Garden Of Eden (Paperback)

Sharon Butala has published a steady stream of stories and novels since 1986 when her very first collection, Queen of the Headaches, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. She was a serious, mid-list writer with a modest profile outside of Saskatchewan until she broke out with an award-winning, non-fiction bestseller, The Perfection of the Morning --the kind of spiritual book that gave the term, "new age", a modicum of respect. In her fiction and non-fiction, Butala masterfully evokes prairie landscapes: her vivid descriptions of coulees, prairie grasses, falling-down barns, and rotting fence posts know few equals.
In The Garden of Eden, nominated for the 1998 Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, Butala broadens her scope to wrestle with large themes of sin and redemption in an at times melodramatic story set in Saskatchewan and Ethiopia. Iris Christie is a well-off farm wife living in the prairie town of Chinook. Childless, she and her husband, Barney, raise her niece, Lannie, a troubled kid who first drifts to Toronto and then decamps to work in Ethiopia during the famine of 1985. Iris hasn't heard from Lannie for several years and her happy marriage is about to end. Barney has moved to a distant ranch, having finally grown impatient with lucrative wheat farming. When Iris finds Barney's corpse in the ranch house, she is jolted out of her comfortable life and sets out to find Lannie and share the news. Vulnerable but determined, Iris arrives in Ethiopia and her awakening and transformation from complacent farm wife to self-aware woman begin.
For the most part, Butala's characters are well-drawn figures who exude the rough edges of real life. One exception is the young, handsome novelist, Jay Anselm, who, in a rather hackneyed sex scene, eventually beds Iris in a Toronto hotel room and leaves before she wakes up. More seriously, though, Butala loads her story with some symbolism that can be heavy-handed, even for an increasingly spiritual writer. Along with the title's explicit invocation of paradise are a trinity of sections entitled "Seeding", "Growing", and "Harvesting", and chapters such as "The Promise of Heaven", "Loaves and Fishes", and "The Underworld". And her use of richly symbolic dreams to represent Iris's burgeoning inner life read, on occasion, like warmed-over Freudian narratives-just plain "corny" in the parlance of John Barth. In Writers Dreaming, the 1993 book edited by Naomi Epel, Barth advises his creative writing students either to not "do dreams" or, if they do, then only with "ironic awareness that dreams have been overdone". Butala fails on both counts. After setting out to find Lannie, for example, Iris dreams of a snake shedding its skin in a tropical Garden of Eden, which of course symbolizes her gaining an awareness of a new dimension of the world-"whole, perfect, transcendentally beautiful."
The Garden of Eden is an ambitious book marred by blatant signposting and earnest dream sequences. I suspect that readers would prefer to discover their own patterns of meaning in Butala's narratives.
Keith Nickson (Books in Canada)

The perfection of the novel: a sweeping tale of a woman's loss and discovery from the best-selling author of The Perfection of the Morning.

Sharon Butala achieved that magical combination of critical acclaim and popular sales success with her #1 national bestseller, The Perfection of the Morning (over 50,000 copies sold). Now, in what many are predicting will be her most powerful novel ever, Sharon Butala returns to Perfection territory in a profoundly moving tale of two generations of western women and their search to heal themselves.

A farm woman like her mother and her grandmother before her, Iris finds her comfortable rhythm of prairie life shattered forever when her husband dies suddenly. She begins a search for the niece she raised as a daughter, but has not seen for ten years. Lannie, fleeing from her own past, is desperately trying to save others - and herself - in the drought-ravaged deserts of Ethiopia. In her quest for Lannie, Iris must come to terms with her rage, her longing for love and the inexorable truths of nature.

The Garden of Eden is a transforming story that travels deep into the heart of contemporary womanhood and challenges the myth of the West. A search for redemption in a landscape on the edge of ruin, The Garden of Eden is a passionate testament to Sharon Butala's immense talent as a writer and interpreter of our own search for a place in the world.

HarperFlamingoCanada - A Phyllis Bruce Book

"... one of this country's true visionaries."' The Toronto Star