Product Description

Burgundy 1808 one night a young vintner meets an angel in his vineyard. Every year on the anniversary of the date, they meet again. Village life goes on with its affairs, mysteries, marriages and murders and the vintages keep improving, throught the horror of the Napoleonic wars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169462 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 241 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Elizabeth Knox's fifth book, her first to be published in the UK, plays out its huge themes in a small Burgundian village at the time of Napoleon. A novel of forbidden love, wine and immortality, it yields up its secrets--beautiful, tragic and horrifying--one by one, so they're as unexpected as the angel Sobran Jodeau, the young vintner, encounters in his vineyard one night in 1808. Xas is breathtakingly beautiful, has huge expressive white wings, leather trousers and smells softly of snow. He is a keen gardener, and also profoundly curious about mortals, how they feel, how they live, how they make their choices. They talk, and Xas persuades Jodeau to meet him--same time, same place--every year.

Jodeau marries, fathers children, and continues--bar a couple of years when he's off fighting, whoring and trying to keep his best friend alive on the Russian front--to meet with Xas. Their friendship deepens. Jodeau's wine improves, and the joys and troubles of village life wash around him. But this strange relationship between man and angel is inherently unstable, and following the death of Jodeau's beloved younger daughter, it veers off in a direction neither had anticipated. And then Xas tells Jodeau something that drives the vintner almost beyond madness. --Lisa Gee

Review
Wine is relatively incidental to this constantly surprising narrative set in early 18th-century Southern Burgundy. Sobran Jodeau grows vines and makes wine with increasing skill, but merely as a backdrop to his encounters with a disconcertingly human angel and French country life intrigue - murder, suicide and assorted and illicit passions. The earthier aspects of this magical tale are well balanced with the more celestial themes. (Kirkus UK)

This American debut by a veteran New Zealand novelist is a wonderfully imaginative tale, set in the 19th-century French countryside, of the long enduring, loving relationship between a man and an angel. The former is 18-year-old Sobran Jodeau, scion of a family of winemakers, who while drunk and unhappy in love encounters Xas, the celestial being who will thereafter visit him annually - until the angel's intimacy with his human lover propels him headlong into Sobran's complicated family and romantic life. The story is arguably overplotted (especially in later sequences that detail Xas's masquerade as tutor to Sobran's children or that explore the unconventional triangle formed by man, angel, and the younger noblewoman who eventually becomes Sobran's mistress). But a ferocious display of inventive power redeems and enlivens even the book's more extravagant convolutions. Knox's flexible, image-driven sentences effortlessly evoke the lush plenitude of Clos Jodeau and environs, as well as Xas's ineffable strangeness (sleeping in Sobran's bed, "He looked comical, like a young man sharing his bed with two large dogs, the humps his wings made under the covers"). "Fallen angel" Xas, rejected by both God and Lucifer for his intellectual curiosity as much as for his dalliance with a mortal, is a formidable creation. And Knox equals it with her searching portrayal of Sobran: an intelligent, perceptive man who passes through astonishment at the visitation that becomes the love of his life, through furious despair when he learns of Xas's fallen state and fears he has committed blasphemy, to a resigned old age in which he knows he can neither keep nor relinquish the vessel of grace (if indeed it be such) granted to him decades before. A one-of-a-kind novel. It's not for Touched by an Angel watchers, but many readers may respond as ecstatically to Knox's brilliantly original book as they did to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Burgundy 1808 one night a young vintner meets an angel in his vineyard. Every year on the anniversary of the date, they meet again. Village life goes on with its affairs, mysteries, marriages and murders and the vintages keep improving, throught the horror of the Napoleonic wars.

Customer Reviews

Heartwarming - Heartbreaking
It's a lovely read, with a beautiful heart-breaking love story within it, I can't actually say that I could really see what Xas saw in Sobrane, maybe it was just because Sobrane loved him.

The whole religious thing, I have to be honest, went over my head, I'm with Xas in his cynicism about God's creationist ability but I didn't bother pondering over the religious themes. It was enough that there was the love story which fluttered like feathers in breeze. Utterly heart breaking, don't read if you can't set yourself up for that, after all, it's the love between an Angel and a human so it ain't going to be all happy endings - the last two lines broke me into bits - still are, in fact *sits here sobbing*. I could say that it's because I'm more attuned to death or whatever but that's not really true , because immortal - ephemeral love stories have always destroyed me - I've never got over the love between Dora and Lazarus Long (neither has he incidentally)

Mind Blowing and Amazing
I never write these reviews though I'm forever in debt to the people who do; so when I read this book I felt I had to finally praise a book that was better and greater than the average. I never cry over books maybe apart from Hardy's Jude The Obscure ( I think some people will relate to that:)) but I cried and ached throughout this book.

People complain about the murders sub-plot but for me they added a "The Perfume" taste I liked. I loved Xas though the last part of the book didn't stir me as much - it felt disconnected to the rest somehow.

Nevertheless, it will make you question God, Heaven, Hell, Devil, what is Good and Evil, what is love and if love is now too trivial and only supernatural characters like angels have in them the fierceness to love and lost without fearing to fall forever. It is that beautiful. Read it knowing you'll be puzzling about it for months.

Mixed response
I loved the premise of this book - that the vintner has a life-long assignation with the angel Xas on the same night every year, but overall found the book uneven and a bit disappointing. The angel was fabulous and fascinating as was his relationship to Sobran and his own story, it was the rest of the book (which was the largest part) that didn't work for me.
While time became an irrelevancy in the relationship with Xas, it didn't work so well with the story of Sobran's human relationships in the village. I found the murder sub-plot unnecessary and increasingly found myself skipping the 'human' story and just concentrating on the angel storyline.

The writing is also a bit tentative, with some odd use of language that perhaps the author thought sounded poetic, which to me just came over as arbitrary and a bit precious.

So mixed reviews, but probably worth reading for the Xas story alone.