Small Eden - Jane Davis

Author: Jane Davis

Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction.

Rating: 4.1 stars.

Have you ever had the experience when you tell a friend that you loved a book, your friend wants to know what it’s about, and you just go, “Well… uhmmm.. Errr….”? That’s going to be me in this review. I am going to try my best to describe the book but I have no idea where to begin!

Now that you are forewarned, let me attempt a synopsis.

Story:

A small prologue set in 1884 gives us the background of Robert who mistakes the symptoms of scarlet fever in his two toddler sons as signs of teething. When the illness is discovered, his pregnant wife Freya is forced to go into isolation with their four year old girl. But it is too late.

Moving back to 1870. Eight year old Robert is filled with the “itch” of adventure, much to the dismay of his mother Hettie. She does her best to get him to toe the line as she has seen how a family can be destroyed because of adventurous pursuits.

Both these past events set the tone for the main story, which will now proceed in linear order from 1890. A decade after the death of his sons, Robert is a successful businessman in the field of opium production. He decides to construct a ‘pleasure garden’ in their honour, but he never reveals this reason to his wife Freya, who is trying her best to make sure her daughters get the best future through successful marriages.

How this pleasure garden comes into being, functions and affects the lives of all people involved with it forms the rest of the novel.

A literary fiction’s greatest strengths are its writing and its characters. Both are exceptional in this book. Jane’s writing prowess had already made me a fan when I had read ‘A Funeral for an Owl’. This book depicts the same firm control over her pen – excellent descriptions, thought-provoking lines, well-developed characters, superior plot control. Take this line for example: “You don't simply grieve for the person who's gone, but for things that might have been.” Straightforward, yet so true.

If you love character-oriented books, you will certainly enjoy the range of characters in this one. Robert, a man with a head full of dreams that he doesn’t want to share with his wife. Freya, who refuses to even take the names of her dead sons and has bound away her grief. Robert’s mother Hettie, who seems to have lost her marbles in her old age by going off on a trek to Scotland. The Reynolds family (Frank and his wife, and their two sons John and Gerrard), who work at the pleasure gardens but each has their own secret agenda. The Hoddy siblings (Oswald and Florence) whose commitment to each other allows them to overcome various problems but not all. Each of these characters gets a strong page space and despite the number of characters, there’s no confusion about who is who. Their distinct personality shines through! Most of the characters can’t be slotted into clear ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories – this layered character development always works better in such fiction.

I had no idea what pleasure gardens were, so to get a glimpse into them was an enlightening exercise. The author captures well Robert’s single-minded focus on his garden, sometimes at the cost of the other people and commitments in his life. The attention to historical detail also comes out in every chapter. Right from people’s clothing to habits, to life in the 1800s, to the rise and fall of pleasure gardens, to the political and religious upheavals because of opium production, it does not feel like you are reading a historical story but living it.

It goes without saying that with so many characters and an overarching plot, this isn’t an easy read. It is slow, there is no effortless plot progress, there’s no central event around which the story is built. At various points in the book, I felt like asking the author, “Where are you going with this?” But trust me, it all comes together beautifully.

I would definitely recommend this book to those who love literary fiction with well-developed but complicated characters and a great slice of history. Not recommended to those who like quick reads (at almost 400 pages, this book requires a lot of patience) or plot-oriented rather than character-oriented fiction.

I kept swinging between 3.75 stars (when the writing seemed to get too slow or when I was lost about where things were going) to 4.5 (when the emotions and the characters blended into one heck of a touching reading experience.) So I will just go with the average of the two ratings, though the well-tied ending tempts me to go higher.

4.1 stars.

My thanks to Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op, Rossdale Print Productions, and NetGalley for the DRC of “Small Eden”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

PS: If you are fond of reading back stories about novels, the author has an interesting blog article on how she “discovered” the people on the cover. (Yup, they are photos of actual people from the 1800s!!!) This is another sign of her eye for authentic detail. You can read the article HERE.

There are a couple more blog posts on her site about various elements of this book, such as her decision to make Robert an opium gardener, the concept of pleasure gardens, and the history behind parakeets (whom Robert “imports” for his garden. I enjoyed this glimpse behind the scenes of a book.