Miss Garnet's Angel

Product Information

The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other…. 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.' 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.

Both Julia and Harriet were dutifully pro-labour, even deriving a sense of moral superiority - or at least moral purity - from the connection. But beneath the austere surface, Julia Garnet was hungry for adventure, for travel, and, most unexpectedly, for beauty, the latter having been limited to admiring the inherent loveliness of flowers in other people's gardens. Julia was starved for joy and she was shrinking into oblivion when her housemate's sudden death changed everything and brought Julia face to face with with her surprising destiny. 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. What was the germ for Julia Garnet’s story? What is it that drew you to Venice and the Book of Tobit as the setting and occasion for your novel? 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. In 2000 her first novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, was published to word-of-mouth acclaim, and she subsequently became a full-time writer. She widely contributes to newspaper and magazines, and to the BBC. [ citation needed]

Success!

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? Julia Garnet is a thoroughly straightlaced and cautious elderly woman who was a schoolteacher and is now very recently retired. Her flatmate, Harriet, dies 2 days after they both retired, and the elderly cat, that has lived with them a good number of years, disappears. Julia's lifetime of caution is dulled and she decides on the spur of the moment to spend 6 months in Venice. Thus begins a journey where caution is gradually thrown to the wind, where she learns how to make friends, and discovers art, love and mystery. 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. 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.

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. 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. This was the biggest challenge in writing the book and in fact I completely rewrote the Tobit/ Tobiassections. The first shot was too Biblical —you can’t beat the original and it felt too much like a parody. So I scrapped it and tried for something old and plain —different from the more complex syntax of the Venetian sections. But I kept a cadence —a rhythm —which I do take from the —matchless —Authorised Bible. I write both from and for the ear and in fact the Tobit/Tobias sections are now almost my favourites. I was pleased at having some first person narrative to mix with the third person and i think it is what give the book its particular texture, which many people are kind enough to say is part of the richness of the book. 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.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. Give us the inside scoop on your writing regimen: How many hours a day do you devote to writing? Do you outline the complete arc of your narrative early on? Do you draft on paper or at a keyboard? Do you have a favourite location or time of day (or night) for writing? What do you do to avoid distractions? 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.