The Gardener

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My father was not vouchsafed then – or ever – the truth of the liaison that had led to the loss of his wife's legs (after she died, he told me that he had "put things together" over a period of time). She had been a fine athlete (they had met playing tennis) and he was reunited after five years away with a woman who would have to contend with a lifelong disability. In addition to necessitating the amputation of her legs, the bomb had radically damaged my mother's pelvis. She was advised that she must not have children. It was a double blow to my father whose own father had been killed in the first world war before ever seeing his only child. My father, like Christopher Tietjens, the hero of Parade's End, was brought up in "the old school". He could never have abandoned a wife with such a loss to cope with. And, with characteristic persistence, my mother proceeded to canvass obstetricians until she found, in her home town of Liverpool, a consultant who agreed to perform the potentially dangerous operation that would be required if they were to have a child. In the ‘sprawling’ house, Hassie is left alone to tend the ‘large, long-neglected garden’. Finding it rather a large task, she asks for the help of Murat, an Albanian refugee, who has largely been ‘made to feel out of place amongst the locals’.

The strength of this novel, for me, was SV’s ability to add so many layers to village life both good and bad: village gossip, narrow-mindedness, supporting the ‘locals’ by buying shrivelled fruit and bad art – all this tempered with the beauty and power of nature. The simply glorious descriptions of birds and flowers moving through the seasons just made this tale of the countryside sing for me. And that leisurely growth is forever stunted – even a power out, or blown fuse, or whatever it is that afflicts the house before it's shipshape, is just mentioned and then ignored. But then, when the same applies to the greater things, those that might have actually provided a plot, you see all that is wrong about this mish-mash. The decorating, as dull as it was? Incomplete, forgotten, ignored. Likewise with the garden. Ditto with the history of the house Hass gets wrapped up in. No, there is some semblance of a story as regards Hass settling down, and some indication of a kind of fairy legacy regarding the building and its environs, but nothing that ever gels into the form of a decent story.Settling in the country Hass feels a connection to her father through the birds in the garden and the countryside. Through new friends in the village, she learns the history of the area, and more specifically their new home, Knight’s Fee. Hass explores the region’s significance with the early saints and pagan gods. While I was reading The Gardener, I found myself reacting to it, like Hassie regarding her untameable garden, “with a mixture of awe and resentment”. Its rendering of character is frustratingly uneven and its narrative excursions into the past seem so randomly introduced that the pacing often feels wildly out-of-kilter. Viewed as a whole, though, the novel's narrative design emerges as instrumental to its central conviction, as set out in the prefacing letter: that “the certainties we construct are apt to be toppled by reality.” Try as we might to control it, nature has other ideas:

Although my parents, and later my little brother, lived in the upper part of the house, my bedroom was on the ground floor, which suited me as I loved my godmother, who never scolded me, dearly. My mother, no doubt because of her disability, could be sharp of tongue. My room where I practised ballet, looked out on to the garden. In particular, it looked out on to a tall white cherry tree with which I developed a mystical relationship. The house’s garden makes for a strong central metaphor, steadily progressing from a wilderness into a flourishing garden, eventually even producing its own harvest as a result of Murat’s attentive work. Ultimately, the mystical charms of the natural world provide Hassie with a kind of healing as she sees the possibilities of new life and becomes less concerned with winning the approval of others. In this sense, reading The Gardener is a form of healing in itself. For People Who Devour Books The house is set in an extensive but overgrown garden in need of repair. It’s a job too big for one person, so Hassie hires an Albanian migrant who has broken up with his English wife to help her. Although neither of them has any horticultural knowledge, they work together to weed the overgrown garden beds, mow the lawns, repair broken trellises and plant new plants.

The Gardener is a tender manifesto for how what is broken and neglected in us can be restored through care, love and time. If the novel has a fault, it is that it’s too focused on the protagonist. Little time is spent developing Murat’s character and the descriptions of him often speak to stereotypes: he is cautious, diligent, deferential and mostly silent; he has ‘dazzling teeth’ and ‘topaz eyes’, uses formal language and misunderstands British idioms. It is difficult not to cringe as Hassie remarks to the local vicar, ‘I’m all in favour of immigrants … Especially when they’re like Murat. They strike me as much harder workers than the British.’ I have an idea that how and author is feeling while writing a book gets into the book’s atmosphere. For all the anxiety and understandable fear about me as I wrote this novel, my mood was strangely calm, always with a sense that all would be well if we could only attend better to our relationship with the natural world. In the end, that is what happens for Hassie, my central character. Working on her untended garden and walking through the ancient countryside, and most particularly an ancient wood, the various hurst and traumas she has sustained fall away and she finds new life beginning to evolve within her. In time, I became a psychoanalyst, a profession that by definition abjures the limelight, and managed a judicious balance between doing well enough to please her and not too well to threaten. I was the outcome of that potent mix of determination and optimism. Six years later, my mother went on to have my brother but I grew up with the expectation of being an only child and with the haunting sense that I had some unspecified task to fulfil. She told me about the man who died, whom she had loved passionately, far too early for me to cope with the information. The disturbing result was the strong – if wholly irrational – conviction that my "real" father was not my honourable dad but the lost student hero who had died.