de Helen Humphreys
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de Helen Humphreys
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de Helen Humphreys
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de Helen Humphreys
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de Mary Ann Shaffer
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Though The Lost Garden, the third novel by Kingston-based writer Helen Humphreys, is set in England in 1941, it takes place far from the bombs of the Blitz. Gwen Davis, a sad, shy employee of the Royal Horticultural Society who's spent much of her adulthood studying diseased parsnips, leaves London to lead young members of the Women's Land Army on an estate in the Devon countryside. She arrives amid great confusion, but soon realizes that she's inherited a gaggle of Land Girls who are less interested in growing potatoes for the war effort than in consorting with the Canadian soldiers stationed nearby. Gwen is not a natural leader, but she does find allies in Jane, a wan but caustic young woman whose boyfriend is missing in action, and Captain Raley, a dashing Canadian officer prone to quoting from the poems of Tennyson. Gwen also discovers a garden planted by someone who worked on the estate during its grandest years, before World War I decimated an earlier generation of English gardeners. The events that follow prove that the melancholy narrator is wrong to believe, as she says early in the story, that "the stupidity of vegetables is preferable to the unpredictability of people."
The Lost Garden is written in a style very much informed by Gwen's favourite writer, Virginia Woolf, who herself has just gone missing as the novel begins. Although some dialogue teeters on the edge between lyrical and overripe, the action builds to a lovely finale that merges all of the novel's disparate elements into something with genuine emotional resonance. Like the roses that fascinate the novel's heroine, The Lost Garden's poise and beauty are complemented by its surprisingly hardy nature. --Jason Anderson --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.
From Publishers Weekly
Evocative, if occasionally clunky, Humphreys's third novel (following Afterimage) is the story of an Englishwoman's search for her place in a world permeated by war. The narrator, 35-year-old Gwen Davis, is a horticulturist who flees bombed-out WWII London to manage a team of "land girls"-women who grow vegetables as part of the war effort-at a country estate. She struggles to manage her wayward charges, who are more interested in the Canadian soldiers billeted in the main house than in cultivating potatoes, and writes letters in her head to her idol Virginia Woolf, whose recent death has left her feeling bereft. She also tries to seduce the world-weary, hard-drinking Captain Raley, who has a secret of his own that dooms their relationship. Though her conflicts pale next to those of the soldiers waiting to be posted to battle and even those of her new friend, Jane, whose cousin is a casualty of war and whose fiance is missing in action, it is Gwen's quiet self-discovery that is at the center of the novel. Humphreys renders convincingly her first, fleeting experience of deep friendship and love. Unfortunately, the story is sometimes marred by overwrought or cloying prose, though Humphreys's language also has its moments of elegance (during the blitz, "houses become holes. Solids become spaces. Anything can disappear overnight"). Humphreys doesn't quite have the narrative energy of Pat Barker and Jane Gardam, but fans of those authors may enjoy this exploration of the impact of WWII on English life.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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