Image Credit: AmazonReading while travelling is not a particularly easy task but I thought I must not abandon my favorite pastime. So I picked up “The Mark of the Angel” by Nancy Huston, from the well-stocked bookshelf of the house where I am staying. The beginning lived up to the exciting vignette provided on the back flap. Raphael is a gifted musician, a flutist to be precise, who is a bachelor living in his mother’s sprawling apartment. When Saffie, a German girl, responds to his advertisement for a maid, and comes home he instantly falls in love with her. He is captivated by her every movement but Saffie never responds. It is only later that we learn why.
Angel interweaves the lives of three people in France, which is still recovering from the wounds of the Second World War. Initially, the book is gripping, and shows great potential with its well-drawn portraits of a taciturn and mentally scarred Saffie. But people seem to be constantly falling in love at first sight in this book. Even the seemingly cold and dispassionate Saffie is irresistibly drawn to Andras, a Hungarian instrument maker, as soon as she sets her eyes on him. She is so utterly mesmerized that she ignores her three month old son Emil’s cries while she is locked in passion with him and says, ‘I will follow you anywhere.’
Huston’s writing is at times psychologically insightful and furnished with wonderful similes. But sometimes it gets a bit unbelievable. The indifferent Saffie comes alive all too suddenly for my liking with Andras. He is able to bring her to the heights of ecstasy with just a touch. At times portrayals like these seem to border on the melodramatic.
But the book is noteworthy for its fresh perspective and approaching the ravages of the Second World War from a completely different angle. Most of the books on the Holocaust and the War that I have read are all written from the perspective of the Jews. But Angel is told from a German’s view showing that the War was for everyone. The Second World War has been perpetually blamed on the Germans but we forget that there were a lot of German civilians who were harmless and who did not even support Hitler’s mad plots. Saffie was one of those who got caught up in the war and went through immense suffering, her only fault being that she was a German. Angel nudges and reminds the reader that war is not black and white. There are many colors to it, most of them dark.
Verdict: A quick read for the different perspective
Rating: 3/5
