Engaging, beautifully written - Rated 
I was captivated from the beginning. Sally Vickers' writing brought the initially unprepossessing Miss Garnet to life, and delicately illustrated her transformation. Attention to detail brought authenticity to modern Venice and its restoration, which I found a fascinating backdrop that enhanced the story well. The only tricksy part was the story of the twins - on first reding I found that element a little irritating, however, they do provide a perfect device to illustrate Miss Garnet's character. Observation of the minor characters and Miss Garnet's interactions with them are a pleasure.
Evocative, spellbinding and erudite - Rated
Do not be put off by the reviewers here who, while entitled to their opinions, clearly fail to grasp the deeply poetic timbre of Salley Vickers' voice and extraordinary story-telling. This is a wonderfully evocative and spellbinding novel, as well as truly erudite, in the best sense of the word (knowing, rather than merely knowledge-laden). Salley Vickers writes with passion, characteristic precision, and a deeply sympathetic ear for all that is hidden and hurting in the human heart. Julia Garnet is an endearing, gracious creation, and her transformation from icy schoolmarm to spiritual seeker is both beautiful and wholly believable. The descriptions of Venice, the story of Tobias and Raphael, and the Catholic iconography are all redolent with a rich and inky Gnosticism that is beautifully rendered. I wanted to hop onto the next plane to Venice to go and see for myself! The structure of the main narrative, interwoven with a stunning retelling of the Book of Tobit, is unselfconsciously clever as well as compelling: both narratives gripped me from beginning to end, as I found myself reading well into the small hours of the night. Julia's gradual discovery of her social and spiritual self, as she makes her own pilgrim's progress through the complexity and conflict of human (and divine) relationships, will offer hope to all who have ever been lost or alone. All in all, a joy and an inspiration. I keep returning to this book, taking something new and strangely healing away with me each time. That's what all great art does.
Redemption through angels? - Rated 
"Miss Garnet's Angel" is a novel about a middle-aged lady who undergoes an epiphany in Venice. Her epiphany is somehow connected with the Angel Raphael, who occasionally flashes across Miss Garnet's field of vision, and features in a painting that is an element in the plot (or more precisely, half of which is an element in the plot). The epiphany is also connected, although not in a way that bears close analysis, to the apocryphal story of Tobias and the Angel. Miss Garnet falls in love with a man who, we later discover, is merely simulating an interest in her in order to approach a young boy to whom she is giving (sadly unsuccessful) English lessons. It is not clear why the man, Carlo, has to take this cruel and roundabout route to the boy (and this strand in the plot is never resolved - did the ruse work, or did it not? And why did Salley Vickers drop one, never to be pursued, hint that Carlos might be the boy Nicco's father?). Despite the appalling disappointment of discovering that Carlo's love was not genuine, Miss Garnet undergoes a transformation in Venice, finds redemption in beauty, and abandons her lifelong allegiance to communism in favour of a form of religion (a highly syncretic form which embraces elements of Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastroism at least, and also leads Miss Garnet into a friendship with a dog-loving monsignor). In addition, the transformation involves a newly discovered liking for prosecco, lilac dresses and hats with veils.
I, like Miss Garnet, am a lady of a certain age. I am not, it is true, a childless spinster or a teacher who has realised only upon retirement that my teaching career was sterile, meaningless and devoid of human contact. (Quite incidentally, I am an alumna, like both Salley Vickers and Miss Garnet, of Girton College, Cambridge.) So it might seem likely that "Miss Garnet's Angel" would have appealed to me. Unfortunately, from many points of view it did not.
The first reason has to be that the novel is really not very well written. Comparisons to Jane Austen and Henry James are entirely unjustified. Ms Vickers has a writing style which is at best wooden, at worst incomprehensible. Her word order is strangely mannered and her punctuation leaves an enormous amount to be desired (starting with the elementary point that only questions end with question marks; statements do not).
