I’ve been too busy to review the last few books I’ve read, but I want to make the effort and start again.OK, so I picked this off the shelf mostly because of the title. It’s a nice, lyrical title and the backcopy said it was about a young group of boys who band together to discover who is killing little girls in their home town.Sounds exciting, right?I’m really torn about this book. On the one hand I think it’s really well written, even if the prose does get a little purple and overly descriptive at times – that’s just my personal taste, but the real failing is the plotting and storyline.Contrary to what the backcopy says, this book is NOT about a bunch of young boys trying to track a killer Famous Five style. The Guardians, as these boys call themselves, only meet twice and are caught and bawled out the second time by the local Sherriff, so they never meet again. That’s it. That’s the end of that storyline. What the backcopy would lead you to believe is the whole theme of the book is actually begun and ended in a few pages.So what happens the rest of the time? Well, that I think is the book’s biggest problem, our hero, Joseph Vaughan, for ninety-five percent of this book doesn’t do anything. He gets on with his life and has the same trials and tribulations (though a few more tragedies) as anyone while these murders continue in the background. He feels bad, but he doesn’t go out and seek the killer. He doesn’t do anything about it.**SPOILERS**There are also some huge plot holes in this book. Joseph is obsessed with these killings, but when his mother – who has had a breakdown – offers to tell him who did it, he walks out. I think he does that twice. Surely you would want to hear every theory, not matter who it came from. This seemed really stupid and out of character.Another thing that annoyed me is after a certain death in the book, there are only two people who could be the killer! And no one figures this out. It’s obvious!Joseph goes to jail at one point and I have many problems with this. Firstly, there are so many holes in the case it could strain vegetables. People must have been very unaware of their rights in the 50s because even I, with no legal training, could have got this case dismissed. As it is, Joseph is sent to jail for ten years, which I think only takes a chapter to get through and this does somewhat undermine just how long he is falsely imprisoned, until his case is reheard by the Supreme Court and his conviction overturned. I must also mention his idiot lawyer, who I would have fired ten minutes after meeting him. Again, were people really so unaware of their rights that they just took the first schmuck lawyer they were given?And finally the ending, which also seems rushed and gives no real explanation of why the killer did these unspeakable things to young girls. Who the killer is seems to be just put in for twist value and doesn’t really make any sense.A promising beginning, but an unsatisfactory middle and ending.
When I first started reading R.J.Ellory’s, A Quiet Belief in Angels, I thought,"This is a con.....this can't be right.....this is a joke!"I was convinced I was reading the works of the Master, Steinbeck.Right from the opening lines, Ellory had me drawn in, taken under the influence of, and then totally intoxicated by his verbal skills and mastery over phrase, paragraph and perfect prose.‘Sat at my window, chin almost touching the sill, and looked out into the night. Sky as hard as flint, the scudding clouds thin and fragile, like they’d disperse with nothing more than a fingersnap, but all of it beautiful in a broken-up, haphazard kind of way; the ghosts of day-clouds, backlit afterthoughts to remind you of morning. The morning gone, the morning on its way…which one it didn’t seem to matter. In the air the crisp snap of lodgepole pine and bitter juniper made the taste of breathing sour and electric.’Pure poetry! ‘Tried not to think of my father, the sound of his voice, the smell of him – bitter apples, coal tar, sometimes cigars. I closed my mind down to nothing. Waited and watched, and then waited some more. Tried to breathe deep and even and slow. Tried to close out the sound of bugs and trees, of wind and the stream. Tried to hear other things. Things that came from darkness.’More impeccable prose!Added to his power over words, was R.J.’s inimitable expertise as a story teller. I read with eagerness and yet uneasiness, the unfolding of the heinous, extraordinary crimes that disturbed and haunted the ordinary, hard-working, everyday folk of Augusta Falls, Georgia; commencing in 1939. As I travelled with him, sometimes coaxed, sometimes running ahead, I couldn’t help but feel perturbed that the road in front might not be going the way in which I wanted to walk……at times, as a reluctant traveller, he forced me to tread the path that he had beaten out and I became timorous, totally disquieted that the destination we were heading for was not one I would choose to aim for; not a place I would seek to visit.R.J. Ellory forcibly delivers, he will not disappoint! He is a Writer to be reckoned with and bears a name that one day, I am confident, will be reckoned up amidst the All Time Greats!Are we sure he did not sit and learn at the foot of John Steinbeck? Carrie King
What do You think about A Quiet Belief In Angels (2007)?
