The secular angel in contemporary children's literature: David ...

where Luke and Tate are standing in an alley: Mestraal immediately knows that Tate is about
to harm Luke, yet, once again, he does not intervene.
Mestraal is a character whose qualities change alarmingly throughout the narrative, and
a persona that is equally beautiful and ugly, evil and benevolent, hated and loved. He
represents, in fact, the epitome of what Blake suggested when speaking of the Contraries, and
of the contradicting faculties that make up and complete the soul. How can beauty exist
without ugliness, and how can good be defined without the presence of evil? Mestraal is an
angel whose “body was so impenetrably dark that the brickwork on the building beneath was
nearly erased by the sheer depth of its shadow. […] There was a face of some kind there, but
it was hideous —as if the angel had chosen the nose, eyes and lips of the most deformed
people in the world to be its own” (McNish, 2007, 20). The description is as terrifying as the
angel itself, and the fact that the author has chosen to introduce him in this particular state, at
his worst, without explaining that he was once the most beautiful and powerful, suggests that
he wants the reader to hate him first; that is, to have no preconceptions about who he was and
what he has become, but what he is right now. In fact, what the author is doing is allowing the
reader to assume binary oppositions between good and evil or light and dark which are then
challenged and complicated. In this, McNish seems to follow Pullman’s example, by
suggesting that the line between these contraries is not always clearly defined, and one should
withhold judgment before examining further. These contraries suggest fixed states of being
while all the novels analysed in the thesis show how both humans and angels have the
potential to change or transform.
The reader is told that this appalling appearance is the result of his own free will and
decision to manifest as such in front of Freya. Hestron tells Freya that “[the angels] fashion
[themselves] in the image of those they love’: ‘We can never make up our minds what face
among our wards to use, whose features we should cherish most’ (McNish, 2007, 153). This
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