book review: The Forgotten Garden

Huzzah! One I actually liked!

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is a detailed, slow read, but really worth it.

The story is told from the third-person perspectives of three women - Eliza, Nell, and Cassandra. As such, it skips around in time. It actually reminded me of several Doctor Who episodes where the story is told out of order, chronologically speaking, but as you see bits of it, other bits make sense and/or take on more meaning, and you eventually get a complete story. It's actually not too hard to keep up with the time shifts in this book. The location and date is listed on the first page of each chapter, so you're immediately oriented as to which main character you're tagging along with.

Speaking of characters, there are a lot to keep track of, and not just because the story is told in three time periods. Cassandra is Nell's granddaughter. Cassandra's mother more or less abandons her with Nell when Cassandra is a kid. However, Cassandra and Nell get on well together, and as Cassandra gets older, she starts helping Nell run her antique shop. After Nell dies, Cassandra is left not only with the remnants of Nell's life, but also her belongings, including a cottage in Cornwall and the beginnings of a mystery. Cassandra's own personal tragedy seems too briefly touched on, and I sense it was put in merely to give her more in common with the other two women. It doesn't quite ring as true as the traumas the other two women suffered.

Nell's sisters eventually reveal to Cassandra that Nell was a foundling. She arrived on the docks in Australia as a four-year-old with a white suitcase and no name. The sisters' father took her in and she became one of the family. Just before her wedding, Nell's "father" told her of her origins, which she could only dimly remember - time having fuzzed them out and replaced them with her adopted family. As a result, Nell canceled her wedding and withdrew emotionally from her family. Eventually, she decided that she wants to know who she really was. We follow Nell a bit as she finds out her real name and pieces much of her background together, but she has to abandon this endeavor abruptly. Years later, Cassandra picks up where Nell left off and finds the remaining clues.

Eliza is the pivotal character. She is referred to as The Authoress throughout much of the story, and she had the worst life of the three women. Her mother, Georgiana, coming from a rich old family in Cornwall, runs away and marries a sailor. He dies at sea, leaving her with twin babies. She doesn't want to return home to the family seat disgraced, so she takes lodgings in a filthy hovel in London, making what money she can. She dies of tuberculosis, and her children are left to fend for themselves, under the abusive gaze of the lady of the house, who constantly threatens to send them to the workhouse, although they each bring in rent money via various forms of child labor. One twin dies in an accident, the other, Eliza, is sent back to the family home, much to the displeasure of Aunt Adeline, who married into the family after having been Georgiana's companion, and who lives for respectability and for advantages for her only daughter, Rose, whom she feels should be given precedent over Eliza. However, Rose, who is an invalid, and Eliza get on well together, so Eliza manages to earn her keep, as it were, as the BFF of the daughter of the house.

Eliza has quite an imagination, which was an obvious escape from her circumstances. She starts to write down the fairy tales she makes up to entertain Rose, and eventually gets them published. She also gets to know the house staff, the gardener in particular. With her uncle's consent, she helps the gardener restore a garden next to a cottage on the estate. There is a hedge maze that separates the cottage from the mansion. Years later, when Rose announces that she is engaged, Eliza moves to the cottage in a sort of self-imposed exile as well as to be out of the way of the newlyweds, but still near enough should Rose need her. She's rather more passive and naive in adulthood - blindly agreeing to anything Rose wants in hopes that Rose will be happy and always need her. Personally, I liked the more adventurous, mischievous, and defiant Eliza as a child than the woman she became. Once Rose and her husband return from a trip, Eliza plans to travel, but her plans abruptly change as a result of tragedy, and she disappears.

Eliza moving to the cottage and then being gone from their lives are joyous events as far as Aunt Adeline is concerned. Bluntly, Adeline is a scheming, selfish bitch for whom one's place in society is everything, something that Eliza could care less about. She very nearly lets down her guard after the tragedy, but manages to contain it. She's interesting, if loathesome.

Rose is slightly annoying and weak-minded. She has a bit of her mother's selfishness, and she does not have a close relationship with her father, which is far more his fault than hers. While she understands her mother's obsession with societal standards, she can't resist Eliza, who is the most authentic and lively person in her circle.

There are a line of people who pop up to give Cassandra information about aspects of the mystery - they serve their purpose and then pretty much go away.

If there is a pointless character in this story, it's Rose's father. He was close to Georgiana (his sister), felt abandoned when she ran off, instigated the search for her and her children, and insisted on Eliza being brought to live in the family home, despite Adeline's protests. He's a photographer who often goes on expeditions for months at a time, hence the lack of relationship with his daughter. He becomes obsessed with photographing Eliza, as she is his only link to his sister, but she manages to elude him. He's rather like a living ghost roaming about the place. I was never sure what to make of him, other than as a barrier to Adeline throwing Eliza out on her ear.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a cameo appearance in the story, so the similarities to The Secret Garden are not coincidence. Thankfully, Morton doesn't dwell too much on the connection, but just leaves it as a nice bit of detail.

Morton did really well with the settings - Brisbane, Australia; London and Cornwall in the UK. You definitely get a good feel for the atmosphere of each place. I've already put Cornwall on my list of places to visit someday.

The whole thing does have a layer of melodrama running through it, in a Dark Shadows sort of way (if Johnny Depp really does go through with the film version and plays Barnabas Collins, I'm SO going to see it). I was in the mood for that kind of thing at the time, and the parallels between the lives of these three women, not to mention the connections between them, are intriguing and distracting enough, so I found the melodrama amusing more than irritating. I can see that others might roll their eyes at it, though.

It's a relief to find a good read after several duds, although it was short-lived. The book I started reading after this one didn't hold my interest At. All., so I had to abandon it. I've just started The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which looks more promising.