Miss Garnet's Angel

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She makes new friends, and meets new, interesting people, including a young man and woman, twins, who are restoring a series of panels depicting the tale of Tobias and the Angel, a story which is told in the Apocrypha, and which holds a strange fascination for Julia. Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism, and her first name 'Salley' is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for ' willow' (cognate with Latin: salix, salicis), as in the W B Yeats poem, " Down by the Salley Gardens", a favourite of her parents. [ citation needed] A rich, moving, and satisfying tale of a woman engaged at last with the great mysteries of love and life. Beautifully wrought and impressively wise. How do you feel about the popular critical and commercial practice today of sorting contemporary novels into tidy categories: women’s fiction, men’s fiction, gay fiction, romantic comedy, literary fiction, etc.? To what categories have you most often found Miss Garnet’s Angel assigned? I am giving up. Somehow, although it started well and takes place in Venice, I cannot really get interested. Every time I do get into Miss Garnet’s story, I have to read about Tobit (not interesting to me at all, cannot understand why it’s written in the first person), so there it is, life is too short. I’m giving up.

Miss Julia Garnet, spinster and virgin, travels to Venice after the death of her friend Harriet. She discovers more than solace there, something more akin to an awakening. It’s a beautiful premise and is artfully executed, and Venice is the ideal, sumptuous setting for this intriguing mix of stories that Julia’s tale entwines with – my favourite character is the wise and delightful Monsignore Giuseppe, whose presence brings a kindness and affability to the story which I really loved, but while some of the characters fall flat, Julia’s relationship with Venice itself (and the angel Raphael) never does. It is a book that tries to do a lot, but that’s okay because it largely succeeds. Consider the way the author’s narrative establishes dual meanings for “blindness”: as a physical, unalterable condition on one hand, and as a more abstract reference to one’s capacity for empathy, love, or self-awareness on the other. Fair warning: Miss Garnet's Angel is an irresistible force of nature, a mystery with no solution but many possible answers. At the very least, you will question your assumptions about the possibility of "entertaining Angels unaware", the limits of material existence, and the finality of death. Not bad for one book. Did the first-person voices for Tobit and Tobias come easily? What particular sorts of challenges, risks, or liberties came with creating the voice of a Biblical character (and adopting a rhythm, tone, and syntax completely distinct from the narrator of Julia’s story)?There is also plenty of religious mysticism, beautiful descriptions of Venice which make you want to go there at once, and a parallel story within the story. Beauty intrigues us much as a brilliant magician does. Can we trust our senses to give us an accurate picture or are we being subtly deceived? What would happen if just for a moment we suspended our disbelief and let ourselves feel wonder? What would it be like not having to understand something intellectually but actually entering into it, becoming part of the story instead of the critic? Level-headed Julia Garnet succumbs to the charming story of Tobias from the Old Testament Book of Tobit told in paint by the renaissance artist Giantonio Guardi and finding new life at the hands of Toby and Sara, the almost-twins and art restorers Julia discovers in the Church of San Raffaele.The story of Tobit, Tobias, Azarias (Raphael in human form), an unpaid debt, a dog, a giant fish, and a beautiful but tragic bride is unlike anything else in the Judaic Old Testament. We find no jealous, narcissistic Jehovah here. Missing are the blood and gore, the stories of deceit and revenge, the anger and judgment of an implacable god. Here we see the other face of the divine: the gentle strength, the patient wisdom and, ultimately, the blinding radiance of pure spirit. By the time she was at university in the early 1970s she said she had, "crushingly high standards" in writing. "The people I loved were Jane Austen, Conrad, James and Dostoevsky. I felt you had to be in that sort of range. I couldn't just write any old book, so I thought about writing as something separate to earning a living." I am always reading Shakespeare —and, in fact, at present also the Bible, which I am trying to read all through. I am writing on The Book of Common Prayer, so I’m also reading the Prayer Books —so I’m surrounded by what y family call my ‘holy books’. Then I’m reading a lot of poetry for my nest novel —and also quite a bit of philosophy (which I may write about soon). I read almost no contemporary fiction. The last novel I read was Chance by Joseph Conrad. I’m a great devotee of Conrad —when one thinks he wrote not even in his second language but his first, the mind boggles. It makes anything I do seem very unimpressive! And I love detective stories —especially the old-fashioned ones. The novel came out of me almost uninterrupted. But once I had written it I became fascinated with the origins of the story of Tobit and did much research on it —of which a fraction appears in the ‘Authors Note’. I discovered the story has strong Zoroastrian antecedents —and I became very enamoured of the Zoroastrians. It is a religion which, the more I learned of it the deeper its appeals to me. It still exists —and the Parsees are its main inheritors —but what attracts me to it most is its great stress on tolerance —especially religious tolerance, which all of us who have lived through recent troubles must agree has become an urgent necessity in our time. Something which occurred in many small ways throughout the writing of the book: I had written the Epiphany scene before I had realised that the Magi, who visit the Christ child at Epiphany, are for the tribe of the Medians who are Zoroastrian priests; then I had written the important scenes which occur on the bridge by the church of the Angel Raphael, before I had learned that the bridge is a key Zoroastrian image for the threshold of worlds. Perhaps most of all I loved uncovering the role of the dog i the Tobit story —dog’s were not at all popular with the Jews and Tobias’s dog is the only one who gets a good press in the Hebrew scriptures. This is almost certainly because the dog is part of the Zoroastrian element in the story, and for the Zoroastrians the dog was sacred —a psychopomp, one who leads the soul across the threshold of life and death.

