The Savage Garden [Paperback]

 

 

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About three years ago, British author Mark Mills debuted with "Amagansett", a critically acclaimed murder mystery set in post-World War II Long Island, notable in the off-the-beaten track setting and period and in Mill's slick and sophisticated prose. But where "Amagansett" meandered sometimes aimlessly across Hampton's dunes, Mills' second effort, "The Savage Garden", is as lively and raucous a page-turner as the Tuscan hills where his story takes place.

Adam Strickland is a young Cambridge student in the decade or so following World War II; a brilliant but borderline slacker. For his thesis, his professor suggests travel to Italy to research the Renaissance gardens of the Villa Docci. Drawn more to the promised pleasures of Tuscany's seductive hills than the academic allure of a rather pedestrian Florentine garden, Adam gladly accepts the challenge. Traveling from Florence to the surrounding hillsides, Adam meets the aging and elegant matriarch Signora Docci and begins his scholarly research on the villa's garden, supposedly a memorial to "Flora" - the wife of it's 15th century owner. But it is soon apparent that there is more to the garden - and to the families who've occupied the villa for centuries - than Renaissance architecture and medieval history. Intrigue and mystery seem to lurk behind every statue and behind the villa's locked doors, revealing sinister parallel events spanning the hundreds of years between Flora's untimely death and the murder of Signora Docci's son by the Nazi's who occupied the villa during the WWII.

Simply put, "The Savage Garden" has all the elements making a great novel. The premise is clever, intelligent, and understated, delivered by a cast of well-drawn and likable characters who are cast in credible situations while reacting believably. The story line throws in enough history and culture to keep it interesting, while not bogging down in unnecessary historical minutia. But most of all, "The Savage Garden" is at its core a good old fashioned Gothic mystery that will bring back memories of "The DaVinci Code" and Matthew Pearl's "The Dante Club", while deftly sidestepping the "Hollywood" of the former and tedium of the latter. Make no mistake about it - Mark Mills is a writer with serious chops - a writer that in two outings has shown depth and versatility and an uncanny ability to educate while entertaining. I'm looking forward to number three, but hoping the wait is less than three years. Another title that I just can't help talking about is 'Across the High Lonesome' by James McNay Brumfield; I picked up this book when I saw that Larry McMurtry, the author of my all time favorite book 'Lonesome Dove,' gave it high marks.

Mark Mills writes like it takes no effort which, as we all know, takes work. The ease of reading can trick you into thinking that this isn't a book to be taken seriously, just a summer read. There is so much meat here. We get another glimpse into the 'after war' experience of people pulling their lives back into order from chaos, we see how war can mask very personal violence as military brutality, we gain insight into how a family can be tortured by guilt and by avarice. The themes are universal and Mills manages to craft the most unlikelinest murder mystery in both style and content. A terrific read.

Adam Strickland is drifting towards his degree in art history in 1958 when he is called to his professor's office one afternoon. Adam is assigned a special summer project: to write a scholarly monograph about a famous garden built in the 1500s. This garden, dedicated to the memory of Signor Docci's dead wife, is a mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills, and classical inscriptions. But during his three-week sojourn at the villa, Adam comes to suspect that clues to a murder are buried in the strange iconography of the garden.

As the mystery of the garden unfolds, Adam finds himself drawn into a parallel intrigue. Through his evolving relationship with the lady of the house - the ailing, seventy-something Signora Docci - he finds clues to another possible murder, this one much more recent. The signora's eldest son was shot by Nazi officers on the third floor of the villa, and her husband, now dead, insisted that the area be sealed and preserved forever. Like the garden, the third-floor rooms are frozen in time.

I enjoyed this novel: the setting, the history and the intrigue combined with some memorable characters to deliver a fine mystery. As the `who' and the `why' in both mysteries becomes clear, I was left wondering about the lengths to which some people will go to keep secrets.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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4.0 out of 5 stars "What they did in a moment, we live with forever."
Weaving Greek sculpture, renaissance literature, and even the horrors of the Second World War, Mark Mills' seductive tale centers on the strange doings of a mysterious Villa high... Read more

Published on Jun 30 2007 by Michael Leonard

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