Finally! I have finished this book. I thought I never would. It's SOOO slow-moving, but the prose is just brilliant. It reads like an enchanting, on-going poem. Don't read it for the story, read it for the words, because the latter far surpasses the former. However it is a good story as well, slightly marred by the fact that there was no mystery in it for me as two of my relatives let slip the murderer's name in front of me before I started reading. People like that should be hanged. But even that didn't ruin it for me, because this isn't a plot-led book. The words take on a life of their own. Magic.
—Joni
British author R.J. Ellory’s crime novel, A Quiet Belief In Angels, seems from another time. He was born in 1965 and he writes about fictional events that begin in 1939 and continue through the 1960’s and finally culminates in a short epilogue, in 2005; but that is not the other time I mean. The pace of the novel seems like something that was written in the late 1950’s. It is blissfully deliberate and some patience is needed, but only a little and only for a short while. I fell right back into the rhythms of my reading experiences of that time. It is less about the criminal and the horrific crimes than about the narrator, one Joseph Vaughan. Twelve years old and a knight errant of sorts. The romance quickly dissipates and a quest is born, only Joseph doesn’t yet realize it. He accepts this as he grows into manhood. It wasn’t what I expected but I felt rewarded for biting into it all the same. The crime ends. It starts anew. It ends again. It finishes anew. Some may think the true identity of the criminal is a bit too embellished, but the journey is the thing. Ellory is supposed to have written a screenplay for a film of this book. I would have to see it.
—Roger
It's been awhile since I've encountered a narrator as tightly controlled by his author as Joseph Vaughan is in R.J. Ellory's "A Quiet Belief in Angels." There's a part of Joseph we can't quite get to, hidden by the cloak of enigma or numbness, and Ellory holds the reins relentlessly. But it's no wonder. In his story, spanning decades, Joseph is haunted by the brutal deaths of young girls in his small Georgia town. As the bodies of murdered and mutilated girls pile up in Augusta Falls and in surrounding counties, starting before the Second World War, Joseph organizes The Guardians, a band of his buddies determined to protect the town's young girls.Of course they fail. Joseph finds one of the girls, in pieces, himself. Already haunted by death — his father is gone — Joseph has a lifelong obsession with finding the murderer and with his own failings, through his mid-teen years doted on by his teacher, through his expanding relationship with her, through the apparent resolution of the culprit's identity and his mother's slipping mental grip.The book's back-cover description gives the impression that The Guardians play a huge role in the novel, like a gathering of Stephen King kids banding together against evil. But that element is not very prominent in "A Quiet Belief in Angels." It's a mystery story, a character study, a decades-spanning tale of Joseph's obsession. The book's opening has Joseph, as a middle-aged man, in a room with a dead man he has shot, a man he believes to be the one responsible for all the murders. Joseph's here-and-now musings keep recurring even as he details his life from boyhood to manhood and recounts the tragedies he keeps seeing/experiencing.In many ways, Ellory's book is a wonder, his powers of description occasionally superb. Still, there are slow spots in the tale, even if seemingly dull scenes turn out to have meaning. I found the killer's ability to commit atrocities in many communities over many years, completely unseen, to be a bit of a stretch. The story's impact lessened a bit for me as Joseph grew from boyhood, but Ellory kept satisfying twists and turns coming, and the tale did stay with me. Three stars, then, but on the very high side. I confess to not having heard of Ellory before, but he may be one who bears watching, and a look back at his earlier books may be in order.
—Tim
