of an old spinster who, after a loved one dies, decides to take a six-month rest
in Venice. and encounters strange people. There is also a biblical sub-plot
concerning the angel of the title (Raphael, who is not just an angel but an
archangel) and the apocryphal figure of Tobias. I am very fond of Venice and
generally enjoy reading stories set in this sinking city, and I am not a stranger
to narratives that intertwine biblical motives. One would say that those two
things made me buy the book, but for me it is not as clear-cut as that.
Miss Garnet is an elderly British woman who decides, after the death of a very
dear friend, to come to terms with everything through a six-month stay in
Venice. She soon starts to settle in and even befriends a twin-brother and
sister that are working on a restoration project in a church that also holds a
painting of ‘Tobias and the Angel’. She becomes intrigued by the apocryphal
story depicted in this painting and asks one of her friends back in Britain to find
her a copy of the Apocrypha. In alternating chapters, the story of Tobias and
the Angel is then intertwined with the story of Miss Garnet’s adventures in
Venice.
One of the oddities of this novel is that its protagonist is a lady ‘beyond child-
bearing years’. She does not have her entire life before her, but she sees it
quietly drawing to a close. Back in Britain she had Marxist sympathies, but
under the influence of the many Venetian churches she visits and the above-
mentioned painting of Tobias and the Angel she becomes a Bible and
Apocrypha reader. I found this transition rather simplistic and sketchy. It needs
a bit more nuance and substance to make it come to life and to be really
believable.
In terms of narrative Miss Garnet’s story is not really interesting. She meets the
twins, she meets a father of the church and she becomes, if not a believer in
Christ, at least an avid reader of biblical stories. The chapters that tell the
apocryphal story of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael are by far the strongest
in terms of texture and narrative. Seen the nature of the source-material, this is
no wonder. There is a strong contrast with the story of Miss Garnet. The
apocryphal story is a parable that takes places in times and countries long
gone and is educational on a moral level. Miss Garnet’s story takes place in the
present and is seemingly real; it could have happened. These two stories do
not mix well, they are too different to make for an interesting contrasting effect.
Spoilers ahead! In the end, the two stories are the same, but the reader was
never aware of this because the twins are not siblings at all but lovers. This
revelation, though it adds depth to both stories since they compare and
contrast better, made me feel sort of cheated.
In the end, this is a book full of interesting ideas and it tells us something about
how the morals and values of biblical (and apocryphal) stories are still valuable
and applicable today, but whereas the retelling of the biblical story is pitch-
perfect, the spiritual voyage of a elderly spinster is too sketchy and dramatically
too clumsy to be captivating.
