An Army of Angels: A Novel of Joan of Arc

National Review, August 11, 1997 by Florence King

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

IT IS only fair to warn you that this review will violate the standards of objectivity, detachment, and ironic distance demanded by literary criticism. I've reviewed many books that I've liked and some that I've loved, but this time I have a masterpiece on my hands and I'm still reeling from it.

An Army of Angels is a first novel by Pamela Marcantel, a Louisiana native who was raised in the French Catholic tradition. Although she wrote a great deal of fiction and poetry while in college, none of it was published, and eventually she gave it up and joined the English Department at the University of Virginia. It was here that thoughts and images of Joan of Arc began to come to her, intensifying over time until she was compelled to embark on the research that led to this book.

Not the least of her many gifts is an instinct for literary structure that gets her right into the story. It opens with Jehanne (the medieval version of her name) being kicked awake in her prison cell by a brutal English guard who tells her, "We're going to burn you, witch," then flashes back to the day six years earlier when Jehanne first hears her Voices while tending her family's cows.

The manner in which the author handles the Voices of Sts. Michel, Catherine, and Marguerite will reaffirm the devout while convincing the most recalcitrant freethinker. To avoid the cheapening ghost-story effect of letting them appear as characters who speak within quotation marks, she renders them as light, the heat of a summer day, the wind against the face of a running child, a swarm of bees humming with an otherworldly intensity; and puts their words into type faces -- dominant bold, feathery italic, bleak sans serif -- that match the content of their messages.

To relieve the ethereality of medieval mysticism she also gives Jehanne vivid dreams full of modern allusions that make us thrill with recognition:

Jehanne saw a spacious city rising to meet her. The inhabitants were strangely dressed and rode in bizarre carriages that moved without being pulled by horses. A tremendous statue of a knight on horseback stood in the center of the city's square, and when she asked who he was, she heard, "That is no man; that is Jehanne the Maid, who saved France from the English."

The future saint who is brought so superbly to life on these pages is a tomboy with a healthy ego who enjoys being one of the guys. "So this was what it was like to have one's legs encased in cloth!" she thinks the first time she puts on male attire. "She had never imagined what a liberating feeling it could be. No wonder men felt so vigorous and masterful, wearing such wonderfully freeing things." To the troops she leads she is "as down-to-earth and approachable as a sister," but women are another matter, especially after she becomes famous. Pestered by a wannabe mystic who claims that she, too, hears voices, Jehanne impatiently tells her, "Your place is with your husband and children." Womanly duties are not for Jehanne; "There are plenty of other women to do them," she blurts out to a hostile cleric. "Only I can do the work I was charged to do by the King of Heaven."

Incapable of suffering fools, she was allied by destiny with the biggest fool in Christendom: the Dauphin Charles, declared a bastard by his own mother and robbed of his inheritance by his father, the mad Charles VI, who signed over the throne of France to England's Henry V after the latter's triumph at Agincourt.

The combination of parental rejection and physical unattractiveness has given the Dauphin a paralyzing inferiority complex that worsens when he is exposed to Jehanne's utter certainty of purpose. She is all for attacking Paris now; he dithers in endless brainstorming sessions, forever polling his advisors. She wants to hold his coronation in Reims now; "Charles kept stalling, moving in baby steps . . . she felt as if she was trying to roll a large stone uphill." Exhausted by his need for constant reassurance, sick of his imploring glances, Jehanne comes across as Margaret Thatcher trying to keep George Bush from going wobbly.

When she finally gets him to the church, he has one of those spurts of strength to which the weak are prone and insists that Jehanne stand beside him at his coronation, an honor never before granted even to the peers of France. During the ceremony her Voices come to her in a passage of breathtaking beauty:

Through the delicately spinning vortex she saw the domain where she most desired to be, ageless, loving; and a serenity overcame her, all at once expelling fear and reducing everything human to the level of a child's game. In the center of that eternal Moment nothing else mattered; the only thing real was that blinding, singing warmth that pulsed in her ears and whistled through her like a wind from Forever.

That the spineless Charles would betray her was in the cards. The mediocre always hold the superior back even when they are on the same side. Eisenhower did it to Patton, and Charles did it to Jehanne, relieving her as commander of the army and appointing the doddering Archbishop de Chartres in her place. In a final, incredible display of self-hatred the newly crowned Charles gave the Duc de Bourgogne, England's ally, permission to take Compicgne, one of the towns Jehanne had won, to use as a supply base for the English forces holding Paris. Said Jehanne's gallant comrade, the Bastard of Orleans: "Charles has managed to betray himself."