Beauty and the Beast, Marlowe Theatre (Susan Elkin reviews)

I’m not sure who recommended this book to me. I found it lurking on my Kindle, in my digital TBR list. But someone must have done, or maybe I read a review when it was published earlier this year, because I evidently bought it. Reading it now was an unexpected, stumbled-upon treat and one of my occasional flights into non-fiction.

Laing, clearly a knowledgeable gardener, and her husband Ian, bought a house in Suffolk not long before the Pandemic. The overarching narrative in this book is her autobiographical account of how she rediscovered, worked hard at, and revived the garden originally created by landscape garden, Mark Rumary, who once lived there with his partner. She has one third of an acre divided into a series of “rooms”. Her descriptions are beautifully sensuous – you can see the colours, smell the soil and feel the rhizomes of the honey fungus which she digs up and dumps. Jackdaws live noisily in the garden along with different sorts of bees and you can almost smell the dizzying pollen as the garden re-emerges and develops.  In part, it’s a book for gardeners but you don’t need to be technical about it (I’m not) to get drawn in.

The best thing about The Garden Against Time, however, is her informed eclectic, reflections on what gardens mean, stand for and symbolise now and in the past. Gardens are closely linked culturally and etymologically with paradise and she’s so good on Milton, especially Paradise Lost that she has inspired me to reread it. Interesting isn’t it how reading is a lifelong, unending treasure hunt with every book pointing gently to another one?

She writes evocatively about gardens she visits, and is inspired by, all over the UK and elsewhere: Great Dixter, Belsay, the great gardens of Suffolk and many more. And she meets and talks to people who knew Mark Rumary. At the same time there are Pandemic restrictions which confine her to her garden and trigger more thoughts about the functions of gardens in the past, present and future – pointing out that huge tranches of the population became first time gardeners in 2020 and 2021 because as Voltaire wrote in Candide, when all else fails, “Il faut cultiver le jardin”.

Laing has a passionate political agenda which sometimes becomes a bit wearing. Yes, I know slavery was an appalling concept by 2024 standards, but it happened and we can’t undo it. We do well to remember, moreover, that every single one of us is the beneficiary of slavery because it created British wealth across the board. It’s far too simplistic to single out individual, “wicked”  plantation owners (such as the fictional Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park) with their country piles, parks and gardens. If you don’t know about the work of landscapers Capability Brown and Humphry Repton, you will once you’ve read this book although Laing is scathing about how they “reworked” huge acreages which often meant displacing whole villages and communities.

And, occasionally, her historical interpretations exasperated me. Charles II did not “seize” the throne in 1660. He was restored very carefully, partly because there was no republican successor. His powers were strictly limited compared with those of his father who’d been executed in 1649. I was fascinated though, by her account of the famous Enclosure Acts which we all learned about (sort of) at school. She deems them a “land grab” and maybe that’s accurate. Suddenly the ordinary people who lived, on and by the land, no longer had a place to grow their own produce. Should all land, in fact, be “common”, Laing wonders as she debates communism and socialism and ways in which they’ve been practised or abused down the generations?  Laing, of course, owns her own Suffolk garden although she is delighted to fulfil her aim of opening it to the public through the National Gardens Scheme.

It’s not an easy book to categorise. Garden Against Time , subtitled “In search if a common paradise”, is variously an autobiography (death of her stepmother, her father’s illness and inheritance problems are another concurrent thread), a gardening book, literary criticism, history of land ownership, political treatise and a lot more. That is probably why it’s such a compelling, sometimes provocative, read. It’s also rather beautiful.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

I enjoyed The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) so much that I pounced with glee on this “companion” novel, published earlier this year. It features some of the same characters and we’re still in Oxford.

Peggy Jones, who narrates, lives with her twin sister Maude, on a narrow boat on the canal and works in the Oxford University Press bindery where Maude, who is neuro-divergent and speaks mostly in echoes, has a remarkable talent for folding. Their much missed late mother, also a “bindery girl” was, we infer, in a relationship with Tilda a suffragist who remains a close “relation” to  Peggy and Maude and writes wonderfully graphic letters from Belgium when she goes off to be a VAD alongside Vera Brittain. Yes, this is a novel which quite often features real people. I enjoyed “meeting” Mr Horace Hart of Hart’s Rules fame too.

Once the war starts in 1914, most of the men and boys enlist. Then carnage in Belgium leads to the arrival of Belgian refugees as well as British casualties. Peggy volunteers to help at the hospitals in Oxford which is how she meets, and eventually falls in love with Bastiaan, a character who delights.

This is not, however, a straightforward love story in the conventional sense. Rather, it’s a book about books, information, education, loss and inequality.  Peggy yearns to read the books she’s folding or stitching and like her mother before her she collects the discarded sections from work and brings them home so that the main room on her boat is lined with books or sections of them. Maude catalogues their boat library. Across the road from the bindery is Somerville College where privileged young women, like Gwen who becomes a good friend, are entitled to study. But Peggy, desperately hungry for learning, is barred – or is she? Could there be a way? I’ll spare you the spoilers.

There is a great deal to reflect on in this meaty, multi-layered novel. At the simplest level it’s immaculately and admirably researched although Pip Williams, who lives in Austrailia, has visited Oxford just three times. From her detailed account I learned a lot about traditional book making. As I often say, people who read fiction soak up extraneous information unconsciously. It’s a bonus side-effect that we greedy readers enjoy.

I also liked the way Williams weaves the futility of war in with the Suffragist movement and the frustration of someone in Peggy’s position. Even when the vote is granted to (some) women in 1918, she’s still excluded because she’s under 30 and not a householder. Williams paints the whole town/gown divide (which still exists) accurately too.

The characterisation is interesting. The librarian at Somerville Colleg is a case study in enlightened thinking and kindness. So, in a completely different way, is Mrs Stoddard, Peggy’s supervisor at the Bindery. She may be firm, and with a job to do, but she’s also empathetic. Then there’s Maude who depends on Peggy. Or is it the other way round? Maude is gradually revealed as being more capable and less needy than Peggy assumes and should, perhaps, be allowed a life of her own as witnessed by her intense friendship with the troubled Belgian, Lotte.

Then there’s the depiction of life on the canal – by coincidence this is the second book I’ve read in the last fortnight in which the main characters live on boats. (See last week’s Ashore by Penelope Fitzgerald). Here we get a strong sense of community with the family “next door” as close friends, worried about Jack who’s in France and lovingly looking after a very elderly mother. Pip Williams has a knack of making it all both human and humane.

At the heart of this enchanting and moving novel lies a homage to books. And that, of course, gets my vote.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing