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

with this everlasting feeling of despair, pain and sorrow that your wards feel at all times, and
that is consequently and endlessly felt by every angel. He takes her to a basement of a house
where a man is mistreating his dog. Mestraal uses this as a simple example for Freya, in order
to show her the amount of cruelty that a person can inflict on an animal or another human
being. “’This bothers you?’ Mestraal said. ‘You think this is the worst thing a human being is
doing now in the world?’ (…) ‘But what about all my other wards? I can’t be with them at the
same time as this man. Do you think that none among them is suffering greater indignity than
this dog?’” (McNish, 2007, 208). With this, Mestraal begins to unravel a reality that is both
sad and utterly painful and horrifying. He speaks of all the millions of people requiring an
angel’s help and comfort, and even though an angel’s nature lies in doing exactly this, in the
end, it is never enough. He confides to Freya that both he and all the other angels would want
nothing more than to materialise before their wards, show them that they really exist, that
there is someone there for them to take away their anguish, even momentarily; but what
would that come to? “Do you think they are content? No, instead they come to depend on us
even more. After we reveal ourselves a few even put themselves deliberately in danger to test
us. […] What would the worst of you be like if you knew for sure we existed?” (McNish,
2007, 215). This last question raised by Mestraal gives Freya and the readers much to consider
and illuminates notions of dependency and responsibility. As will also be shown in the
following section, one version of faith in the narrative, as articulated by Mestraal, is presented
as problematic in that it is inescapably linked to feelings of dependency and an unceasing
appeal and request for attention, comfort and care that may become consuming and selfish. In
Mestraal’s argument that humans’ knowledge of angelic existence would maximize this need,
McNish is presenting both Freya and the readers with difficult and complicated concepts of
human behaviour. He is not simply deconstructing the notion of making difficult choices
every single day, but also showcasing how gruelling a process it can become. Mestraal’s
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