We believe in angels

Wednesday, 24th February 2010

Nearly 40 per cent of Brits and over 70 per cent of Americans think angels exist. James Walton explores the strange resurgence of faith in heavenly helpers

Among the more neglected victims of the recession have been the authors of misery memoirs — or ‘mis-mems’ as they’re rather heartlessly known in the trade. As if these people hadn’t suffered enough at the hands of their drunken, violent and/or abusive families, the credit crunch brought more bad news. The books sections of supermarkets began to think that misery was something we could now get for ourselves without the help of reading. What they’d offer instead was a bit of comfort: a belief that, despite appearances to the contrary, we’re surrounded by powerful forces with our best interests at heart. In other words, the way was open for the return of angels.

The big angel book of 2010 looks set to be Angelology by Danielle Trussoni, a much-hyped thriller from Penguin, due to be published in April, based on the age-old struggle between human beings and the Nephilim, those pesky descendants of the fallen angels — and complete with a cover-up by the Catholic Church. (Think Dan Brown meets Dan Brown.) But when the Bookseller magazine officially identified the supermarket trend not long ago, the market leader was far more typical of angel titles as a whole.

Angels in My Hair is the autobiography of Lorna Byrne, an Irish woman who claims to have seen angels every day since she was a baby. Not only did the book become a bestseller, achieve six-figure sales in America, attract queues of weeping fans to Byrne’s signings and gather endorsements from the likes of William ‘Ken Barlow’ Roach (‘Lorna beautifully and graphically describes angels and how they work’). It also led to interviews with several newspapers, who quoted Byrne with a remarkable lack of scepticism. ‘I see angels all the time I’m awake,’ she told the Mail. ‘I see people’s guardian angels — we each have one — and other types of angels, too, including archangels and cherubim.’ ‘Their wings,’ she added for the Telegraph, ‘are beautiful beyond words.’

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