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FALLING ANGELS is Tracy Chevalier's long-awaited follow-up to her
international bestseller GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. However, this
new title is far from a companion piece to her beloved debut.

FALLING ANGELS begins January 1901, the morning after Queen
Victoria's death, the morning that her son, the dandy King Edward
VII becomes monarch. This is a telling date to begin a novel with,
and Chevalier doesn't waste any time setting up her main character,
Kitty Coleman, as the archetype of the new Edwardian age. Kitty is
an upstanding London lady --- beautiful, refined and very, very
smart. She has a handsome husband, a plain but intelligent
daughter, and a beautiful home, complete with cook and maid. From
all appearances, she is completely and utterly successful and
socially accepted. But those standards are Victorian to the
extreme, and Kitty is a modern woman. She is bored with her family
and her life and longs to be back at home with her nurturing father
and brother so she can be free to study, to make art, to do
whatever.

Kitty's diametrical opposite is Gertrude Waterhouse. Gertrude longs
to be more than she is --- in short, the proper Victorian lady. She
follows manners books, wears all the right things and instructs her
two precocious daughters on how to be gentlewomen. Kitty and
Gertrude (and their families) are brought together in a chance
meeting in a graveyard. The families have abutting plots, and their
marked social and cultural differences are immediately
recognizable: the Waterhouse's gravestone features a large,
romantic, old-fashioned angel, which the Coleman's want
removed.

The families become further embroiled when the Waterhouses, in an
effort to keep up with society, move to a more posh, more
acceptable house. This house (of course) happens to be right next
to the Coleman's own. Maude, Kitty's daughter, and Livy, Gertrude's
oldest, join forces in friendship as the families' lives get
increasingly complicated. Unfortunately for the reader, these
interworkings occur at the time when the plot completely falls
apart. The first misstep Chevalier makes is to have the two girls
become confidantes with a gravedigger's son named Simon. While it
is plausible that Livy and Maude would become friends due to their
class and age, it is utterly unthinkable that parents would allow
their little girls to play with an older boy who curses, is far too
cheeky and is frankly way below them in class status --- especially
parents with pretensions to gentility like the Waterhouses. To put
it in American terms, this friendship is akin to a white Savannah
family allowing their five year old daughter to play with the
teenage son of their black garbage man in the 1950s.

Even putting this implausible relationship aside, the children
themselves leave a lot to be desired. They are precocious to the
extreme and, even allowing for the fact that children in
turn-of-the-century times spoke in a way that is unfamiliar to
modern ears, their dialogue is stilted and unbelievable. And in
Livy, Chevalier has created a real little monster --- a spoiled
drama-queen who uses all her powers of manipulation against her
family, Simon, and the Colemans. Not to say there aren't children
like her in the world, but why should we want to read about
them?

The fact that she includes the interclass friendship is very
surprising since, in every other case, Chevalier's characters are
utter stereotypes of the upper-class in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain. Gertrude is a two dimensional cutout whose every word
seems ripped from one of the manners manuals of the time, the men
come across as bumbling bureaucrats who know nothing of their
families, and the servants are all crass and interested solely in
clandestine sex. Prime example: Richard Coleman, Kitty's husband,
begins the novel as a freethinking scientist, a man who loves but
does not understand his wife. He even goes so far as to try
"swinging" to get her interested in him again. By the middle of the
novel, however, he has become enemy number one, the man who is
keeping Kitty down, though we're left with the sense that if she
just told him her desires, Richard would build her a room of her
own.

One would think that Chevalier, who went to so many pains to show
how smart her main character, Kitty, was, would then allow Kitty to
act smart. But no. Instead, Kitty falls into the same traps and
tropes that have felled female heroines since time immemorial.
Kitty commits adultery, falls under the spell of a radical
feminist, even has an abortion at a time when, frankly, having a
back-alley abortion would have killed her. Chevalier is also
heavy-handed when she discusses Kitty's zeal for feminism. After
her affair has left her feeling even more alone and confused, Kitty
turns her attention wholeheartedly to the woman's suffrage
movement. It is obvious that going to meetings and rallies,
organizing and just talking to these intelligent women gives Kitty
some of the mental nourishment she needs. Chevalier, however, again
falls into cliche, making these women shallow and bored upper-class
housewives who either care little for the cause and all for the
publicity, or who are blindly following Caroline Black, their
charismatic leader. Here again, Chevalier falls short. She had the
chance to further explore these women and their lives but instead
she fell back on assumptions and stereotypes, making them out to be
radicals at best and fools at worst.

Chevalier is at her best when she is describing the Victorian
fetishism of death, funerals, and graveyards. She obviously did her
research, and some of the material is fascinating, but readers who
know little of the time period will be at a loss. FALLING ANGELS
itself is a tad death-obsessed. As the title portends, the
characters in FALLING ANGELS do not come to happy ends. Instead,
through a series of coincidences and tumults, two of the main
characters are dead at the end of the book. Chevalier has written a
potboiler, not unlike the Victorian penny novels. FALLING ANGELS is
an interesting attempt, but will leave fans of GIRL WITH A PEARL
EARRING perplexed and disappointed.