The Angels of L19 by Jonathan Walker
Review by Gary Kaill
There are angels on the streets of… Merseyside. Perhaps. Certainly for Robert, the troubled teenager whose implacable faith becomes the narrative springboard for this second novel from the emerging Weatherglass Books, they are real and their presence will set his life on an unexpected and ultimately tragic course.
The Angels of L19 continues the aesthetic its publisher began earlier in the year with Isobel Wohl’s astonishing Cold New Climate. Both books set themselves almighty challenges. Wohl’s long-form debut examined in unsparing detail the relationship between a middle-aged New Yorker and her former lover’s teenage son. Angels of L19, set amidst the socio-political upheaval of mid 80’s Liverpool, is viewed largely through the eyes of a compelling and deftly drawn protagonist — Robert is a teen both energised and troubled by his faith. Is he God’s instrument (‘When he was born again, the walls began to sing’) or is there something else at work?
From the outset, Robert’s faith negates any darker concerns, even when he is visited by the presence, a shape-shifting entity that first appeared after a church camp the previous year. It seals Robert’s quest from the off: ‘When the presence delivers its message, everyone will know that God has chosen Robert.’ More troubling is the introduction of a second angel, a naked girl armed with taunts and a promise: Robert’s friend and neighbour Tracey’s life for the return of his dead mother.
Robert is the fulcrum, but Walker supports with a deftly drawn cast of characters. They exist largely in and around a devout evangelical group: the Brethren. As the visitations continue, and Robert’s actions become ever more concerning, Tracey’s worries grow and she confides in Mark, a Falklands veteran and now local church group leader. ‘He’s different,’ she says, ‘lately. He has these gaps. Seems to go somewhere else.’ It’s this conversation, perhaps, that triggers Mark’s concern and his subsequent devastating actions once he becomes convinced that Robert’s increasingly unstable behaviour is not so much grandstanding (‘It’s just to please himself,’ he observes, initially dismissive) but something darker entirely.
It takes a great deal of storytelling savvy to paint so vividly the intimate, working class, family settings of this era and this place without resorting to a cheap shot of nostalgic fancy. For every mention of an Austin Allegro or Time Bandits on VHS, Walker is quick to utilise these artefacts for the purposes of subtle colouring and moving his story forward. I admired much about The Angels of L19, not least its disarmingly involving plot and the way in which Walker so carefully assembles the final third of the book, in which a series of shocking events begin to shape an over-arching tragedy. (There is a coda — perfectly pitched — that plays beautifully with time and memory, and the heavy price of forgiveness, that will fracture the more sensitive heart.) But the real joy is in the aforementioned detailing. As Liverpool thrums amidst marches and strike action and, Derek Hatton’s Labour council snarls defiantly as it faces down the challenge to its spending plans from central government, even the pages begin to smell like Thatcher’s Britain.
Robert and Tracey escape the day-to-day via their Christian beliefs but also music. Walker is dutifully generous to these two impassioned teenagers, allowing them an informed position on their various passions: ‘Robert seems to think that Larry Mullen Jr of U2 is Tracey’s favourite drummer. But if he’d ever thought to ask, he’d know it’s Stephen Morris of Joy Division and New Order.’ Robert’s obsession with U2, in particular the devotion that finds questioning voice on their early work (‘God is hidden inside the song, even when the words appear to be about something else’), gives voice to a line of inquiry into the band’s that receives only a fraction of the time it deserves now we’re all cooler and prefer to simply mock our past-their-best stadium behemoths. (For further reading, Walker has written a series of compelling and deeply researched blog posts on the work of U2 and other acts of the period, including REM, Lloyd Cole, Violent Femmes and The Blue Nile.)
The Angels of L19 is sensitively observed and quietly told; patient readers might find themselves drawn not so much to its brooding narrative innards but to its deft stylistic touches — the adroitly assembled machinery that powers and guides the story. This finds form in Walker’s conversational and dialogue-based choices that see discussion, often between just two characters, fleshed out over several pages. People talk and they talk at length, peppering their conversation with elements of the day-to-day; this almost-documentary approach performs a strange kind of magic trick, actually building drama and allowing the reader to step closer to the characters then they might have reasonably expected.
And that choice is supported by another that delights: a fleet-of-foot application of a close third person perspective that toys delightfully with the limited element of such a viewpoint. Walker steps into and then out of the narrative and, much like Georgina Harding did with her magnificent Harvest earlier this year, he flexes the mode with great care. During the annual church revue, where Robert’s Smiths-aping performance begins to collapse, we have:
‘He starts dancing. To Tracey, he looks like Ian Curtis of Joy Division… It looks like he’s in a mating ritual with Mrs Evans.
Mrs Evans is seventy-two. Leave the poor woman alone! But Tracey can’t get this message across…’
And later:
‘Fifteen seconds pass. Kevin whispers, “What now?”
God’s everywhere. He’s here now.’
And thus we, the reader, dart in and around, occupy a space in the character’s head before being gently positioned to the edge of the room. It’s a peculiarly satisfying mode of address and it serves the story, and its darkening mood, very well indeed.
I left The Angels of L19 feeling both strangely broken and yet oddly uplifted. It is, at times, uproariously funny (see Robert’s one line dismissal of The Smiths on Top of the Pops — ‘Moan, moan. Look at me, look at me’ — for a fine example) but the weight of this exceptional novel is borne to a large degree by the tragic events that take place at its end. Robert, of course, is not the first young devotee to believe themselves to be enacting God’s plan, and he is certainly not the first to find that perceived plan morph into something else entirely (there is no Owen Meany moment awaiting him), but he is a figurehead of some magnitude and the reader who connects will find the journey as satisfying as it is upsetting.
‘Faith is a story,’ the book suggests at one point. ‘You tell it to yourself, then you tell it to other people. And when they hear your story, it confirms their own.’ How true this is. Here, then, is one of the novels of the year — a book of substantial scope, style and ambition, and one that speaks eloquently and authoritatively of connection, of kinship, and of what might result when we think to narrow the gap between the singer and the song. Thus, the reading of the book becomes a communion, every passage an article of faith. There are wonders here. Embrace them.
The Angels of L19 is published by Weatherglass Books, 19th August 2021