The second reason is that, while the novel is obviously intended as a didactic parable, it is not clear what it is teaching us. That unrequited love is a salutary experience? That middle-aged ladies should beware of the attentions of attractive gentlemen? That salvation is to be found in angels? That twins are in some significant sense not what they seem (Sarah and Toby - whose names, for reasons that remain obscure, echo those of characters in the tale of Tobias and the Angel - are taken by Miss Garnet for twins, but subsequently turn out to be lovers)? That psychotherapists are evil (`twin' Sarah has had a nasty encounter with a `false memory' therapist)? That pleasant little `human' encounters - with charming American tourists and sympathetic ladies on trains, for example - are the road to redemption?
The third reason is that the figure of Carlo (the gentleman with designs on the young boy) is a character who leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. He is apparently charming, urbane, attentive and cultured, but beneath this beguiling exterior he is a devious paedophile. This, combined with the denial of any possibility that Miss Garnet's devotion to her lifelong companion Harriet is in any way homosexual, gives an insidious and abiding feeling that, together with the angels, there is covert homophobia hovering around this novel. Speaking as a heterosexual woman, I did not like it.
A modern E.M. Forster? - Rated 
I began reading this and was reminded of Forster's 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' where the impact of the beauty of Italy changes the moral and spiritual world of the main protagonists but Vicker's lacks the subtelty of the earlier writers work and it soon becomes clear that the retelling of the Tobias myth set in modern Venice, though cleverly conceived, failed to convince me at the end.
However, please read this novel as it is well written and does take you to another time and place.
Towards an epiphany in Venice - Rated 
A repressed spinster in her fifties, retired from her career as an uninspiring school teacher, a communist and anti-religious, Julia Garnet travels to Venice, falls in love with it (devotees of Venice will relish the evocations of the city), is gradually thawed out by its beauty and stimulus and by people she meets there. She has rented an apartment in the Campo Angelo Raffaele, behind the church dedicated to that angel. She gradually comes to learn the story of Tobias and the Angel Raphael and indeed to show increasing interest in it; and she is also drawn closer and closer to Catholic imagery and to a Catholic priest.
Salley Vickers intersperses her narrative with instalments, with some additional inventions of her own, of the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha. With each instalment she adds a little more to the account in the Book of Tobit. At first these additions amount to very little, but the later ones are based on research that has been done which has found that the Book of Tobit (written during the time when the Jews were living under Persian rule) probably has Zoroastrian roots, and each subsequent instalment veers further and further away from the original.
One has the feeling that Julia's experiences in Venice should have some bearing on the story and vice versa; but it is difficult for a long time to see what these might be. For much of the book, the inserted instalments relating to the Book of Tobit seem to have no relevance, either directly or indirectly, to the passages on either side of the insertion - only towards the end do they converge.
Julia meets an English pair, a young man and a young woman, who are restoring the masonry in a chapel (invented by Salley Vickers) which also has a sculpted Raphael and also a painted panel of him. Rather obviously they are called Toby and Sarah (like the characters in the Book of Tobit - though at this point a reader who has not already read that book would not yet know this). The closest correspondences between the Book of Tobit and the plot of the novel are with this pair; and these begin only about half-way through the novel. Only once or twice are there correspondences with Julia herself.
The story of Julia in Venice and of her interest in the Book of Tobit would stand well on its own, even if one does not look for any parallels. It has many wise reflections about human relationships and personal development. There are allusions to other literature; there are digs at arid rationalism and a reference to a destructive Freudian analysis (Salley Vickers is a Jungian analyst). The book reads easily, though there is the very occasional slight clunkiness of expression or description which betrays that this is a first novel. If I feel that I cannot give it the full five stars it is because I felt I was being invited to look for a more satisfying connection between the novel and the story of Tobias and the Angel, which the book, perhaps teasingly, withheld from me for so long. It is true that the revealing of psychic histories has something in common with a detective stories, but for me the way the two genres were mixed in this novel did not quite come off.
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