Scenes in The Forgotten Garden

I'm still pondering settings . . .

Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden, struck me hard. I think the story packed a walloping punch because of her intense storyworld, and the severe contrasts between settings.

I consider the parched, oppressively hot summer in Australia, where everything struggles to grow in the garden and a little girl hides beneath the house to escape the heat . . . and then we travel to a cold, dark mansion on the west coast of England, drenched in rain and surrounded by an enormous verdant green lawn and formal garden. The constant pounding of the sea on the cliffs below fails to soothe it's inhabitants. Ms. Morton takes the reader to a dirty, tiny attic room in grey London serving as a refuge of sorts for an orphan, but later we find the same orphan imprisoned in a quaint cottage perched on a cliff above the ocean with an extraordinary walled garden attached.

These juxtapositions and clearly detailed settings are etched in my mind. I close my eyes and stand in an unfriendly London street shrouded in fog and the stench from turn-of-the-century city-life, or lift my face to the sun and imagine the garden Makepeace planted, an apple tree and its spring blooms.

Thank you, Kate Morton, for your vivid sense of place, and for creating places my mind can wander back upon. Read her book and you will see what I mean.

Favorite Escapes

The setting in a novel is huge. It’s the silent character. Readers may not pay close attention, but without setting, you are literally nowhere.

When I read the last page of a great novel, I often close my eyes and remember the most distinct places the author took me in the book. I want to take a few posts to talk about my favorite escapes in fiction.

I will start with the side of a cliff in A Soldier of the Great War by Marc Helprin. There’s a scene where the protagonist, a professor of aesthetics and a soldier, must climb a cliff using very little equipment. He does not know what he’ll find at the top, but describes the air and the light as it ricochets off the rock from his unique point of view. I almost felt the coolness of the mountain, welcome warmth from the sun on his back and I saw all the scenery around him. I still see it.

Helprin also took us to a WWI foxhole in the same novel. I see dust raining on the soldiers under attack. The low ceiling, everything looks gray, covered with dirt and fear. Men crawled across the unforgiving floor, yelling at one another as the walls crumbled around them. The tension and fear pulse in my gut even when I remember the scene, because the setting is so vivid in my mind.

That’s the beauty of good description. If I can go back to a scene in fiction years after I read the book, the place has become real to me. As real as any other memory.  

This is great fiction.