The Rebel Angels

The Rebel Angels is novel by Canadian author Robertson Davies. 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 (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988).

Like the rest of the Cornish Trilogy, the novel takes place in the same universe as the Deptford Trilogy, with the major characters Clement Hollier and John Parlabane being alums of Colborne College (the college where Dunstan Ramsay taught history in Fifth Business) and former classmates of Boy Staunton's son David.

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:

The defrocked monk Parlabane, a brilliant and sinister sodomite with a thundering voice and 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.