The Rebel Angels is Canadian author Robertson Davies's most noted novel, after those that form his Deptford Trilogy. First published by Macmillan of Canada in 1981, The Rebel Angels is the first of the three connected novels of Davies' Cornish Trilogy. It was followed by What's Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus. It did not quite attain the popularity of the Deptford Trilogy.
Plot
The Rebel Angels follows several faculty and staff of the fictional College of St. John and Holy Ghost, affectionately referred to as "Spook". The story, like many of Davies', is notable for very strongly drawn and memorable characters – in this case the defrocked monk Parlabane, a brilliant and sinister sodomite with a thundering voice, voracious appetite; 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's narration alternates between Theotoky's and Darcourt's points of view. 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.
Background
Many of the characters were based on college acquaintances of Davies; their stories are recounted in Judith Skelton Grant's biography Robertson Davies: Man of Myth and Brian Busby's Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit. As well, many believe that Davies based the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost on Toronto's Trinity College. Evidence for this connection includes numerous similarities between the fictional and the real life college ; the fact that Davies taught at Trinity College for twenty years and 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 featuredon 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. Like the real-life Massey College, Ploughwright is a graduate college where scholars are invited to partake in interdisciplinary discussions and High Table dinners.
Reception
reviewed The Rebel Angels for White Dwarf #45, and stated that "Not for the squeamish, it features a murder whose inventive nastiness makes the destruction of whole shiploads of the people in Downbelow Station pale into insignificance."
