Review by Bill Kirton
Catherine Czerkawska happens to be a friend but she’s also a
talented, dedicated, thoroughly professional author who (I think) has a good
readership but who deserves an even bigger one. None of that information is
relevant to my reading of and response to this book, however, because from the
earliest pages I was drawn in by the character of the first person narrator, a
19th century Scottish gardener, William Lang. The author folds
narrative layers together so that, through his own words as he recounts his
life, we learn of his loves, his sorrows, the demands of his job and family, and above all, the pain of one huge
central betrayal. And yet, at the same time, we’re able to warm to him as an attractive,
highly sympathetic character. He’s not flawless, he’s sometimes quick-tempered
and gauche and his naivety about some aspects of life opens him to
disappointments which might well have been avoided.
All the time, though, his voice, that of an old man
recalling incidents from early boyhood, adolescence, manhood and his present as
a grandfather, is consistent. It’s a tour de force on the part of the female
author who disappears entirely inside her character.
The narrative seems always to be in a present, but it’s a
changing one: the present of his time helping his father, who tended the physic
garden at Glasgow University; his apprenticeship and eventual appointment as
his father’s successor; his friendship with a young professor; the birth and growth
of his love for his Jenny; the excruciating pain of the denouement; and then
the quiet satisfactions of his later years. The narrative’s leisurely pace fits
the subject well because his time is spent in his beloved garden or roaming the
countryside looking for botanical specimens. Plants can’t be hurried and he
relishes their colours, shapes and perfumes, uses his poetic gift to convey
such things as honeysuckle’s ‘buttery tangle in all the hedgerows’. Indeed, the
world of trees and plants informs all his thinking.
But when the authorities in their ignorance build a type
foundry next to the gardens, the polluting intrusions of the ‘unnatural’ world
(my word, not his) begin to stifle the plants, cover their life and beauty with
a corrupting film of filth. His story thus becomes that of the shifting
perspectives of the 19th century from the rural idylls of the
Romantics to urbanisation, from the innocence of the natural world to the
inhumanity of the industrial revolution.
But all the while that William is leading us through these
experiences, he keeps reminding us of some ominous event which crushed him,
destroyed his faith and trust in the world he knew so well. The mystery of this
event is brilliantly handled. In the middle of some lively sequence, he’ll
pause, reflect briefly on a pain he carries without explaining it at first.
Then, progressively, through other ‘asides’, we learn of its source, although
we still have no idea what it might be. The author even uses his granddaughter
to deepen the mystery. She comes into William’s room as he’s writing so we’re
suddenly faced with a different character, one leading a life clearly separated
from the one he’s just been describing.
As well as the tensions and conflicts generated in William
himself, there are those in the outside world. There’s the coexistence of the
garden and the factory, of course, but there’s also a more subtle one in the
actual seat of learning where he works. On the one hand there are studies in
botany with all that implies about life and growth, but they’re directly
contrasted with a subject such as anatomy, which relies on death and
dissection. This, to William, is anathema and it colours his perceptions of the
professors who teach the separate disciplines until, as an old man, he begins
to recognise that both disciplines are necessary, a thought which sets him
speculating about some of his own attitudes over the years.
The settings in which the whole story takes place are
perfectly realised. Everything about the narrative reminds us that we’re with
him in the 19th century. And yet, in connection with the academic
theme, there are some delightful indicators of modern observations. The
students get drunk and rampage through his garden, causing lots of damage, but
it’s his observations on the professors and teachers that suggest some
attitudes and opinions still prevail. ‘If these people were, by some miracle of
transposition, to be precipitated into the real world, the world outside those
venerable walls,’ he writes, ‘ I am convinced that they could never survive.’
And again, ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, many of the professors
considered the students to be wholly undesirable, a necessary evil, an
inconvenient interruption to the real business of scholarship.’
So, in these and other observations and especially in the
character and presence of William, there’s a lot of warmth and pleasure in
reading the story. It’s a very human
tale, beautifully written, written with love and yet, when two of its themes
come together towards the end, the effect is devastating. It has the spareness
and intensity of a classical tragedy. In short, it’s a great novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment