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KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS.

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This book cries out for a different rating system - perhaps a 1-10 scale. Even then one would have to reward an "11" for this magnificent tome. I could not find a single flaw in the entire reading - character development and portrayal was realistic yet unforgettable, the setting mesmerizing (one is instantly transported back to the time of the Inquisition and the faith-filled, simple lives of the city dwellers) and the plot was perfect.

I have read criticism that the tale was not realistic or made suppositions and assumptions that are not exactly correct in the historical sense. But what one should remember is that this tale is an allegory, not a documentary. The fictional city is in Spain and the Inquisition is at its high point when a stranger appears. He is intelligent, interesting, and friendly but an unbeliever. He tells of a land in which belief is arbitrary and where one can change their religion - or choose to have no religion at all. This is too much for Church officials for in their eyes murder, torture and lying can be forgiven but also blessed. A trial of sorts is proposed.

Now we have the second story and the joy is how the two are seemlessly weaved into one arc. A child found among the wolves is being raised by nuns. She is not to be given any religious instruction and if she comes to a belief in a Supreme Being the visitor will be found guilty, otherwise he will be judged to be innocent.

The battle is not between atheist and believer. It is a civil war between two schools of thought within Catholicism - the plain folk and their local leaders and a grand inquisitor who employs "unusual" methods for "protecting the faith". The wolf-girl finally is made to make a statement that can be interpreted as belief and Palindo, the visitor, is tortured to confession. When he refuses to follow this up with another confession (which would then validate the previous "confession") he is sentenced to be burned alive at the stake. A lowly follower trades all her material goods for a balm that will bring instant death upon being heated.

The aftermath is a short but appealing denouement. The bishop's assistant announces he cannot believe in a God that seeks obedience through torture. The wolf-girl returns to her solitary mountain home but not before catching a glimpse of a vast naval armada from the foreign land streaming toward the city that burned its citizen. The rewards of sin...

Jill Paton Walsh's "Knowledge of Angels" should havewon the Booker Prize. It is arguably the most outstanding yetaccessible of the five novels that made the shortlist in 1994. Set in the medievial ages, KOA is a brilliant and highly intelligent fable of ideas. Controversial perhaps, but timeless. Even today, we continue to debate the question of whether the concept of God is innate to man or acquired through the intellect and the socialisation process. In the middle ages, certainly during the times of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, it was heretical to espouse the creed of atheism. The crime was punishable by torture and death. The story of Amara (the wolf child), brought up and suckled by wolves before being returned to human society, was to be the great experiment by which learned scholars of the day sought to prove the existence of God. Palinor, the castaway who hails from a world where people live by the principles of humanism, finds his life endangered when his unconventional ideas threaten the orthodoxy of the day. Paton Walsh's novel isn't even specifically about religion or humanism. It is about the need for human society in its search for truth to understand the confining nature of paradigms, to continually challenge conventional wisdoms and reinvent itself, and to practice tolerance if the search for truth is to be served. Astonishing, yet not. "Knowledge of Angels" is a beautifully crafted and highly entertaining novel of ideas that should be read by those who love good literature. I can't recommend it highly enough. END

Knowledge of Angles by Jill Paton Walsh is one of the best books of our time. Its richly illustrated plot was truly unique. We read this book for a high school English class and both agreed that it was one of the best books we've ever read. The story of a wolf-girl slowly interwines with that of a man unjustly persecuted because of his beliefs. A young girl, raised by wolves, is captured by men and brought into the human society. A kindly boy finds help from the Cardinal who in turn decides to perform a religious experiment with her. She is brought to a secluded cloister where she is to be kept without any mention of God in her presence. In this way, the Cardinal tries to find out if there is actually a high spirit, that seems to guide you. This careful experiment soon leads to surprises, that would best have been left unknown. The story of a wrongly persucuted man makes "The Knowledge of Angles" even more amazing. Palinor, a king from an unknown "perfect world" fell off a boat and swam to a nearby island. He is immediatly thought to be an athiest because he neither knows that God exists, or knows that He doesn't. Palinor was put into prison, then released and taken to talk to the Cardinal. His arguments are so convincing that he even has the Cardinal somewhat doubting his faith. The two stories come together to create a very important theme, one of love, hate, God, and sympathy.

The key to unlocking the answers in this novel is the passage before the begining, in which Jill Paton Walsh describes to us the postions angels hold. We, the readers need to amsume this postion in order to understand exactly what it is that Jill Paton Walsh is trying to explore and understand. We are asked not to judge any of the characters as they are all at fault and are all equally right. The way they all behave is true to their beliefs and life style. It is a clever and intriguing novel but i found that to gain full satisfaction from this novel it has to be read al least twice, this in itself is not a difficult task as it is a novel that you could read again and again and each time you would uncover a new and interesting point that would add to the debate that takes place through out the novel. For those who do not want or do not enjoy the hard work or unravelling a novel to its essence, Knowledge of Angels is also a brilliant read at face value and will appeal to a wide audience. It is not about the wrongs and rights of religion, it is an exploration or people and situations using relgion as a setting.

Others have described it well here so I'll just corroborate: you'll want to read it again and again. It's a pleasurable stroll through a Mediterranean island in the middle ages. It's an intellectual exercise between atheist and believer. It's a fascinating story of a child raised by wolves and tamed by nuns. You'll find the characters attractive, believable and intriguing. I highly recommend it.

