Miss Garnet's Angel
Salley Vickers, 2000
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452282971
Summary
Stories magically unfold within this novel’s irresistible tale of Miss Julia Garnet, a schoolteacher who decides, after the death of her longtime friend Harriet, to take an apartment for six months in Venice. Soon overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the city and its magnificent art, Miss Garnet’s English reserve begins to melt away. For the first time in her life she falls in love—with an art dealer named Carlo—and her once ordinary world is further transformed by a beautiful Italian boy, Nicco, and an enigmatic pair of twins engaged in restoring the fourteenth-century Chapel-of-the-Plague.
Most affecting to Julia, though, is her discovery in a local church of panels depicting the ancient tale of Tobias and the Angel. As Julia unravels the story of Tobias’s redemption, she too strives to recover losses—not just her own but also the priceless painting of an angel that goes mysteriously missing from the Chapel along with one of the twins restoring it. His name is Toby.
And Miss Garnet herself may prove to be an angel, but nowhere in this haunting, beautifully textured and multilayered novel is anything quite what it appears to be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—Liverpool, UK
• Reared—Stoke-on-Trent and London
• Education— Cambridge University
• Awards—judge, Booker Prize (2002)
• Currently—lives in London, UK
Salley Vickers is an English novelist whose works include the word-of-mouth bestseller Miss Garnet's Angel, Mr. Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus myth to Sigmund Freud in the last months of his life. Her books touch on big philosophical themes of religion, art, creativity and death. She also writes poetry.
She was born in Liverpool in 1948. Her mother was a social worker and her father a trades union leader, both members of the British communist party until 1956 and then very committed socialists. She was brought up in Stoke-on-Trent and London, and read English Literature at Cambridge University. Following this, she taught children with special needs and then English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University and was a WEA and further education tutor for adult education classes.
She then trained as an Jungian analytical psychotherapist, working in the NHS and also specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked. She gave up her psychoanalytic work in 2002, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology. She now writes full time and lives in London.
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' (from the Latin: salix, salicis) as in the W.B. Yeats poem, "Down by the salley gardens" a favourite of her parents.
She has two sons from her first marriage. In 2002, her second marriage, to the Irish writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney, was dissolved.
In 2002, she was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Novel-writing at its finest and most eloquent...splendid...the sort of book that effortlessly, like angels, or sunlight on Venice's rippling waterways, casts brightness and beauty into those private and most shadowed recesses of the human heart.
The Christian Science Monitor
Vickers has taken myth, religion, and secular humanism, and turned them into substantial life-affirming fiction.
Philadelphia Inquirer
This enjoyable, multilayered novel contemplates existential themes — religion, life, death and love and the ways in which these themes are juxtaposed insists on the harmonious closure which is achieved in both narratives.
Times Literary Supplement
What begins as a beautifully-written, gentle tale of a woman coming to life, slowly deepens into something more intriguing as Vickers takes up issues of good and evil, sexuality, religion and belief. Just as one can happily wander the streets of Venice until one finds oneself lost and fear sets in, the reader is lulled by her artful prose — until ensnared.
Oxford Times
As administrator of the Booker Prize for the past 30 years I am often asked whether I agreed with the judges of the year, or what I would have chosen ... Salley Vickers’ Miss Garnet’s Angel ... is easily the best novel that I have read in 2000 ... you watch Miss Garnet utterly changed in character and personality, and you marvel at how all this has been achieved, together with a depth of knowledge and projection of the story from the Apocrypha. It is also one of the best pictures of Venice I have come across."
Martyn Goff - New Statesman
Cleverly weaving her graceful rendition of The Book of Tobit, from the Apocrypha, through the main narrative, Vickers gives Miss Garnet’s revelations a weighty universality and timelessness. Although she is as clear-eyed and unsparing as Pym and Brookner when assessing her characters’ limitations, Vicker’s vision of human possibility is coloured by hope.
Atlantic Monthly
Miss Garnet’s Angel is a remarkable novel, whose genuine originality is the result not of flashiness but something far more substantial: imaginative intensity. This is not revealed in weighty digressions but distilled into suggestive images and precise relations. It is a vivid and fresh novel, deliciously entertaining and — which is rare for good novels — a happy book.
