Heartbreak, Love and Hope

“There was good love and there was bad love. There was the kind that helped raise a person above her failings and there was the desperate sort that struck when someone least wanted or expected it.” This might be the true underlying theme of Alice Hoffman’s book, The Third Angel.

Once again Alice Hoffman pulls in some of the mysterious, supernatural elements of life to tell this story than spans three generations. The thread she uses to weave this together is, however, subtle and understated. It’s not the thread that keeps you reading--the thread doesn’t completely become apparent until the last pages.

The Third Angel is a simple, yet complex book. It consists of three novellas about three women, each in a different time. Beginning in 1999, the first story is of Maddy, the sister of the bride-to-be, who falls in love with the wrong man, Paul her sister’s fiancé. The theme of ill-fated love helps tie the mini-stories together through time. This story is set in London with Maddy staying at the Lion Park Hotel—another thread woven through the story.

Earlier, in 1966, Paul’s mother, Frieda Lewis, worked at the Lion Park Hotel, where she was living out her own fantasy of independence. Her father wanted her to be the physician he knew she was capable of becoming but she instead escaped (it was, after all the mid 1960s a period of rebellion) to work as a maid. She too, became involved with the wrong man and found herself in a potentially disastrous love triangle that was laced with drugs, money, and bad love.

Earlier yet, in 1952, twelve-year old Lucy Green, the future mother of Maddy, is accidentally drawn into events that changed the Lion Park Hotel and many lives. Again, a love triangle has disastrous outcomes and young Lucy becomes more than just a bystander, but an active participant. One room at the hotel was haunted. Maddy discovered that, Frieda knew that, and Lucy observed the beginnings of the haunting. The ghost of room 707, and the man apparently connected to the love triangle that created the ghost, appears in each story. We discover that Lucy, many years later, holds the key for resolving the ghostly dilemma and for tying the seemingly incomplete tales together.

Regarding Dilemma,
Alice Hoffman has been a go-to author for me. When I need reliably good fiction as an escape from my regular non-fiction, I go to her books. The touch of supernatural, the beautiful descriptions, the well-crafted characters and the wonderfully told stories have always been highly readable. She generally provides enough detail and complexity to keep me guessing and they consistently offer quality summer reading. I found too many distractions in The Third Angel.

In 1999 Maddy is told that “love has nothing to do with the here and now” and her sister’s beautiful tale about The Heron’s Wife weaves this first story of betrayal together. When this ended and I moved on to Frieda’s narrative, I was disgruntled wanting Maddy's incomplete story to continue. That feeling repeated with Frieda and again with Lucy. Each novella was a well-crafted introductory tale and potential start to a complete stand-alone novel. Each ended abruptly as Hoffman moved us into the next time period.

Hoffman introduces her trademark supernatural element through both Room 707 and its ghostly inhabitants as well as through references to the three angels: the Angel of Death, the Angel of Life and the Third Angel, “the one who walked among us, who sometimes lay sick in bed, begging for human compassion.”

On the surface this appears to be about the hotel and room 707. It serves to warn about the outcomes of disastrous love triangles. “Love is ancient and mysterious and you can’t mess with it. If you do it just backfires and you meet with disaster. That’s a fact.” You will probably find yourself returning to reread the first pages once you complete the book. Maddy’s story becomes more than just a bored, self-centered powerful woman’s musings; it ties into the concluding tale that took place 47 years earlier.

Frieda explains that regarding the third angel "You can't even tell if he's an angel or not. You think you're doing him a kindness, you think you're the one taking care of him, while all the while, he's the one who's saving your life." The three angels tend to travel together, but you never know which one will stay to finish their task. Both Frieda and Maddy had their angels while Lucy, well, you need to decide for yourself but she spent more than 40 years searching for a release from personal torments.

Fans of Alice Hoffman will enjoy The Third Angel, although, like me, they won’t find this a favorite addition to their collections. The third angel metaphor was over-used and remained incomplete. The three stories were left unfinished. Yet, the one thread that wove through, that of Room 707, demonstrated Alice Hoffman’s talent for deftly extracting overlapping events to create an unsettling and memorable tale of love, betrayal and loss.