Julia Garnet’s life continues to expand as she explores what Venice has to offer, her social life blossoms, and she experiences a spiritual awakening of sorts, as she realises how wonderfully uplifting the religious worship she has shunned for most of her life can be....her life is becoming fuller than it’s ever been. I adore Venice, it's quite unique, and somewhat bewitching, so it's not difficult to imagine how strait laced retired British history teacher and virgin, Julia Garnet, succumbs to its magic, and falls head over heels in love for the first time in her life.This charming book weaves together the apocryphal tale of Tobias with his guardian angel, Raphael, and the story of Miss Garnet's adventures in the magical setting of the city of Venice. A nicely told and rather quiet story, that did not really meet my interests, but probably very nice for the right target group. As the story of Miss Garnets sojourn in Venice unfolds, the story of Tobias and his Angel unfolds alongside, adding a wonderful extra dimension to this book. The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other…. Standing with Vera before The Last Judgement at the Tintoretto church, Julia wonders, “What did it mean to be weighed in a balance and found wanting?” And later, in her journal, she writes, “What does my life really amount to?” How are these questions ultimately resolved?

Well, this may disappoint you but I have no regime whatsoever. I write only when the fit (and it is a kind of fit) takes me —and that might be for ten days on the trot —or not at all for a month. once a book gets going I seem to want to be at it all the time. it’s like a love affair —irresistible —the book is like a secret lover, nothing else is of such interest. Perhaps because of this I write, when I do, very fast. I wrote Miss Garnet in nine months —but, as I am always saying —it took over twenty years to mature in y mind —most of the ideas I want to write about have been mulling about somewhere inside me, linking up with other ideas, for many years. Physically, I write on a, now, quite aged laptop and I have no plan at all other than a kernel of the idea. That grows inside me and then seems to flow down my arms —or not; and if not I stop till they do. Hemon was born in Bosnia, went to the US in 1991, and taught himself to write in English. When fiction crosses the Danube, critics scratching for a suitable adjective to describe Eastern European otherness go for "Nabokovian" or hint at kinship with Kundera. Hemon gets compared to both on the cover of his first collection of short stories. As he writes in artifice-rich prose about loss, exile, and the peculiar tangles of Balkan history (Tito, Stalin and Archduke Ferdinand), those comparisons make sense. He excels at that superficially unserious style that communism bred, but some may find his stylistic gymnastics and clotted prose unsettling.

What sort of a man was Julia’s father? What picture of him emerges to us through Julia’s intermittent recollections? In the end, I think this is someone who actually does write better than Dan Brown trying to write something similar to The da Vinci Code or such, but running up against the same problems: the straining of credulity chief among them. While I welcome this in cheezy mystery fiction, I expect something better from this sort of book.