Miss Garnet's Angel

Overview

When her long time friend Harriet passes away without warning, the abstemious Miss Garnet finds herself facing a void whose substance or raison de etre she is unable, perhaps on some level willingly, to fathom. As a torrent of existential torment threatens (albeit done away with with pragmatic huff), Miss Garnet finds herself fleeing to Venice, where she takes up residence in a homely apartment whose amenities scarcely extend beyond a battered pan for coffee and which is decorated in the tragic remains of her landlady's glory box. But despite her efforts to the sort of anonymity she has so long enjoyed in London, Miss Garnet finds that her quiet, English ways serve only to make her conspicuous amongst the warm Venetian community and amidst the cultural richness of the famously romantic city. Miss Garnet, an individual whose worldview is cripplingly narrow and which relies upon vicariousness rather than personal experience, and who prefers to rely on the expounded theories and perceptions of others rather than engage with her own, finds that her newly public persona is a facilitating force when it comes to developing quaint and curious friendships, and to finding herself the subject of a series of curiously circumspect encounters. Despite her naturally retiring ways, Miss Garnet, or Julia (meaning "young"), as we come to know her, begins to find that her most deeply, intransigently held conceptions in relation to herself and her place in life are perhaps resting on rather shaky foundations. Through a multi-pronged plot that intertwines with the ancient biblical tale of Tobias and the Angel, Vickers traces Miss Garnet's slow but inevitable efforts towards personal realisation as she finds herself nested within a series of complex, ambiguous relationships and curious, inexplicable occurrences.

My thoughts

Miss Garnet's Angel sits beautifully within Vickers's oeuvre, and the more of her work I read the better I'm able to discern how her novels form a thematic (if not a narrative) series. Fortunately, given the fact that the continuity here is thematic, there's no issue with reading her work out of order, which is of course the path I've apparently taken to her work.

Vickers delights in working with those characters who are so often overlooked both within fiction and within society: the quiet, the shy, the introverted, and given this, her choice of Miss Garnet as a protagonist is unsurprising. However, what is surprising is that while many others will conflate introversion and introspection, Vickers sidesteps this trope, giving us a character who is not only cut off from the world, but from herself, too. Her frugality of self is almost total, and she struggles to engage with anything that might have meaning or that may pose a threat to the face that she has so carefully established. Curiously, her lack of identity is so absolute that when pressed, she names herself by her (former) occupation as a history teacher rather than as an historian, the latter being, at least to Miss Garnet, far more intertwined with one's sense of self. Indeed, Miss Garnet's sense of personal isolation is such that she even perceives of herself in the third person; it is some time until she becomes comfortable using her given (or perhaps "Christian", given the themes of the book, and Miss Garnet's self-professed agnosticism) name.

This inability to self-reflect or to challenge one's personal assumptions and conceptions of course extends through to Miss Garnet's necessarily narrow social life: despite having considered the late Harriet a close friend, it is really only in death that Harriet begins to exert any great influence on Miss Garnet's life. Miss Garnet, despite herself, travels with a giddily ostentatious hat that was once Harriet's, and this prop becomes a substitute for her friend, offering Miss Garnet both comfort and a safe and unchallenging means by which she might at last engage with her erstwhile friend. The notion of a post-mortem friendship is curious, and speaks to the degree to which a person or a relationship can be so completely created or moulded by the mind of another. To me, the relationship between Miss Garnet and Harriet is perhaps the strongest element of the book, and Miss Garnet's own realisations about the nature of the relationship--such as the magnanimity Harriet kept from her friend to avoid being seen as frivolous--are often deeply moving.

Miss Garnet's spiritual renaissance, of course, is also alluded to by the way in which her bigotry is slowly uncovered and dealt with: gender, class, and racial constructs come to the fore time and time again and are steadily dealt with as the narrative, and thus Miss Garnet, progresses. I do have some qualms about the way in which issues such as Miss Garnet's virginal, love-less past and her cautious, frugal nature are dealt with through this spiritual awakening, and do find it somewhat confronting that it is, largely, spirituality that is highlighted as the key transformative force for Miss Garnet. Still, Vickers does not require of her character a transmutation from lead to gold or the like: rather, for the most part Miss Garnet largely remains herself, but simply a more weathered, self-assessing version of the same.

Perhaps the element of Miss Garnet's Angel that worked least well for me was the counterpoint narrative, an account of the spiritual recovery of Tobit and Tobias that limns Miss Garnet's own journey. While I appreciate the conceit, I felt that this secondary narrative devolved into confusion at some points, and at others was simply too neat and coincidental; the result of which was that these chapters felt rather smug and knowing, and detracted from the quiet beauty of the rest of the narrative.

Conclusions

As a debut outing, Miss Garnet's Angel is beautifully accomplished, revealing the wit and perspicacity that is a hallmark of Vickers's fiction. Her depiction of Venice is outstanding, and her characters equally so, both of which together lends the book a sense of sincerity and groundedness that is needed given the pervasive themes of religion, spiritualism, and self-discovery. It's my feeling that the narrative would have benefited from a better integration (or excision) of the Tobit/Tobias secondary narrative, but I do appreciate Vickers's efforts in working with such a story.