Small Eden

This book is worthy of a re-read session. There I said it. A beautifully crafted story of a couple and their loss and how they cope with it in seperate ways and how it affects their lives as it unravels further in the pages of the book. Poignant and deeply in invoking emotions out of readers, this book is absolutely worth it.

I’m afraid to say I struggled a little with this book. It’s based on grief, how people deal with it in different ways and how they remake their lives. It is beautifully written and hauntingly evocative but I struggled to really engage with the characters meaning for me it lacked emotional impact. That isn’t to say it’s not a great story, it is and as I said very well written the story just didn’t ‘click’ for me.

The characters were interesting, the storyline was excellent, and the style of writing was perfect. The first book I have read by this author and I will be keeping my eye out for more in the future. If you enjoy reading a great stories then this book is for you.

This is a beautifully written book with an enchanting storyline and well developed characters. Before I read this book I had never heard of the pleasure gardens but after reading this I will definitely be looking them up more. I wasn't sure whether I would like this book but I really enjoyed it and I can't wait to read it again or read more by the author.

Creating a pleasure garden in memorial to his sons' passing from scarlet fever, a man finds himself unable to communicate with his wife over this horrible loss. Late 1800s London is beautifully described in this well written novel.

This was an unusual tale, set in the 1890's about grief and loss, love and living a full life. Poppy and Physic garden grower Robert Cooke and his wife Freya have two baby boys, an older girl and a baby on the way. One night one of the boys develops a rash, Freya wants to call out the doctor but Robert thinks Freya is over reacting and that the baby is just teething. By morning the boys are dead. Robert struggles to deal with the consequence of his "mistake" and often imagines how the boys would look and play as they grow. He notices that a chalk pit where he found solace helping out as a twelve year old boy when his own father died is up for sale and he rashly buys it with a plan to redevelop it as a Pleasure Garden, a "small eden" where the boys in his imagination would love to explore and play. Whilst planning the gardens he enlists the help of a wheelchair bound artist and her architect brother who become almost a second family to his youngest daughter. His older daughter is drawn to the son of the family who caretake and tend the pleasure gardens. Robert's mother is also on a quest, after spending most of her life indoors, sedentary and lonely she heads to Scotland to discover where her own father died on a climb and returns a changed woman. The book follows the families through the course of a decade or so and it was really interesting to see how their lives progressed and the toll Robert's obsession with the Gardens had on his life and those around him.

Have you ever had the experience when you tell a friend that you loved a book, your friend wants to know what it’s about, and you just go, “Well… uhmmm.. Errr….”? That’s going to be me in this review. I am going to try my best to describe the book but I have no idea where to begin!

Now that you are forewarned, let me attempt a synopsis.

Story:
A small prologue set in 1884 gives us the background of Robert who mistakes the symptoms of scarlet fever in his two toddler sons as signs of teething. When the illness is discovered, his pregnant wife Freya is forced to go into isolation with their four year old girl. But it is too late.
Moving back to 1870. Eight year old Robert is filled with the “itch” of adventure, much to the dismay of his mother Hettie. She does her best to get him to toe the line as she has seen how a family can be destroyed because of adventurous pursuits.
Both these past events set the tone for the main story, which will now proceed in linear order from 1890. A decade after the death of his sons, Robert is a successful businessman in the field of opium production. He decides to construct a ‘pleasure garden’ in their honour, but he never reveals this reason to his wife Freya, who is trying her best to make sure her daughters get the best future through successful marriages.
How this pleasure garden comes into being, functions and affects the lives of all people involved with it forms the rest of the novel.

A literary fiction’s greatest strengths are its writing and its characters. Both are exceptional in this book. Jane’s writing prowess had already made me a fan when I had read ‘A Funeral for an Owl’. This book depicts the same firm control over her pen – excellent descriptions, thought-provoking lines, well-developed characters, superior plot control. Take this line as a sample: “You don't simply grieve for the person who's gone, but for things that might have been.” Straightforward, yet so true.

If you love character-oriented books, you will certainly enjoy the range of characters in this one. Robert, a man with a head full of dreams that he doesn’t want to share with his wife. Freya, who refuses to even take the names of her dead sons and has bound away her grief. Robert’s mother Hettie, who seems to have lost her marbles in her old age by going off on a trek to Scotland. The Reynolds family (Frank and his wife, and their two sons John and Gerrard), who work at the pleasure gardens but each has their own secret agenda. The Hoddy siblings (Oswald and Florence) whose commitment to each other allows them to overcome various problems but not all. Each of these characters gets a strong page space and despite the number of characters, there’s no confusion about who is who. Their distinct personality shines through! Most of the characters can’t be slotted into clear ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories – this layered character development always works better in such fiction.

I had no idea what pleasure gardens were, so to get a glimpse into them was an enlightening exercise. The author captures well Robert’s single-minded focus on his garden, sometimes at the cost of the other people and commitments in his life. The attention to historical detail also comes out in every chapter. Right from people’s clothing to habits, to life in the 1800s, to the rise and fall of pleasure gardens, to the political and religious upheavals because of opium production, it does not feel like you are reading a historical story but living it.

It goes without saying that with so many characters and an overarching plot, this isn’t an easy read. It is slow, there is no effortless plot progress, there’s no central event around which the story is built. At various points in the book, I felt like asking the author, “Where are you going with this?” But trust me, it all comes together beautifully.

I would definitely recommend this book to those who love literary fiction with well-developed but complicated characters and a great slice of history. Not recommended to those who like quick reads (at almost 400 pages, this book requires a lot of patience) or plot-oriented rather than character-oriented fiction.

I kept swinging between 3.75 stars (when the writing seemed to get too slow or when I was lost about where things were going) to 4.5 (when the emotions and the characters blended into one heck of a touching reading experience.) So I will just go with the average of the two ratings, though the ending tempts me to go higher.

4.1 stars.

My thanks to Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op, Rossdale Print Productions, and NetGalley for the DRC of “Small Eden”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.