TL,DR: Barring some tendency toward bombast and humbug, this novel is compulsively readable, and often uproariously funny.
Note: The Rebel Angels is the first volume in what's called Davies' "Cornish trilogy," but in my experience of reading the books, "trilogy" is a very loose concept, and they can be read in any order.
An academic satire loosely based on Davies' own Massey College in Toronto, The Rebel Angels concerns a small group of scholars, all interested in some way in the past's connections to the present. There's a McGuffin consisting of some unpublished Rabelais material; beautiful, half-gypsy Maria is studying Rabelais; Clem Hollier is her faculty supervisor; Simon Darcourt teaches New Testament Greek to Maria; the loathsome Urquhart McVarish has slyly got hold of the Rabelais MS; and John Parlabane, a gay drug-addict defrocked monk, appears as a trickster figure to confound them all. All the men, even Parlabane, are interested in Maria to one degree or another.
A popular method of dream interpretation is to see all the figures within a dream as representations of the dreamer, and it could be said that Davies approaches his novel the same way. When they're arguing with each other, Davies is arguing with himself. This could be insufferable, except that Davies is so funny and interesting. He is large, he contains multitudes.
That said, his characters all sound more or less the same: Maria, the 20-year-old student, and Simon, the 50ish priest, trade off the narration of this novel, but if you chose a page at random, you'd be hard pressed to tell which one is speaking.
Davies' attitude toward sex is hard to make out: he's not a prude, and he certainly recognizes the power of sex, but his characters—not very realistically—nearly all seem willing, nay relieved, not to have to have it. There's a lot of earnest talk about how much more fulfilling friendships are. That doesn't stop Davies from describing, via John Parlabane, a perverse sex scene that is a hilarious and amazing bit of comic grotesque. If you ask me, the book is very much worth reading for that scene alone
by arrec