Two plot-lines interweave: a feral girl-child is found on a mountain, wholly without speech or any other attribute of human culture; and at the opposite scale a highly educated and intelligent man is washed up on the shore. Mountain and shore are both on Grandinsula, a Spanish island at the height of the Catholic Inquisition ruled by its benevolent prince Severo.

With this initial juxtaposition, Walsh sets in train her theme: a careful exploration of belief and unintended consequences. This is a dialectical novel, a novel of ideas guised in naturalistic form. For the washed-up man, Palinor, originates from an impossible land: one in which reason prevails. He finds himself now in a country where religion dominates and therefore the stage is set for a fundamental clash between reason and unreason.

Walsh's poetic genius is to sketch the Catholic protagonists delicately, wtih immense compassion. Yet at the same time she subtly indicates their terrible ignorance, their entire lack of connection to the real world that surrounds them each moment of their lives. They have high office and great power, yet they are astonished when a gypsy woman feeds her baby by the breast - the reality of squirting milk that formerly was assumed by these least-worldly of men to be merely a painter's metaphor. Later, in conversation with Palinor, Severo realises that years earlier he caused to be executed a man who was not evil but rather insane. During every encounter with Palinor the atheist, Severo the Prince of the Church is uncomfortably aware that the atheist is a more attractive and honest person than any other man he has encountered (and indeed more intelligent and honest than Severo himself)- yet his beliefs are in stark opposition to Severo's religious convictions. The core conflict of the book is the conflict in Severo's breast, as he struggles to make sense of the dichotomy he confronts.

Walsh's brilliance is that she largely writes the book from the perspective of the believers, and thus can show step-by-step how they proceed from discourse through torture to final execution. She enables us to move inside the thoughts and feelings of the priests as they struggle with Palinor, and she allows us to feel some sypathy for them even as they collaborate in an atrocity: the torture and murder of an innocent man.

Fine details accrue throughout the story, each lending its infinitesimal mass to the overall construct until the result overwhelms us. At times this is chilling: Walsh's account of the Inquisition is based on real-life records and reminds us that humans have a unique capacity for abstracting violence; the mundane records of the Catholic Inquisition are nauseatingly similar to those of the Gestapo and the KGB.

The novel's necessary flaw is Palinor: for the theme to exist he must be a kind of mythical man, a super-man of sorts, able to reason clearly and maintain a never-wavering attachment to truth above personal considerations. No such man has ever existed, and thus ironically we feel less sypathy for Palinor than we do for the religious men who exterminate him. This is the price the novel must pay for its core theme, and it is worth paying because above all else this is a novel of ideas. All the naturalism of the book serves to insinuate the ideas, to carry them forward.

Ultimately the book is also highly naturalistic because Severo protects his faltering ungrounded faith by sacrificing the good man Palinor to torture and the flames, just as religious people have always done when time and circumstance permits. The self-protection reflex of the human mind is extremely powerful and Walsh is true to life: she sets events in motion and they roll forward with inexorable momentum.

At the very end of the book we see nemisis approaching: the ships of Palinor's home country approaching Grandinsula to discover what has happened to their countryman. When I wrote to Walsh shortly after the original publication of this novel I suggested the approach of the ships was akin to Mr Kurtz's cry in Heart of Darkness: "Exterminate the brutes!" But Walsh kindly replied to correct me, explaining her painful sympathy for Severo as a good man impelled by the logic of his beliefs to perform an evil act. And it is this terrible heart that the novel shows so clearly. While in no way a polemic, Knowledge of Angels shows with crystal clarity and precision how the blanket of religion wraps around what would otherwise be adequate minds and clouds them to the point where they are incapable of recognizing reality from fiction and good from evil. If Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion and Daniel Harbour's book An Intelligent Person's Guide To Atheism approach these issues from a purely intellectual perspective, Knowledge of Angels carries the reader into the most intimate reaches of the problems of religion and enables us to feel terrible sympathy for those who labor under the delusions of faith.

While I can't top Avid's review (see below) for insight and eloquence, I can say that this book will appeal to you even if you're not normally the type interested in vast philosophical questions. Part of Jill Patton Walsh's triumph is that she makes the discussion of ideas so accessible. One truly feels drawn into the world of this tiny Spanish island and the people who live there. And one does not have to be a literary genius to realize that the structuring of this novel is nothing less than symphonic in its brilliance.

I won't reveal the powerful, throbbing revelation that lies at the core of the novel. Know, though, that this book will almost certainly spark your imagination and challenge your assumptions about faith, life and, indeed, the universe.

This story is an especially pertinent discussion of religious intolerance, and how to live a beautiful, joyful, inquisitive life in the face of it. A revealing look at the genuine sources of wonder life grants us.

As an A-level student studying this novel for my English Lit qualification, I read this book with a degree of suspicion. Afterall, why should I study a book about religion when I could have done an RE A-level? After the first few chapters, however, I realised the actual gravity and social importance this book can play in our post-millenium society. The actual theological content will have you thinking about the role an omnicsient force and play in our life, and may even lead you to question your very own moral code. The allorgorical ties were also very stimulationg, as was the attractive narrative of Amara - the wolf-child. Paton-Walsh gives her characters such an intellectual and ethical grounding that we don't even realise the sometimes damning consequence of their actions. So, if you want a severe moral stimulation, coupled with the lush imagery Walsh is so highly regarded for, then buy this book!

I love this book! It is so beautifully written. It's poetic and profound. I have read several of Walsh's books, and all of them have greatly affected me, but none nearly as much as this one.