The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West

Walsh (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace), former music critic at Time, discusses nearly 100 musical, artistic, and literary works, from the epic of Gilgamesh to a Tom Wolfe novel, to illustrate “the soul of the West” and how it supposedly is threatened. Exactly what that soul is, however, Walsh never succinctly spells out; it seems to involve a struggle of God and good against Satan and evil, as well as heroic struggles by (male) protagonists, sometimes against fate. Unfortunately, Walsh’s style is often rambling; he doesn’t build an argument so much as make claim after unsupported claim. He undermines his credibility with blanket statements, some counterfactual, such as that women entering the workforce has caused “an effective halving of the family’s income” because of additional expenses in “child care, meals, etc.” Other assertions are simply bizarre (“Homer has more to teach about governance than Harvard, and always will”). Walsh will lose many readers with his mini-tirades against the “satanic” Left; feminists, whom he contemptuously sees as obsessed with “transvestism, transsexuality, and non-gender-specific personal pronouns”; and Muslim refugees, who he claims have turned “English cities [into] hotbeds of radical Islamic theology [and] Pakistani rape gangs.” Aside from educating readers about important cultural artifacts, this diffuse, often bilious work does little, if anything, to advance the author’s goal of uncovering “the soul of the West.” (May)