Review: Anna and the Angel by Eleanor Williams

Jon Gower

The apocryphal Old Testament story of Tobias and the Angel has both intrigued and inspired people down the centuries.

When the Masterpiece Tour of treasures from the National Gallery in London reached the Davies Gallery in Newtown three years ago they brought Tobias and the Angel from the Workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio.

This was painted as an altarpiece around 1470-75 and proved to be a fecund source of inspiration for Welsh artists such as Eleri Mills, Claire Cuneen, Philip Eglin and Cecile Johnson Soliz who offered contemporary responses to the painting.

Archangel

Tobias and the Angel depicts the archangel Raphael guiding the young Tobias and his dog through the countryside, an episode based on the book of Tobit.

Clad in lavish attire, the boy is on his way to collect a debt that is owed to his blind father, Tobit. He carries a gutted fish on a string, while Raphael shows him the small, round box that contains its organs – ingredients for a salve to cure Tobit’s blindness.

That self-same story – which is missing entirely from Protestant Bibles but is there in Catholic and Orthodox versions, is the source of Anna and the Angel, a bright, tight novella which relocates the story to Wales, specifically to Cardiff and Newport. Its author is a Reader in the Church in Wales and a lawyer in the public sector who chooses to reframed the story as a feminist re-telling, seen from the point of view of women.

Letter exchange

That redacting comes in the form of an epistolary exchange between two strangers, Anna and Edna and as their letters are exchanged so too does the reader get to glimpse their lives – entering and winning an arts’ prize, creating a jazz performance space in a barn – but importantly, keeping up with the adventures of Tobias. He turns up unexpectedly at Edna’s home in Newport, on a mission to retrieve a small fortune on behalf of his blind, reclusive father, T.

Which just leaves the angel of the title, who comes in the form of Az, a gifted, mysterious healer with magical powers. He is the presiding spirit of the tale and a very good spirit at that. He takes Anna on a mystery tour to the rim of Cardiff Bay which seems to take them both to a place between dimensions:

‘We walked along the empty, curved walkway between the sea and the built-up glamour of the shops and restaurants. It made me feel strangely amphibian, as if I was in a liminal zone between two realities. Suddenly I didn’t know what was real. The early morning sunlight seemed to bounce off the grey waves that were coming in towards us, and I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t see the beginnings of, oh I don’t know, another dimension.’

Part of the pleasure of reading this contemporary version of an old, old story is the recognition of the elements of the original and how they’ve been updated and often given a little twist. The story of the Biblical Sarah, whose husbands kept on dying on their wedding night now belongs to another Sarah, who, as she grows close to Tobias, puts the reader slightly on edge, very much concerned for his welfare, spooked by her history with past boyfriends on whom she has had a fatal effect.

One of the most lingering aspects of Anna and the Angel is olfactory: this is fiction where the sense of smell is engaged with very effectively, from the scent of sickly flowers through foul packets of fish innards to brighter fragrances of citrus and sandalwood joss sticks, not to mention the smell of multiplex cinemas, a mix of ‘stale air and escapism.’

Revelations

Without giving too much away the book ends with some appropriate revelations and to everyone’s relief the missing money is found in a black bin sack entrusted into the care of someone working in a place very much like Everyman Cinema in Cardiff Bay.

In moving the action from the Middle East to the south-east of Wales Williams manages to underline both the timeless appeal of the original and also its mutability, able to be engagingly refashioned as a modern tale of angels moving among us, and moving in simply the most mysterious ways.

Anna and the Angel by Eleanor Williams, a New Welsh Writing Awards winner, is published by Parthian and is available from all good bookshops.