The adversary in no man's land
cover artist: Julia Lloyd
This is my first Daniel Kraus and I came to it because it won a prize and because I’ve been on something of a horror kick the last few months. In case you didn’t know Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and another of his novels, Whalefall, is about to hit cinemas.
This is by way of saying I don’t think I would have picked this up if it wasn’t for Kraus being seen by other people first. Talk about the things you love, folks.
It’s also a novel that’s quickly become (in)famous for its treatment of punctuation. Angel Down is told as a single sentence. There are people who’ll raise their eyebrows at that, others who’ll say that books should cater for the reader first. I have no time for either. I love it when writer’s play with the form of the novel as much as the text. Sure, it doesn’t always work and sometimes it’s clear the writer thinks they’re cleverer than they are but so what? Personally I think we should reward ambition and intensity and reaching for the edges of things.
Still, stuff like this can be a gimmick and by that I mean they add nothing to the narrative, the sense and atmosphere of the novel itself.
Kraus’ first big achievement then is to make this structure work. He does it in a specific way that allows you as the reader to breathe while also rendering the entire story urgent and immanent in a way that more conventional punctuation would have missed.
This urgency, the quasi-stream of consciousness that Kraus invokes on the page is essential to the tale he builds over the course of the book and I didn’t even notice I’d not seen a full stop until three or four pages in. Then I noticed and then I thought hard about what it was accomplishing and then I relished getting back to the rest of it.
The story itself follows one Private First Class Cyril Bagger; scumbag, conman, son of a bishop who lost his faith and, mostly, concerned with surviving the first world war no matter who else dies in the process.
Bagger has spent most of his life insulating himself from feelings towards his fellow man. He’s done this because feelings make it harder to steal from rubes, fools and the greedy and these folks are Bagger’s congregation.
If his father is a bishop, in one of the endless self-made Puritan inspired American expressions of Christianity, then Bagger is his own sort of preacher – one of confidence and misplaced faith, of chance and getting ahead of those around you. Bagger’s view is the distillation of the American dream – the idea that you can make it big built on the truth that if you do others can’t. Krauss illuminates in swift strokes of the pen how the American Dream is built on a zero sum game where for you to win many others have to lose.
And Private Bagger is determined to win that game – other people are his stepping stones.
The thing is, in the battalion in which Bagger serves (and swindles soldiers around him to go over the top on his behalf), there are very few good men of his acquaintance.
On a morning when the familiar screams of the wounded fill the air from no man’s land, Bagger and four of the worst soldiers in the battalion are left behind by their commander as the rest of the unit marches away. Their mission? To find and 'help' the person screaming. By which they know to kill them as that’s the easiest thing they can do.
Kraus has the patter and feelings of these fellows down – he has done the work to make this feel like a specific time and place. Attitudes, technology, experiences are all there situating Kraus’ characters in the most miserable of trenches at the end of WWI.
I think this would be enough to tell a story with. Erich Maria Remarque did it with All Quiet On The Western Front and told one of the most profound anti-war stories ever seen.
Kraus does something different here. This setting, with its horror – body, social, political and existential – morphs into something altogether different when they discover that the person wailing in no man’s land is no wounded soldier but something altogether different.
Retrieving an unconscious body whose appearance none of them can agree on save to say it’s a woman (clean and unspoiled by mud, war or time).
Krauss departs here, using this woman’s presence to help outline each of Bagger’s comrades, to show them at their weakest and most venal, their most desperate and most vulnerable. None of these men are good but none of them are quite intentionally evil either.
Don’t get me wrong, part of Krauss’ theme here is that men do evil things and relish them for the benefits they bring them. However, he’s also quite clear that it is this equation, that evil brings good things to those performing the evil deeds, drives so much suffering and harm.
Krauss doesn’t say that this justifies acts or even that the perceived and actual benefits of doing evil last. He just carefully lays out how ordinary people are quite capable and willing to do evil to others if it helps them get what they want in the moment. It’s not even that they’re great planners – a momentary feeling of satisfaction can be enough. We see this in the acts of complying in advance we have observed in the USA since White Supremacists came to power there. For each valorous act of resistance there are the equivalent acts of cowardice, complicity and collusion.
Bagger and his comrades are prepared to suffer so long as it means those around them suffer more. Kraus is clear each of these men are traumatised but he also makes it clear that these men brought nothing but themselves to the war and those selves were already primed to walk paths in which other peoples’ suffering was a price they were happy to see paid.
War is misery, says Kraus, but war exists because we make it and where then the blame?
I don’t want to say too much about the story here – it is an gossamer thing which rewards a lightness of expectation and a lack of foreknowledge, especially around who this woman is and what she wants. I'm going to elide the way Kraus treats the uncanny too. It is good but nothing special in its own right. It's the service to which he puts it I find especially interesting.
Suffice to say that Kraus is, I think, playing with our ideas of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions not simply with the story but with the way he’s written the book. Bagger is human. In the end he can’t escape feeling things for the people around him. He hates this as much as it’s a salve for his soul. Kraus isn’t writing a Disney movie here – the real story isn’t the friends he makes along the way.
But it is about the choices we make – the ones we barrel through and feel are inevitable because we are hemmed in on all sides as well as the power to stop and choose something different, something new, something that can break not just us but the world around us.
There are revelations that Kraus delivers to people who think about changing but often cannot, or who might try, but have no moral muscles and so can’t make it stick. The weight is too heavy to lift. So they find change hard and leave it untried.
Angel Down is a horror novel. It is a speculative novel. It is an anti-war novel. It is a novel about the American Dream. Most of all it is a novel about how, across our entire lives, it might be that only one choice matters and how we might miss it because we sleepwalk through life without considering what we do and how it changes us and the world around us.
It’s not about agency per se, it’s about moments when who we are and what we choose matters, about how the rest of our lives might seem full of choice but are, really, expressions of us playing in tiny little prison cells where we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking we’re acting across the entire world.
Krauss, in the end, skewers the idea of agency as the supreme good in the same way a tender philosopher might skewer the idea that free will is absolute and he does so with the uncanny and the otherworldly sitting in judgement of our hubris.
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The Math
Highlights:
- One freaking sentence
- Layered, thoughtful and mystical
Reference: Krauss, Daniel, Angel Down [First Atria Books, 2025].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
