to say.

The story element of these, if you are unfamiliar with any of theses works, is basically The Phantom Of The Opera meets Charlie’s Angels. That is to say, a retrofitted version of Charlie’s Angles, run by Eric, the famous opera ghost and assisted by their Bosley stand in, known only as The Persian. The first three angels in the first story are Irene Adler (‘The Woman’ from the Sherlock Holmes stories), Trilby O’Ferral and Christine Daaé. And it’s here that I have to admit that, just as when I read the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections, I don’t always know the characters and situations the various references are pointing to... although I do know a reference when I read it and there are so very many in these stories. A quick poke in the eye with a name, for instance, was all that was needed for me to realise that the Carlotta Castafiore, mentioned early in the first story, was an obvious ancestor of the Castafiore in the TinTin stories.

The story is made up of a number of tantalising vignettes split up into acts... Act One: The Marriage Club, Act Two: Les Vampires De Paris, Entre Act - The Case Of Mrs. Norton (in some ways, the most tragic segment in the novel), Act Three: Guignol, Act Four: The Mark Of Kane, Act Five - Deluge and then... After The Curtain (I’ll get to this last one in a minute).

As some readers may have guessed, some of these titles are giveaways to a few of the characters you are going to meet within the section and, up to a point, each set of angels is a completely different team although, later in the book, older angels return to team up and smite their enemies together, in the best crossover tradition.

The first act deals with a bunch of improbable but wildly entertaining... let’s say ‘non-human’ enemies (not too many spoilers desired) and the evil Joséphine Balsamo (who turns up a lot in the pages of the Shadowmen collections, it has to be said). The second one brings in Les Vampires of the famous Louis Feuillade serial (and the later Olivier Assayas Irma Vep movie and show) but, curiously, Vep herself doesn’t show her face with a proper mention until much later in another segment. One person who does pop up in this is Newman’s Vampire Genevieve, although I couldn’t work out which incarnation of her it is. At first I thought it was the one I know and love from his Anno Dracula books and the time setting of this story indeed seems to favour that the events of the first book might well be taking place around that point but, later on, with his Kate Reed character also turning up as one of Eric’s Angels, I am more inclined to think it is the other version of Genevieve from his Warhammer books and, thus, another version of Kate Reed, separate from the Anno Dracula novels, who is also working for the Diogenese Club (and I’ll be reading Mr. Newman’s short story collection The Man From The Diogenes Club sometime very soon so, I may find a little more enlightenment there).  

The Entre Act concerns the return of a former angel as a client and, in some ways, best demonstrates what Edgar Allan Poe once called The Imp Of The Perverse. In that it’s somewhat a tale of obsession where the victim has brought everything down on themself. This is followed by another wonderful story where Kate Reed, among other angels, finds herself embroiled in a torturous murder spree being committed around the area of the famous Grand Guignol, although I was surprised to find that the legendary Paula Maxa did not turn up as a character in this one (unless she was alluded to and I just didn’t recognise her... which might well be the case).

Act Four is a tour de force as the next lot of angels go to the French commercial tourist trap version of Xanadu (a kind of Euro Xanadu), to do battle with newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (yeah, from Citizen Kane). Kane is attempting to, as William Randall Hearst once said, ‘provide the war’ by uniting a whole crew of famous villains such as Dr. Orloff and Julian Karswell, by paying them off with wins in his casino (there’s even a character popping up from Its A Wonderful Life, reviewed here, in here, if I’m not mistaken). The angels obviously scupper his plans but I was glad to see that there is one definitive winner in the story segment... Bret Maverick, as played by James Garner on TV and at the movies (check out my TV and film indexes for various Maverick reviews). Plus this section has an obligatory ‘armadillo’ mention, relating to the Tod Browning version of Dracula (reviewed here)... gotta have one, I guess and I always enjoy when people mention that damned armadillo.

The last act deals with the infamous floods in Paris and reunites some of the former angels, who turn up to bear witness to a very sad event, only to find themselves trying to stay alive long enough to see if it really is Fantômas trying to kill them all, or someone from their past. This story includes a really great joke scene which refers back to the first Star Wars film but, yeah, I can’t bring myself to reference the joke here, you’ll just have to read the book.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that Newman doesn’t let all the many references get in the way of a good story and, even the genuinely ridiculous bits are held together without risking the credibility of the fantasy world he creates in this one... sometimes you just have to roll with the whimsy, I guess and, life is generally all the more enjoyable for having done so.

And then, when all is said and done, we get a Newman manifestation of a thing which has ben occurring (perhaps plaguing) modern cinema since the first time it happened in the first of the Matt Helm films (The Silencers, review coming relatively soon). That is to say... we have a genuine post credits scene in the book which, if you skip through what looks like the ads at the back, many will miss. Yup, after Kim’s afterword and, even after a couple of pages of ads for some of his other books, we get a final mini chapter entitled After The Curtain, where we will learn the fate (hopefully not the final fate) of one of the more important characters in the book. One hopes for a sequel to this one, set over the next forty years perhaps but, I guess time will tell if Mr. Newman wishes to revisit this literary territory in the future.

And that’s that. Once again, with Angels Of Music, Mr Kim Newman delivers another spectacular set of yarns that are totally immersive (despite the constant referential writing that is etched into the very DNA of the tales) and gives his readers a wild and very entertaining ride. Definitely check this one out.