Miss Garnet's Angel

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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. 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. A projected non-fiction book about The Book of Common Prayer and entitled Sweet and Comfortable Words was never published. What parallels and distinctions might we draw between the lives of Julia and the Monsignore? Although they’ve both been given, for much of their lives, to starkly different philosophical ideologies, what fundamental beliefs and traits do the two of them share? She travels to Venice, falls in unrequited love, meets new friends, solves a crime and experiences some good things and some not so good. She probably participates more in life in these few months than in all her previous years.

This is a tough book to describe, it reads like literature, with a strong reliance on the setting - mostly Venice - and characterisation of the protagonist. Julia Garnet is, among other things, a woman struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by her father’s censure and abuse. How successful, finally, has she been in doing so? Again I didn’t go about it —it arose as and when needed. I don’t plan, as I say, but I find ideas, and characters, arise like helpful genies when I need them. I loved finding some of the minor character in ‘Miss Garnet’ — Signora Mignelli, for example, Julia’s highly practical and unselfconsciously mercenary landlady, or Mr Akbar —the man who buys her flat an gives her fake champagne and plays her Elvis —I don’t know where he came from; or Mr Mills, the junior senior partner in the firm of solicitors, from whom she accepts coffee, even though it disagrees with her. That’s what the Mr Mill’s of this world make us do. This is a book of stories —stories within stories, stories complementing stories, stories refracting and reshaping the elements of older stories. The strange beauty of Venice, with its spectacular architecture and abundance of art pregnant with history and ancient mysticism, storms Miss Garnet’s staunch English reserve and challenges her socialist ideology. For the first time in her life she falls in love —with Carlo, a charming art dealer with twinkling eyes and a white moustache —and her spirit, once awakened, is liberated further by her friendships with a beautiful Italian boy called Nicco and an enigmatic pair of twins engaged in restoring the fourteenth-century Chapel-of-the-Plague. It is her discovery of a series of paintings in the nearby Church of the Angel Raphael, however, that leads finally to Julia’s transformation and reassessment of her past. Intrigued by the paintings, Julia begins unraveling the story they tell of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, an ancient tale depicting a quest of faith and redemption. At the same time, she embarks on a quest of her own to recover losses —not only personal losses but also a priceless angel panel that goes missing from the Chapel, along with one of the twins restoring it.

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Tell us about your research into the Apocrypha, the Middle East of ancient times, and Venice. Can we look forward to reading more about these topics in upcoming books? I’ve honestly lost count of how many times I’ve read this book..four times, maybe five.....there is something about it that appeals to me, and I list it among my all time favourites. 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. As Venice works it’s magic on Miss Garnet, she falls in love......with Venice, with its splendid buildings and waterways, with her new life, and, with an enigmatic man she meets by chance.....and with an Angel.... 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?

No one in any of my books is based on anyone —other than myself. All my characters are aspect on my own selves —and the more successful the character I would say the more unconscious the self. One marvellous feature of being a novelist is that it allows for the possibility of living unlived aspects of the personality —to explore these is part of the reward of writing. The habits of a lifetime are not easy to break and Julia seeks out a fairly basic lodging except for one detail: the balcony that presents to her view the glory of Venice's architecture and that indescribable light that so intrigued artists from da Vinci to Canaletto and beyond. From her tiny perch above the teeming canals, Julia Garnet will dive into a life she could not have imagined. Friends had been few and somewhat cold-blooded in England but from her first day in Venice Julia seemed to attract an amazing number of interesting and talented people and for possibly the first time in her life, she fell in love. Not once but twice. And one of the objects her love was - of all things - an Angel. An Archangel to be more precise. A beautiful androgynous Archangel whose presence seemed to follow her around the floating city. His name was Raphael. A nicely told and rather quiet story, that did not really meet my interests, but probably very nice for the right target group. One of a quartet of "London" novels republished by Harvill, Green's book is more curiosity than essential read. It is set during the Blitz and centres on Richard Roe, a diffident man who comes to London from a well-heeled country estate to volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Service. Roe, the archetypal, tight-lipped English widower, who "wished that he had never made a point of not kissing Christopher", his five-year-old son, is contrasted with the professional fireman, Pye. Neither the war as whole, nor even the Blitz, impinges much on the narrative - both men are frighteningly at sea in personal emotional anguish - but fear hangs like a pall over this sombre novel. 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.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. Miss Garnet, ein ältliches, frisch pensioniertes Fräulein und ehemalige Lehrerin begibt sich für ein halbes Jahr nach Venedig, um die dortigen Kirchen und Kunstschätze zu studieren. Auf dieser Reise findet und verliert sie eine Liebe, findet Freunde und verliert sich seltsam tief in religiösen Mythen. The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other….

I'm not sure I would not have read to the end of this book if it hadn't been a book club book. It was just too bland. It could have been called 'Miss Garnet goes abroad (but not very far) and almost makes a few friends.' 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)? Miss Garnet's Angel is a clever and beautiful tale infused with a touch of mysticism and wonder. Miss Garnet is a very rational retired teacher with communist sympathies who late in life discovers that there is far more to life than her narrow outlook. As Miss Garnet's prejudices are gradually swept away she discovers friends in unexpected places and becomes increasingly caught up in the story behind a old painting of Tobias and the Angel. You wouldn't think that Miss Garnet's Angel would be the book to get me out of my slump. It was definitely not SO GOOD or SO WONDERFUL, but it did keep me engaged (ish. More on this later).In 2011 she contributed a short story, "Why Willows Weep", to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology had helped the Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees. [10] She has also published two volumes of short stories, 'Aphrodite's Hat' and 'The Boy Who Could See Death.' I went into this with all my warning lights flashing: it's gonna be spiritual (and I'm not), "oh god, there's gonna be romance" (ew); and "she's gonna see angels, isn't she?" This was probably unfair to the author, but that hasn't stopped me before. Oh dear —should a writer, I wonder, be allowed the luxury of an ideal reader? Since you’ve tempted me I suppose I might hope to have deepened the reader’s sense of life’s rich possibility, and sense of the value inherent in apparently unimportant people and things. I have an acute sense of life’s prodigality —its hidden resources and splendour if we only care to look. And I have a special dislike of the conviction of being ‘right’ —I hope the book might dislodge some certainties and liberate a kind of creative subversiveness. 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.

Near the end of the novel, Julia encounters a young woman on a train named Saskia. As they talk, Julia experiences “the strangest sensation.” And later, Julia reflects that “the meeting had crystallized something for her.” What has happened here? What issues of identification, regret, and mutual recognition might Julia be coming to terms with in this scene? 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.Julia Garnet is sixty years old, emotionally repressed, sexually inexperienced and has spent her life in almost sacrificial frugality. She is also the amazed heir to her former - even more frugal - housemate's legacy. Harriet seems to have had a secret: a genius for investment! Who knew? Certainly not Julia Garnet.