Miss Garnet's Angel

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Tell us about your research into the Apocrypha, the Middle East of ancient times, and Venice. Can we look forward to reading more about these topics in upcoming books?

I read this novel when it was first published. That was in the year 2000! This is a novel that has really withstood the test of time and it is a book I often suggest to people who are off to Venice. Reading it offers an even greater cinematic experience of the city (is that even possible?). It is a gentle story, told with charm and detail, that carries the reader along at a thoughtful pace. This is the story of Julia, now in retirement, in many ways an unremarkable woman – and yet. She chooses to spend 6 months in Venice, exploring the city and its treasures, gaining a variety of friendships and experiences. As the time passes, she learns to re-evaluate some of her core beliefs and to trawl her deeper soul in quiet contemplation. 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. The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other….

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As Venice works it’s magic on Miss Garnet, she falls in love......with Venice, with its splendid buildings and waterways, with her new life, and, with an enigmatic man she meets by chance.....and with an Angel.... 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?

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. 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. 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]Miss Julia Garnet, spinster and virgin, travels to Venice after the death of her friend Harriet. She discovers more than solace there, something more akin to an awakening. It’s a beautiful premise and is artfully executed, and Venice is the ideal, sumptuous setting for this intriguing mix of stories that Julia’s tale entwines with – my favourite character is the wise and delightful Monsignore Giuseppe, whose presence brings a kindness and affability to the story which I really loved, but while some of the characters fall flat, Julia’s relationship with Venice itself (and the angel Raphael) never does. It is a book that tries to do a lot, but that’s okay because it largely succeeds. With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.

I went into this with all my warning lights flashing: it's gonna be spiritual (and I'm not), "oh god, there's gonna be romance" (ew); and "she's gonna see angels, isn't she?" This was probably unfair to the author, but that hasn't stopped me before. 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. A story about an English spinster travelling to Venice who develops an overwhelming interest in religious art and Christian myths. Her retirement, the loss of a friend, and an unexpected legacy have a polarising effect on her, and quite out of character, she decides to spend six months in Venice, renting a small apartment in this beautiful city. 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.

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." 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. 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. Julia Garnet is a lovely creation-inspiring, affecting, charming, utterly believable. Is she based on any real-life models? 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.

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? A projected non-fiction book about The Book of Common Prayer and entitled Sweet and Comfortable Words was never published.

One of a quartet of "London" novels republished by Harvill, Green's book is more curiosity than essential read. It is set during the Blitz and centres on Richard Roe, a diffident man who comes to London from a well-heeled country estate to volunteer for the Auxiliary Fire Service. Roe, the archetypal, tight-lipped English widower, who "wished that he had never made a point of not kissing Christopher", his five-year-old son, is contrasted with the professional fireman, Pye. Neither the war as whole, nor even the Blitz, impinges much on the narrative - both men are frighteningly at sea in personal emotional anguish - but fear hangs like a pall over this sombre novel. 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? 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? Hemon was born in Bosnia, went to the US in 1991, and taught himself to write in English. When fiction crosses the Danube, critics scratching for a suitable adjective to describe Eastern European otherness go for "Nabokovian" or hint at kinship with Kundera. Hemon gets compared to both on the cover of his first collection of short stories. As he writes in artifice-rich prose about loss, exile, and the peculiar tangles of Balkan history (Tito, Stalin and Archduke Ferdinand), those comparisons make sense. He excels at that superficially unserious style that communism bred, but some may find his stylistic gymnastics and clotted prose unsettling. 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.