Miss Garnet's Angel

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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. 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.

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. 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?Introspective, gentle and beautiful are words that describe this. The main character Julia Garnet is an elderly lady who has held herself tightly controlled through most of her life, but upon the death of her friend and roommate through the past 30 years she embarks on a journey to Venice, where she is captured by its beauty and magic, and not least the angel Raphael, depicted in paintings and sculptures around the historical city, seems to have a special grasp on her. We cannot commission desire,” Julia reflects at one point, referring not only to herself but also to Carlo. To what degree, and on what grounds, does Julia come to feel a sense of solidarity with Carlo, of all people? Explain. 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. Venice is a city of Angels but, perhaps more than any, Archangel Raphael is an abiding presence. Identified with healing and with the protection of travellers, he is a fitting avatar for Miss Garnet's adventure and on her first attempt at navigating the complex paths that lead everywhere and nowhere in Venice, she stumbles upon a rather obscure and little known church, the Chiesa San Raffaele. Led by innocent curiosity, she trespasses on an art restoration project - or perhaps I should say a transformation project because conventional, unimaginative Julia Garnet is about to be changed forever.

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. 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. 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. 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. Describe each of the other characters in this novel. Vera. Carlo. The Cutforths. The Monsignore. Sarah. Toby. Azarias. Tobit. What are the motivations underlying their choices and actions?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. Julia Garnet, a retired teacher who has never been in love, seems to belong to that group of disappointed women trapped in the bleak lives that Anita Brookner's readers know so well. But Miss Garnet, soon Julia to everyone she meets, is more robust and adventurous. And she's not exactly conventionally middle-class either: she's a communist and an atheist who disapproves of wealth, religion, and sensual beauty. But much changes when Harriet, the teacher she's lived with in London, dies and Julia decides to go to Venice for six months. There, as she steps off her water taxi at the Campo Angelo Raffael to move into the apartment she's rented, she notices, high up on the Campo's church, statues of an angel, a boy, and a dog. She soon learns that they represent the story from the Apocrypha of Tobias and the Angel Raphael, who exorcised the demons from Tobias's wife Sara (the ancient story is told in sections paralleling the changes in Julia's life). Formerly shy and reserved, Julia now makes friends with her landlady and her son Nicco; an American couple; a charismatic monsignor; and the handsome Carlo, an art historian with whom she falls in love. As she explores Venice, she meets the mysterious twins Toby and Sara, who are restoring a 14th-century chapel where they've found a painting of the Angel Raphael. When both it and Toby disappear, Julia, though by now disappointed in love, rallies to find the painting, help Sara, and live to the full in the city that has taught her how "to learn and enjoy." With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair. 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. Following university she taught children with special needs. [ citation needed] She also taught English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University, specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry. [6] She was also a WEA and further education tutor for adult education classes. [ citation needed] During 2012–13 she was a Royal Literary Fund fellow of her alma mater, Newnham College, Cambridge. [7] Psychotherapy [ edit ]

A story about an English spinster travelling to Venice who develops an overwhelming interest in religious art and Christian myths. 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). 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? 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? 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)?She went on to teach English at the Open University, Oxford and Stanford, specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry. Her first major career move came when she left academia to become an analytical psychologist. "I eventually thought that literature is not a very good academic subject," she explains. "The great writers didn't write to be analysed, they wrote to entertain and to share a vision of human life. It's lovely to sit around drinking coffee and talking about books at Cambridge, but I sort of felt that English is a cheat subject." Throughout the story of Miss Garnet, runs another story, the two tales running alongside each other, but they are also woven together to provide a rich and thoughtful whole. 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?