I wanted to like Penelope Lively’s latest book, Life in the Garden. Here, the acclaimed British novelist has produced a medley of garden memoir, landscape history, literary analysis and personal musings. Other reviewers have praised it, one calling it “a book to treasure,” another “appealingly shambolic.”
I admire Lively’s extensive body of work. Last year, at age 84, she published her 21st work of fiction, The Purple Swamp Hen, and over the past few decades has given us such notable books as Moon Tiger, a tale of remembered love in Egypt, the country of her childhood. The 1987 novel won the Booker Prize and is now shortlisted for the Golden Man Booker Prize, an award for the best title in the prestigious competition’s first half century.
Lively’s fiction explores how seemingly small decisions and events produce profoundly significant results. Such perceptions flow from a prodigious memory and a fertile imagination. In Life in the Garden, she recalls with great clarity her own ostensibly ordinary but deeply formative environments.
She remembers hiding places in her childhood garden in Cairo, where she would read, near a eucalyptus tree or in a hedge or by a bamboo shaded water garden teeming with tadpoles. “I can still draw a map of this garden in every detail,” she writes,” though it has long been displaced by urban sprawl. When she later visited the area that loss could not erase “a memory of trees and grass and flowers, and the ghost of my own alter ego.”
This introduction seems to herald what the reader hopes to be a cozy memoir of a long life shaped, enriched and decorated by garden experiences. But the narrative soon breaks free of this leash and we are led on a journey where the path seems not just winding but at times aimless.
There are moments of poignant observation. While “gardening,” she notes, “you are no longer stuck in the here and now.” She adds that “there is this abiding astonishment at the fury for growth, at the tenacity of plant life, at the unstoppable dictation of the seasons.” Indeed, time is the dimension every true gardener sees working in concert with a plant’s own primal force.
But these sharp insights are undermined by the book’s exceeding discursiveness.One chapter, called Reality and Metaphor, encompasses everything from the gardening dynamic between Virginia and Leonard Woolf to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to gardens as subjects by artists as varied as Monet and Munch.
This may be gently didactic for readers with no gardening background. If you are even mildly versed in such topics as Tulipomania, the English landscape style, the creation of Sissinghurst Castle Garden, it seems cursory and, in the absence of stronger connecting threads, actually quite tedious.
More engaging are Lively’s reminiscences of her personal life. After an exotic and colorful start to life in the colonies, the writer settled into what seems a comfortable and genteel English middle class existence back in Blighty, which is to say one never too far from the garden and, moreover, the act of gardening.
“The two central activities in my life – alongside writing – have been reading and gardening,” she writes. “And there has been a sense in which the two have meshed: I always pay attention when a writer conjures up a garden, when gardening becomes an element of fiction.”
Lifelong gardeners will nod along as she writes about succumbing to plant fads. “I have hunted down dwarf conifers and then ripped them out a few years later. I have junked gladioli and substituted crocosmia.”
But such zingers are too few and too scattered.