The Gardener

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Our narrator, Hassie Days (it is revealed) is writing to her unborn child and the father has got to be Murat, the Albanian gardener with the beautiful white teeth and dazzling smile. Remember that night when Hassie went to look for the lost kitten and was full of sorrow? She saw a figure which ‘began to move slowly towards’ her. It was Murat who had been living in the woods. She refers to this in the denouement, confirmation to readers and, I thought, subtle and moving. 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. The Revd Dr Paul Edmondson is a Church of England priest and head of research for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Much of the novel charts Hassie’s attempts to ingratiate herself with the locals, which include the outspoken and cantankerous retired schoolmarm, Miss Foot, and the friendly local vicar, a widower, who claims not to believe in God. Most importantly she develops a better understanding and appreciation for herself and of her sister.

The narrator speaks honestly and openly to herself about her physical and emotional feelings. We witness her growing self-awareness and fulfilment, through her garden — “my small private paradise which I felt honoured to share with the birds” — and through her connectedness with landscape, trees, animals, a snail, the weather, and through her many literary recollections, including Emily Brontë, T. S. Eliot, Hardy, Hopkins, Beatrix Potter, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth. In the shadowy flower bed the blooms glowed like fireworks, vivid and strange. A gibbous moon hung low in the sky among multitudinous particles of ancient light.”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. 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. Hassie plans to live there permanently, but Margot, who has a job in the city, will simply visit on weekends or stay over when she needs a respite from London life. 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’.

Towards the end of her life, my mother developed Alzheimer's. It was only then, when she was no longer able to peer over my shoulder and judge what I was doing, that I began to write. While I regret that she was never conscious of how her ambition for me found its proper end, I know I couldn't have done otherwise. We get quite a detailed picture of the dynamics that the sisters grew up with. Hassie was very much their father’s favourite and Margot, their mother’s. Hassie seems to harbour a lot of resentment towards her mother and I can imagine the pain that she feels, knowing that a parent doesn’t like her. Living with a domineering or narcissistic parent is a hard way to grow up and it’s inevitable that it would have left its mark.As Hassie works in the garden alongside Murat, she begins to ruminate on her past life, her hostile mother, her diffident father, and the sibling rivalry that tainted her childhood. Most of all, she begins to analyse the love affair that ended leaving her with painful, unanswered questions.