"The Rebel Angels" by Robertson Davies

 A group of academics in a Canadian university squabble over missing manuscripts, philosophy, and a half-gypsy research student.

The blurb says this novel is "a glittering extravaganza of wit, scatology, saturnalia, mysticism and erudite vaudeville". I thought it was quite pedestrian.

Selected quotes:

• "He seemed to me to have more conscience than is good for any man." (NA2.1)
• "Those who can get beyond the fashionable learning of their day are few." (NA2.2)
• "One begins with no knowledge except that what one is doing is probably wrong." (NA2.3)
• "Religion and humour, two realms in which humour seems to be wholly out of place" (NA2.3)
• "His idea of compassion was allowing every indefensible statement to pass unchallenged." 
• (SP3.1)
• "Bowel movement is a real creation" (NA3.3)
• "It is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one's friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer." (NA3.3)
• "I must be modern: I live now. But like everybody else ... I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me." (SP4.1)
• "An ageing romantic is hardly to be distinguished from an ageing Tory." (SP4.1)
• "The gods themselves struggle vainly with stupidity." (NA4.2) This is a quote from Schiller; it also comes into The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing.
• "Intelligent societies have always preserved their wise men in institutions of one kind or another, where their chief business is to be wise, to conserve the fruits of wisdom and to add to them if they can." (NA4.2)
• "Who will smooth the pillow when you lie at the hour of death?" (NA4.3)
• "What is the root of man? ... the deepest root of all, the tap-root, is that child he once was." (SP5.1)
• "How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a PhD would lead one to believe." (SP5.4)
• "the Rebel Angels ... were real angels, Samahazai and Azazel, and they betrayed the secrets of Heaven to King Solomon, and God threw them out of Heaven ... they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene ... and they were often special successes with 'the daughters of men'." (NA5.5)
• "She led a dog's life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong."  (NA5.6)
• "The word glamour has been so battered and smeared that almost everybody has forgotten that it means magic and enchantment." (SP6.3)
• "It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste." (SP6.5)
• "I have had too much experience of life to attempt to tell a really rich person anything. They are as bad as the young; they know it all." (NA6.1)
• "To marry, he said, was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players." (NA6.2)
• "De mortuis nil nisi hokum" (NA6.3) The standard quote is de mortuis nil nisi bonum which mean {speak) nothing but good about the dead.

March 2022; 332 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God