Angelica takes place in Victorian England and chronicles the marriage of Constance and Joseph Barton and life with their 4-year-old daughter, Angelica. The book begins with Constance's story--the ghost story. Strange things begin happening when Joseph demands that Angelica no longer be allowed to sleep in a bed at the foot of theirs. She's moved into her own room, much to Constance's dismay, and it's really difficult to explain the myriad events that occur from that point on.

Without giving too much away, Constance and Joseph's marriage begins falling apart fast, with Joseph portrayed as an abusive husband who believes Constance should perform her "wifely duties," even though another pregnancy would surely kill the frail woman. To avoid this, Constance finds every excuse to sleep in Angelica's room--the biggest excuse being some sort of demonic entity that takes on the appearance of Joseph. Constance discovers that whatever plays out between her and Joseph is eventually played out by the entity. Confusing, I know.

The story is then told from the point of view of Anne Montague, the former actress turned ghost hunter hired by Constance to rid the Barton house of the paranormal activity. In Anne's version, you find out she's not who she says she is, and she believes the "paranormal" activity is Constance's way of coping with Joseph's allegedly inappropriate relationship with his daughter.

The story then shifts to Joseph, and after the way he was portrayed in the previous tellings, I was certainly looking forward to this one. Was Joseph an abusive husband and father? Was he really connected to the entity tormenting Constance and Angelica? Was there an entity at all--or was Constance simply going crazy? Or is she pretending to go crazy as a means of getting rid of Joseph? This is another one of those books that turns everything you thought you knew on its head. Believe me, by the time I finished Joseph's version of the story, I didn't have a clue what I knew. But it's not one of those books you want to abandon due to confusion.

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Moody, evocative, true to its Victorian setting, mysterious, satisfying.

In this multi-layered and psychological Gothic ghost story, nothing is quite what it seems. Constance and Joseph Barton have one living daughter, Angelica, after a long string of disastrous miscarriages. Constance has been warned that another pregnancy would likely result in her death and has spurned her husband’s physical advances for the four years since Angelica’s birth. When Joseph finally insists that Angelica must move out of their master bedroom and into her own chamber, Constance fears for her life in the face of her hot-blooded husband’s desire. Soon, she begins to see a blue phantom hovering over her daughter’s bed at night and believes it is Joseph’s wrathful lust made manifest, threatening Angelica’s life in order to clear a path to Constance. Joseph reacts angrily when Constance expresses her fears about the ghost, and Constance seeks solace and aid from actress-turned-spiritualist Anne Montague.

The story is told four times, by Constance, Joseph, Anne, and, finally, an adult version of Angelica herself. With each retelling, more details come to light about just what was going on and the reader’s allegiance subtly shifts each time. Were Constance’s fears justified? Was Joseph a cruel madman, or was Constance suffering a psychotic break? Did Joseph have immoral designs on his daughter as Anne believed, or did events in Constance’s past influence her views of the present? Complex and deliberately paced, “Angelica” depicts the psychology and repressive social mores of the Victorian era with satisfying depth and intelligence. ( )

This book is described as a ghost story. It is a ghost story only in the sense that two of the characters, Constance, the wife, and Joseph, the husband, are haunted by their relationship with their parents. A better description of this book would be psychological mystery or thriller. We delve into the psyche of a Victorian era family; the husband is quiet and inaccessible, the wife cowers within her sphere, and the child is spoiled and runs the household with her beguiling ways. We see their lives through four different narratives; the wife, the spiritualist, the husband and the grown child. Each sees the situations of their lives very differently. The wife sees her husband as a tyrant that she must protect her child from. The spiritualist feels she is helping the mother, but is really manipulating the situation for her own selfish gains. The husband is clueless to his wife’s emotional needs. The child only wants the attention of the three adults. Inevitably, the combination of these different and opposing perspectives leads to tragedy. ( )

I liked this book, because of the four narratives that each give another version of the same story. Original and well written. Maybe it's the translation, (Dutch), but I thought the style was a bit boring and overdone.
This book makes you think and rethink some situations, which makes it almost interactive. ( )

This is a chilling Victorian ghost story in the vein of "The Turn of the Screw." Mrs. Barton believes that her young daughter is the victim of a sexually driven nocturnal spirit. The family's tragedy is told from the perspective of Angelica's mother, her father, a bogus "spiritualist," and Angelica herself. Each person's version of reality is colored by their own psychological demons and self-induced deception. Which version is the true one?? ( )

Phillips' stiff and evasive Victorian prose is an unusual but effective vehicle for his narrative which intertwines the diverging viewpoints of four characters on a tragic murder. Or was it a murder? And who was murdered? Phillips' story, while a compelling character study and a practiced look at the impact of strict gender and class roles of the late 1800s, and even a fascinating work of suspense, falls short only in its failure to sufficiently answer the many questions it provokes. This novel should be read for its stark portrayal of how different events can appear when seen through the eyes of several different people. The seemingly paranoid Constance sees ghosts, the spiritualist Anne Montague sees something far more sinister, while Joseph, the husband, only sees a wife who is slowly going mad and a household that has escaped his control. This penetrating look into the unraveling of one damaged family in Victorian London is certainly a worthwhile read. ( )

http://superfastreader.com/angelica-b... ( )

I loved this book. It tells the story of a Victorian family's disintegration from the perspective of mother, father, daughter, and a woman who is brought in to cleanse the house of the supernatural forces that the mother believes are tormenting her child. What starts as a ghost story quickly turns into something more and the reader concludes the novel feeling the impossibility of ever knowing what 'really happened' to the family. I'd say more about the plot, but its tough to do so without spoiling it.

The novel comments on Victorian values, sexuality, relationships between women and men, women and women, children and parents, war, colonialism, class, race, religion, medicine, science, and psychology without ever being pretentious or detracting from the root story of one family's crisis.