London Magazine
Guardian angels have attained such trendy status in American popular fiction that it's refreshing to read Vickers, a writer from across the Atlantic, whose subtle depiction of a life touched by a heavenly spirit carries not a hint of clich‚. Her debut novel is an unpretentious gem of a book that charts the late coming-of-age of Miss Julia Garnet, a retired English schoolteacher who spends six months in Venice after her lifelong companion, Harriet, dies. Venice has a magical effect on reserved Julia: a dyed-in-the-wool Communist, she relaxes in her antipathy toward religion, and even begins to visit the local church. There, she becomes enamored of a series of paintings that tell the story of the Apocryphal book of Tobit, a tale that mixes elements of Judaism with the religion of Zoroaster. In the story, young Tobias travels to Medea, part of the Persian Empire, to collect a debt for his father, blind Tobit. He is accompanied on his journey by a hired guide who turns out to be the Angel Raphael. As Julia learns more about Tobias's trek, she embarks upon a soul-altering journey of her own. She falls in love with an art dealer, Carlo, and befriends Sarah and Toby, twins working on the restoration of a Venetian chapel. When Toby disappears suddenly, after discovering a priceless Renaissance painting, Julia finds out that neither Carlo nor the twins are exactly what they seem—but that the Angel Raphael's watchful spirit will help good prevail. This touching novel, a ...[will appeal to] fans eager for a treatment of religious themes without the gooey sentiment that often accompanies the topic of angels.
Publishers Weekly
Beautifully wrought and impressively wise.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Salley Vickers' novel has been held up by numerous reviewers and readers as a refreshing and innovative alternative to much of what's out there on the contemporary fiction shelves today. What do they mean? What is it about Miss Garnet's Angel that has struck such a chord with so many readers internationally?
2. One writer described Vickers' novel as a book that stubbornly defies any neat categorization. So what kind of a novel is this? A romance? A mystery? A tale of religious awakening? How does Vickers' novel depart from every genre to which we try to assign it? How would you describe Miss Garnet's Angel to a friend?
3. In Miss Garnet's Angel, Salley Vickers treats us to a narrative within a narrative of personal odysseys and spiritual awakenings separated by millennia; of sexual repression and revitalization; of ideological feuds and rapturous epiphanies. Through it all, an overarching, timeless vision of "a world poised between truth and lies" shines through-filtered through the enigmatic character of contemporary Venice itself. "What a world she had entered," Julia marvels early on. "A world of strange ritual, penumbras, rapture." Discuss the author's writing style.
4. Describe the change Julia Garnet undergoes over the course of her stay in Venice. What effects do the events and discoveries of her visit have on her sense of self, as a communist grounded in atheism and as a woman generally wary of life's "irrational" realms, whether romantic, mystical, or spiritual? What-and who-are the catalysts for this change?
5. 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?
6. "Long ago she had decided that history does not repeat itself; but perhaps when a thing was true it went on returning in different likenesses, borrowing from what went before, finding new ways to declare itself." Discuss the parallels Vickers establishes between the narrative of Tobias and the Angel and that of Julia, Toby, and Sarah.
7. 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.
8. "Can't be doing with that," Miss Garnet tells herself upon first seeing the picture of the Virgin and Christ Child above her bed at Campo Angelo Raffaele. With this moment, Vickers establishes Julia's atheist-communist wariness regarding religious iconography-and also foreshadows the radical nature of the spiritual and emotional transformations to come. Chart the course of Julia's awakening: discuss the specific moments and scenes in which Vickers illuminates her heroine's mounting intoxication with religious pageantry and mystery.
9. With the opening lines of the novel, Salley Vickers introduces readers to an ancillary character who comes to haunt the proceedings of all that follows: Death. "It leaves a hole in the fabric of things which those who are left behind try to repair." Elsewhere, Tobias invokes death as a metaphor for sexual penetration. Discuss the novel's other characterizations of and reflections on death. What, for example, is Julia's conception of death-and how does it evolve, particularly leading up to her last night in Venice?
10. "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.
11. Re-read the epigraph by John Ruskin. How do his words speak to the themes and preoccupations of Vickers' interwoven narratives?
12. How does Salley Vickers' vision of Venice compare, inform, and/or add to your own personal experiences with the city?
13. 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?
14. What were your understandings of the Angel Raphael and Zoroastrianism before you read Miss Garnet's Angel? Did Vickers' novel inform and/or complicate these understandings? How?
15. 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?
16. What sort of a man was Julia's father? What picture of him emerges to us through Julia's intermittent recollections?
17. 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?
18. What is the Bridge of Separation?
19. 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?
20. The various mysteries and awakenings in Miss Garnet's Angel all play out against a Venetian backdrop that is perpetually in danger of annihilation, of being swallowed by the relentless sea tides. "Each day Venice sinks by just so much of a fraction." How does this tension speak to and enrich the sense of instability and flux underlying Julia's own beliefs and assumptions? At what points in the narrative-particularly in the final pages of the book, when Julia has returned to Venice after the wedding-does Vickers make the metaphor plain?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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