|
Visit
our Salley
Vickers page, for Salley Vickers biography, Salley Vickers bibliography,
Salley Vickers interviews, and Salley Vickers reading guides |
This novel follows approximately 11 months in the life of
Miss Julia Garnet, from the Epiphany to the Feast of Raphael. Her friend,
Harriet, has just died suddenly. With her habits already shaken by the
death of her companion, Julia decides to rattle them even further by jetting
off to Venice, to enjoy the kind of holiday that Harriet had been planning for
their joint retirement from teaching. Miss Julia Garnet is a Communist
who's never been kissed, so it's something of a surprise to see her falling in
love, and to learn of her abounding interest in an angel.
At first glance, this is a Death in Venice/Don't
Look Now kind of book. Carlo, the man for whom Julia falls for big
time, turns out to be quite an apocryphal character, in the modern meaning of
the word. Thankfully, Harriet wasn't in the habit of wearing lurid red
anoraks, and Salley Vickers' new novel, The Instances of the Number 3 also
opens with a death. However, Julia does also encounter the twins who are
restoring the Chapel-of-the-Plague, similar to the sort of work carried out by
Donald Sutherland's character in Don't Look Now. However, there is the
scene where Julia abandons the Reverend Crystal in St. Mark's Basilica, and
where she meets Carlo for the first time. St. Mark's Basilica is very
beautiful, but as Carlo tells Julia, all the art has been nicked from other
cultures and appropriated by the victorious Venetians of past history.
One could say that Salley Vickers has gone about doing the same thing, yet
there is a more apt metaphor to describe what she is doing here. Like Gianantonio
Guardi, Salley Vickers could be said to be borrowing poses or motifs from other
artists, but she recasts them in her own vivid manner (to paraphrase Emil Kren
and Daniel Marx's description of Guardi's 'The Angel Appears to Tobias').
Towards the end of the novel, Julia traces
Tobias's journey on a map. In so doing, she's tracing just how far we
have all come, and the conveying the importance of such journeys. We are
invited to see Julia as several metaphorical figures. She could be Saint
Ursula, watched over by the Angel Raphael as in the cover picture of the book,
cropped from a painting by Carpaccio (although it's hard to see her pupils
following her anywhere willingly, especially not a massacre, since they tend to
regard her as a joke). She could be the legendary traveller of the folk
story of the Grateful Dead, as embodied by the dramatisation of the Book of
Tobit within the novel. Or she could even be the embodiment of the Angel
Raphael himself ('You must be my guardian angel,' Toby says at one
point). Although, to see Miss Garnet as the Angel is to play the tricks
with the title of the book that don't work in the same way that 'Finnegans
Wake' could mean any number of things. Certainly, Julia feels that the
Angel Raphael is watching over her, if only in the form of a statue. To some,
the ending of the book may come as something of a surprise. It did to me
the first time, I'm afraid to admit. But when you dig deeper into Salley
Vickers' research, you cannot avoid a deep sense of foreboding.
Salley Vickers has managed to whip up everything
she can think of about Venice into this book. John Ruskin pops in for a
chat, Tintoretto pops in for tea, the House of the Camel really lights up to
illuminate William Blake, Vivaldi lectures, and Shakespeare puts on some
plays. However the Venice ghetto does not really provide a refuge
for Julia, but may have done some time in the past for the sparkling Monsignore
and his puggish dog. Whilst reading Tucker Malarkey's An Obvious
Enchantment recently, I did kind of wonder what the links between Christianity,
Judaism and Islam were, and Malarkey missed the (now) obvious source of
monotheism: Zoroaster (rather than Akhenaten). This isn't hacked
onto the text by Vickers; it's a natural growth throughout the novel, from the
three Parsi Magi celebrated in the Epiphany, to the Feast of the Apocryphal
Raphael. One gets an indication of how intricately plotted this novel is
by the revelation that there was a Fair Maiden on the Zoroastrian Bridge of Separation.
Salley Vickers magnificently bridges Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and
Zoroastrianism via her dramatisation of the Book of Tobit (and her translation
of the tale is a tad bit more successful than Saint Jerome's with all it's tail
wagging). What better place to build bridges than Venice?
authortrek rating: 10/10
Kevin Patrick Mahoney
|
Visit
our Salley
Vickers page, for Salley Vickers biography, Salley Vickers bibliography,
Salley Vickers interviews, and Salley Vickers reading guides |
Lisez cette page en français avec
Babelfish Lesen
diese Seite auf Deutsch mit
Babelfish
