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.
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