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The Rebel Angels is one of Canadian author Robertson Davies' most noted novels, after his Deptford Trilogy.
The first book in his Cornish Trilogy, The Rebel Angels follows several faculty and staff of the fictional College of St. John and Holy Ghost. Perhaps owing to its being set in a university, it did not quite attain the popularity of the Deptford Trilogy, but it is generally considered to be among his best books.
The story, like many of Davies', is notable for very strongly drawn and memorable characters—in this case the defrocked monk Parlabane, a huge man with a thundering voice, voracious appetite, and flamboyantly homosexual tendencies, both brilliant and sinister; Anglican priest and professor of New Testament Greek Simon Darcourt; Maria Theotoky, a graduate student researching Rabelais; Clement Hollier, a frazzled and absentminded professor; and Urquhart McVarish, a greedy and manipulative counterpoint to Hollier.
The novel has two narrators, each recounting the story in turn. Ms Theotoky tells the story from her point of view and then Father Darcourt tells it from his. Darcourt is attempting to write a history of the university based on Aubrey's Brief Lives.
Much of the story is set in motion by the death of eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish. Hollier, McVarish, and Darcourt are the executors of Cornish's complicated will, which includes material that Hollier wants for his studies. The deceased's nephew Arthur Cornish, who stands to inherit the fortune, is also a character.
As is typical in Davies' novels, the book touches on a number of themes: gipsies, tarot, violin repair, scatology are but a few.
Many of the characters are supposed to have been based on college acquaintances of Davies. As well, many believe that Davies based the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost (or "Spook" as its often called in the novel) on Toronto's Trinity College. Evidence for this connection includes the superficial similarities between the fictional and the real life college; the fact that Davies lived across the street from Trinity while master of Massey College; and perhaps most convincingly that a picture of Trinity's central tower is prominently featured on the cover of the novel's first edition. Equally plausible is the belief that Ploughwright College in the book is patterned after Davies's own Massey College. This connection is supported by the fact that much of the fortune donated by the Massey family to the University of Toronto for the founding of Massey College was originally made in the manufacture of farm equipment.
The Rebel Angels is the first of the three connected novels of the Cornish Trilogy. It was followed by What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus.
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