A truly great read. I'd recommend it to anyone. ( )

I simply could not get into this book. The writing was interesting and mildly compelling, but I found it difficult to connect to the characters and abandoned the story after about 100 pages. ( )

I really hate saying this because I don't think it's fair to make comparisons between the different works of one author, but after The Egyptologist and Prague, this one was a bit of a letdown. Even though it's true that it has all of the hallmarks of Phillips' writing (uncertainty of memory, unreliable narrators views, truth as an elusive entity), all of which put together become the basis for my favorite novels, this one just didn't deliver as did the other two.

It is and isn't a ghost story, but is made to sound like one. In reality, it's a look at the end of a marriage during the Victorian period, told by 4 different narrators, each of which is unreliable. Constance Barton is the suffering wife who married way above her station, then became pregnant and had several miscarriages. Her one surviving child, Angelica, becomes a powerful focus in her life, much to the detriment of her husband Joseph. When Joseph decides that it's high time for Angelica to be moved out of the nuptial bedroom, Constance suffers and begins to be convinced that there is evil afoot. Exactly what is the nature of the evil is the focus of the story.

Some readers will be left unsatisfied, but such is the nature of this type of writing. I enjoyed it, and did not stop once I picked it up, but it wasn't up there on my favorites by this author ( )

I don’t know whether to applaud Arthur Phillips or slap his face. Once again he gives us a tale with multiple viewpoints of the same events and once again we question how much (if any of it) is truth. It smacks of being clever for cleverness’s sake.

This novel touches on a lot of things; marital issues, misogyny, feminism, gender roles, medicine and science versus occultism and magic, sex, child-rearing, madness, Victorian attitudes and animal vivisection. All brought to us through each person’s narrative. Not a 1st person perspective though, but one of omniscience of a sort.

Not as action-packed as The Egyptologist, nor with as many narrators, this one moved more slowly. As it is a Victorian novel pastiche, I suppose it ought to. After about 100 pages though, things started to happen and I became anxious to read the events from other people’s POV, especially Joseph who was made out to be nothing more than a brute by Constance and Anne. Each of them seemed very different than the others’ perception of them, but yet in a way, the seed of that perception was present even to themselves. That’s what made the ending so frustrating, that I seemed to get cohesion and then had it taken away so totally. ( )

Hated it. Sort of liked it. Refused to stop reading it. You can't categorize this book - it's a ghost story (but it's not - it says so right in the beginning - but it is), it's a Freudian book, it's about Victorian life, it's about madness and hysteria, it's misogynistic, it's feminist writinng in its illustration of the hardships of being a woman in Victorian times, it's about the tensions between science and magic/spiritualism, it's about parent/child relationships, it's about marital strife and its impact on the various characters. Basically, it's all those things. I didn't find the ending as annoying as some people. But I didn't enjoy the book.

It was well-written. I admire how the male author can so clearly get into the mind of a mother/female. It dragged on forever.

But what drove me craziest was if only the husband and wife would have TALKED to each other, there would be no need for me to listen to all those hours of book. I could not live in Victorian times. ( )

With echoes of "Turn of the Screw" and "Fingersmith," this is an enthralling novel. It is beautifully written, playing with the reader's desire for a clear understanding by offering only brief glimpses at possible truths. Is the girl Angelica molested by spirits, drawn there by her parents' marriage difficulties? Is her father horribly abusing her whilst hiding this fact even from himself? Is her mother falling into madness as the memories of her own abuse bubble up from where she repressed them?

The key passage, I think, comes as Joseph listens to a twisting story by the pompous Dr. Miles: "The tale did not stop here, but turned upon itself at least three more times before Joseph lost all track of who had been guilty, mad, or worthy of his sympathies...the meanings of both the murder and the marriage shifted, guilt fluttered from one shoulder to the next...."

But in the end, we find that these shifting points of view are all Angelica's attempt to please her psychotherapist by speculating on her childhood tragedy, and she herself refuses to pin things down, because these stories do not point to the truth but only to other points of view: "a machine of four jagged wheels, their interlocking teeth made only for each other." ( )

I finished Angelica by Arthur Phillips and found it very good - unsettling and haunting. It is an unusual Victorian ghost/supernatural story told from 4 viewpoints..the effect, of which, presents a sort of intriguing puzzle as to what really happened. But it's much more than a ghost story as it touches on various topics with regard to the 1880's like: gender roles, madness, science & the medical profession, the attraction of spiritualism and fledgling psychoanalysis. I was drawn to this book from Elizabeth Hand's review in The Washington Post; here are her last lines from the review:
...Phillips is not just trotting out the familiar, gibbering spectacle of "the madwoman in the attic." Instead, his profoundly unsettling achievement is to demonstrate the terrible hold that childhood traumas have not just on their victims but on those who seek to help them: the slippery and dangerous nature of memory, and the futility of believing that we can ever exorcise a demon when the demon's story is our own. ( )

I did not like this book... actually couldn't get into it, didn't care about it and didn't want to read more. I kept trying to read it, thinking it had to get better, that at some point I would care what was going on in the creepy Barton house... but I didn't. Maybe it was the strange prose style, maybe it was lack of character development, I don't really know. I didn't feel like the author was telling me enough to make me care about the plot or characters at all. I would not recommend.

When Cosntance marries Joseph Barton, she believes she's found the perfect husband and protector. But three miscarriages and one troubled birth later, Constance begins to fear Joseph. She keeps their daughter Angelica in the bedroom to protect the girl, but eventually Joseph orders the practice to stop. Unsure what to think of her husband and concerned for Angelica's safety, Constance feels her dread grow when she senses a supernatural presence in the house. She seeks the help of a spiritualist, but it may already be too late.