Miss Garnet’s Angel
by Salley Vickers.
Fourth Estate, €7.99.
Have you ever been to Venice? If not, indeed even if you have, take a trip there by reading this book. It will take you not only to present-day Venice, but much further away both in time and place - to Ninevah in the land of Assyria some two thousand or more years ago.
Two stories are interwoven here; the first concerns Miss Julia Garnet, an elderly tight-lipped atheist spinster virgin who has just retired from her job as a schoolteacher, and the second is a recreation of the story of Tobias from the Book of Tobit in the Jewish Scriptures. The connecting link between the modern story and the ancient one is the part played in each by the Archangel Raphael.
Both stories are about journeys and self-discovery. Understandably perhaps, Raphael plays a more direct part in the Hebrew story, in which he appears in person, but he influences Miss Garnet too, though in a subtler and less overt way. He has more obstacles to overcome of course, Miss Garnet being an atheist.
Of the two stories, I found the one about Tobias the more convincing and more absorbing. Tobias, Raphael and the dog Kish prove to be congenial travelling companions, tension and suspense are successfully built up and maintained, and the narrative rattles along at a compelling pace. Raphael subverts the purpose of the journey and the behaviour of the characters in a most satisfactory way, and (being an angel) is able to bring the venture to a conclusion that pleases everyone and fulfils destiny at the same time.
The modern counterparts are to my mind less successful, and while Miss Garnet herself is sympathetically drawn and makes an unusual and very credible heroine, some of the parallels between her story and the Hebrew one seemed to me to be forced. However the author succeeds memorably in her descriptions of Venice and its effect on the beauty-starved former schoolteacher, and the gradual blossoming of Julia Garnets real nature imparts considerable charm to the book.
In an author’s note, Salley Vickers explores the possibility that the Tobias story, which is very old and predates the Jewish Scriptures, may be Zoroastrian in origin. She gives a fascinating account of the reasons for this suggestion; apparently Zoroastrian beliefs influenced both Judaism and Christianity, and hence all of us, more than we realize. We have inherited our concept of angels from them, but somewhere along the line we seem to have lost their respect for the dog as a sacred animal. This ancient Zoroastrian concept may explain the central role of the dog in the story of Tobias and the angel, and, by extension, the fact that the dog appears in all known artistic depictions of the story. I was very pleased by this suggestion it makes up, to some extent, for the bad press that dogs have received in the Judaic and Christian Scriptures.
Jennifer Flegg