The Crippled Angel - Sara Douglass

This post will contain spoilers for the whole Crucible series

It is done. I am finished. I have completed the series and (once I've finished writing this, obviously), I never have to think about these books again.

King Richard is deposed, and King Henry IV, Hal Bolingbroke sits on the throne of England, but all is not well. The mysterious death of Richard in his castle of exile has shifted allegiances, and Henry Hotspur, son of the Duke of Northumberland is gathering his forces for a rebellion. The Queen, Mary, is slowly dying, wasting away without providing an heir. For Thomas Neville, beloved of the angels, the time when he will have to choose between heaven and his "demon" wife Margaret is creeping ever closer. Can he hand his soul over in love to a woman he once hated, potentially dooming mankind forever?

Alright, I'm reviewing the last book here. If you've read the other two reviews and still want to read The Crucible trilogy, then I salute your perseverance, but look out for serious spoilers. In fact, this whole paragraph is going to be one big spoiler. For everyone else, let me sum this up for you so you're spared the slog. So, Thomas Neville starts out as a devout, self-righteous, woman-hating spanner on a mission from the Archangel Michael to cast all the demons loose on the earth back down into Hell. Accidently impregnates the woman who will become his wife, Margaret through sorcery (remotely, a man several hundred years ahead of his time), ends up leaving the church to return to his noble roots and support his childhood friend Hal in his quest for the throne, and gradually becomes slightly less of a phenomenal pain in the hoof. Both Hal and Margaret, to Thomas' horror are demons. Except they're NOT. No one is. The "demons" that the angels hate so much are actually the half human spawn of the angels, the product of their very rapey forays down to Earth. The angels hate them because St Michael and his pals are absolute top tier misogynists and these offspring represent the angels inability to "resist" the temptations of "mortal harlots". Considering the mortal women are always asleep when they get their definitely non-consensual heavenly visits, every single one of the angels need to have a serious chat with themselves about what they find tempting. So, Hal is actually the Demon King that everyone was convinced Richard was. Thomas is beside himself. He has to choose between his precious (rapey) angels having a hold on earth forever and a his "Demon King" and "demon" wife, who's main sins at this point, seem to mostly be that they're pretty socialist and want to break the hold that the church has on society. Still with me? Cool. It gets wilder. So then we find out that Jesus Christ is also a "demon", the offspring not of God (because there isn't one, just the collective will of the angels), but of every combined angel. Poor Virgin Mary. Thomas frees (white) Jesus from his heavenly prison, and Jesus then gets to bounce around being a bit of a deus ex machina whenever needed. Eventually the historical stuff is dealt with - Hal puts down the Hotspur rebellion and heads back over to France to seize that throne because why would one country ever be enough for anyone, and Thomas must finally make his choice - the angels and their continued chokehold on humankind, or Margaret and her socialist future (not socialist enough to abolish the nobility though, let's not go too wild). LAST MINUTE TWIST - turns out the angels love Thomas so much because he IS AN ANGEL HIMSELF, which also explains why he used to hate women so much. Thomas rejects his angelic roots and wants so desperately to give his soul to Margaret but he can't do it because a) although he loves her now, he feels like she tricked him into it which is a bit of a sticking point, and b) the choice must be that he begs a "whore" to take his soul, which Margaret definitely isn't. "How will this be resolved?" I hear you cry! With a super contrived, super convenient plot twist, that's how! Remember Queen Mary, Hal's wife? Probably not, but bear with me. All the way through book 2 and 3, she's been slowly dying, but she's also been an absolute unproblematic treasure, and Thomas has come to trust and confide in her, loving her in a totally platonic way. Shortly before the Big Choice, she's murdered by Archangel Michael in what seems like a totally random move, but then we realise why, when she materialises, along with Jesus, at the moment of the Big Choice. It JUST SO HAPPENS that Mary is actually the reincarnation (don't ask me how) of Mary Magdalene, the biblical sex worker that Jesus loved, so Thomas can conveniently hand his soul over to her in love, thus saving the world from the angels. Thomas then casts the angels down into hell, and seals it forever, and that, boys and girls, is why we don't get miracles any more. And everyone lives happily ever after, the end. Except for Hal who actually kinda turns into a bit of an antagonist but is slowly, over a period of months, being drowned by sentient French mud (again, don't ask).

And breathe. Reading it back like that, it really does sound like a wild ride but in actual fact, if you read it in real time, it's pretty dull. All the infuriating stuff happened in book 1 and all exciting stuff happened in book 3, with not much in between. And if there's a lot of things in that summary that don't seem to make sense, it's because there are plot holes absolutely everywhere. So we know that the angels created the Christian church in order to keep mankind in check from their heavenly realm but what actually are the angels? How on earth did Queen Mary end up being the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene? How did Thomas end up an angel - was he created from scratch or an existing angel with a bad case of amnesia? I have honestly no idea. What I do know is that once again the women are the stars of the show, and there's not a single man in any of these books that deserve them.

Obviously the central plot point of this book is Thomas' choice, and we're never allowed to forget it - a common theme in these books I feel. Where in book one we were reminded what worthless harlots women are every other page, in this book it's whether or not Thomas will be able to give his soul to a whore. He's ruminating on it. Everyone else is obsessed with it. Margaret pesters him about it so often that honestly I'm not surprised that Thomas doesn't decide to choose the angels just because he's so sick to death of it being nagged about it. The whole plot is just a bit heavy handed, and the same goes for the religious themes. What started out intriguing ended up being pretty clunky and in-your-face, and, as you can tell from the summary above, it just doesn't really make sense.

One good thing I can say about this instalment is that they FINALLY gave me the Black Death that the blurb writers have been promising since the first book. Given that's one of the things that made me buy the damn thing in the first place, it's pretty gratifying that we finally get round to it. Ironically, this is the only one of the three that doesn't mention the pestilence on the back. Go figure. The downside of this is that it's magical plague and it's miraculously over and everyone suddenly well again once Queen Mary tells the heaven-sent black dog that's spreading it to clear off. I wish I was kidding. I actually think parts of the blurbs may have been misprinted on these editions? Because this one definitely talks about Wat Tyler and the Peasant Rebellion, both of which were permanently quashed in book 2. That would make a lot more sense than Voyager publishing house deliberately trying to disappoint me, I suppose.

And there we have it. The end of The Crucible series, and I still haven't figured out why it's called The Crucible. I'd like to say I've learned a valuable lesson about judging a book by its cover, but I'm probably going to the exact same thing next time I'm in a second hand book shop and buy some random fantasy based on how fantastic the cover is. So I've learned nothing at all. I'm convinced it will pay off at some point, and at the very least I'll be generating blog content.