The Gardener

Product Information

Hassie is haunted by the relationship with her late father, and by the memories of her former lover, Robert. She becomes interested in the mysterious previous owner of Knight’s Fee, Nellie East, whose notebooks she finds and reads; a young and wayward girl, Penny Lane, dashes into her life; and then there is the gardener, Murat, employed to tend the grounds of Hassie’s and Margot’s new home. the descriptions of the garden were divine. they were easily the best part of the novel and i would‘ve enjoyed The Gardener more if it had actually focused on the Gardener part more. i don’t care that much about your lost lover! i want to know about the kingfisher and the flowers in your garden! My mother didn't die, but the burns to her legs were so severe that they had to be amputated below the knee, and she was fitted with artificial legs at the same hospital as Douglas Bader. I can only guess what kind of conversation my parents had when my father finally returned, having escaped from prison camp. She had kept from him until the last possible moment the news that, while her life had been spared her legs had not. She later maintained that this reservation was out of concern for his morale, but it seems more likely that it was because the revelation would have exposed the fact that in his absence she had fallen in love – with the friend who died, another Communist activist and a charismatic leader in the student movement. But as she begins to explore the history of the house and the mysterious nearby wood, old hurts begin to fade as she experiences the healing power of nature and discovers other worlds. 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. Hassie’s full name is Halcyon, which isn’t a word I’ve heard used as a first name before. However, when she reveals that it’s from a Greek myth, I saw the charm in it and it seemed to fit Hassie very well. In some ways, she resembles a beautiful, small bird taking flight from her past and settling in a new garden. 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 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. 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.

Foliage like fine green lace poised further blues from the self-seeded love-in-a-mist. The oriental poppies, bought at the garden centre, had spread their veined hairy leaves and the lupins and the foxgloves were pushing up tender-budded spires. Other perennials, from Nelly East’s time, were re-emerging… But happy as I was to see all this, what was most thrilling was the sight of the seeds Murat and I had sown germinating in the darkness of the potting shed. Hassie is keen to integrate herself into village life and makes friends with the elderly and opinionated Phyllis Foot and also the recently widowed vicar Peter, also getting involved in the life of a young child called Penny who often hangs around the home. the novel also perpetuated some harmful ideas about women‘s bodies and their value, and it portrayed romantic love as hugely sexual (at least for Hassie) which i found very boring and unimaginative. it comes across at Robert and Hassie‘s relationship being mostly physical, but then why would Hassie be unable to get over him? because there‘s just no way Robert was THAT good in bed. 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. 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.But I also have long nurtured an idea about writing a book based on the stretch of land that lies between England and Wales, known as the Welsh Marches. I once had a house in Presteigne which is for the most part Powys. But I had only to cross a bridge to be in England. This stretch of land is still full of ancient reminders of a pagan past, among these many so-called “holy wells” which the Christians took over from a much earlier pagan worship. I had already worked with Celtic history in “Cousins”, where St Cuthbert makes a ghostly appearance, and I decided to set this book in this part of the British Isles, where vestiges of Celtic Christianity can still be found. But more importantly, I wanted to explore the hints of what was called “the old religion”, that is the worship that was practised before the Christianisation of the British Isles. When this took place, around the fifth century, edicts were passed and the old sacred trees and groves, that were worshipped in “the old religion” were cut down. But the sacred wells were harder to be rid of so these were transferred to the local saints, who then took over the reputation for the working of cures for those who came to be healed by them.