The
surprise success of Salley Vickers' novel Miss Garnet's Angelwhich
after a quiet start grew steadily week by week to sell 8,000
copies through the General Retail Market in hardback, and over
40,000 in its paperback edition since April this year* is a
tribute to the famous unpredictability of the book trade. Yes,
the novel was published to very good reviews, with Vickers'
wryly comic style earning her comparisons with Penelope Fitzgerald
and Barbara Pym. But who would really have bet on a story about
an elderly virgin taking a trip to Venice getting anywhere near
the bestseller lists?
Vickers,
whose new novel Instances of the Number 3 (Fourth Estate)
is
due out in August, has her own theories about why Miss Garnet's
Angel caught on. "I didn't try to write it to a pattern, but
the subject and the setting of the book happened to be two things
which have what I would call an archetypal appeal. The story
of Tobias and the angel, which I rewrote, is a very old tale.
And lots of people have had very magical experiences of Venice;
it is a timeless city, and a meeting place between East and
West." She thinks her unfashionable heroine was another factor"There
was something a bit daring about having a 60-year-old virgin
as your central character; it had its own kind of radical appeal"and
partly, Vickers believes, readers just liked the feeling that
they had discovered the book for themselves, without hype.
Vickers
was once a university English tutor but later retrained as
an
analytical psychologist. She says she found her way into psychology
through literature "Forget Freud, forget Jung, the greatest
psychologists without a doubt are Shakespeare, Henry James and
Conrad"and she believes strongly that literary novels should
be accessible.
"I
very much dislike the way our culture has divided books into
'literary' and 'popular', because the writers I admire Homer,
Shakespeare, Jane Austen were both high literature and also
very popular."
She
is entirely happy, she says, when she receives letters from
readers who enjoyed Miss Garnet's Angel simply as a portrait
of Venice. But for those who want to look further, the novel
also explores much more substantial themes, ones which Vickers
says she has been mulling over for many years. Despite its
comedy
and, as Vickers points out, "the comic eye can be a wise eye" Miss
Garnet's Angel is, after all, the story of an elderly virgin
whose emotional life is regenerated by some very mixed experiences,
including falling in love with a man who turns out to be a
manipulative
paedophile.
Vickers
says it is the story of how good and evil go hand in hand: "That
is one of the things Shakespeare understands. His evil characters
are very close to his good characters, so it takes an Iago
to
understand a Desdemona. The juxtaposition of good and evil
in Shakespeare's plays, and in the story of Tobias and the
angel,
interests me very much.
"In
the contemporary story of Miss Garnet I suggest that the
capacity
to look at and recognise evil is a strengthening and maturing
experience: Julia Garnet only goes through renewal and regeneration
because she has the experience of humiliation and is led
astray
by her sexual inexperience."
Her
new novel Instances of the Number 3 has a more prosaic setting
London and the Shropshire countryside but Vickers' many fans
will not be disappointed. This is another unusual and distinctive
story, about a love triangle in later life. After the sudden
death of her husband Peter, Bridgeta strong-willed woman in
her 60s starts to develop a friendship with his mistress Frances.
The relationship between the two women is further complicated
by the appearance of Zahin, an enigmatic young Iranian student,
whose own links with Peter are as yet unclear.
As
a tale of multiple erotic and emotional entanglements unfolds
illuminated by Vickers' observant eye for human follies and
foibles Peter re-enters the story in ghostly form, and it becomes
clear that the theme of triads and trinities has spiritual as
well as earthly resonances. Think heaven, hell and purgatory
or indeed, the Holy Trinity itself.
Again,
many readers will simply enjoy Vickers' sharply drawn characterisations,
as Bridget and Frances bicker and bond: "I am fascinated by
human motivation and I find it endlessly interesting," Vickers
says. "I hope I am not cruel in my humour: I think it is admirable
that we desperately want to be noble, but of course we can't
be, nobility and pettiness go side by side."
But
of the return of Peter as a phantom, she says: "I was taking
the old Catholic idea of purgatory, and giving it a little
cleaning.
It is the sense of a space between life and death, which exists
perhaps in our memory, when we continue to have a relationship
with people who aren't actually here."
There
is, she concedes, "a concept of divinity" in the book. "People
often ask if I have a religious faith, and I've tended to
say
that I don't think that man is the measure of all things, that
there are other dimensions. I don't particularly want to
say
how I perceive that. But behind my writing is a sense of other
levels, other possibilities within which we live; I think
art
and poetry have always been about that."
She
worries now about having made the book sound "portentous", and
recalls some of her favourite comic moments instead. The one
which always makes her laugh "which it shouldn't, when it's
your own book" is when, in a flashback, the Catholic priest
Father Gerard tries to explain the Holy Trinity to Peter, who
is stumbling after a sense of faith.
"Father
Gerard is one of my favourite characters, I tease him like
anything.
I gave him this slightly happy-clappy jargon to speak. He explains
the Holy Trinity as a Neapolitan ice cream, with three different
flavours, each contributing to the ice cream as a whole.
At
that point Peter can't quite accept it, because he suddenly
thinks of the wafer of the ice cream and the communion wafer,
and he just can't get past that."
Benedicte
Page The Bookseller June 7 2001
*Hardbacks
have sold over 15,000 and Paperbacks have sold over 100,000
to date.
