A Hunch: A Guest Post by Nick Newman
A dreamlike story that reads like a darkly imagined fable, The Garden is an eerie and compelling exploration of love, loneliness and sisterhood. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Nick Newman on what inspired him to write The Garden.
Hardcover $29.00
The Garden
The Garden
By Nick Newman
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.00
A darkly beautiful, eerie, hypnotic novel about two elderly sisters living alone at the edge of the world.
A darkly beautiful, eerie, hypnotic novel about two elderly sisters living alone at the edge of the world.
Listen: I’m as anxious as the next person about the future of our wretched, burning planet but The Garden was never meant to be a dystopian novel. Rather, it was utopian in its motivations; a story that was not so much post-apocalyptic as post-post-apocalyptic. What would happen if someone rejected the dying world wholesale? Decided to start again, on their own terms? How would that go?
The garden is an image I have carried with me for some time. I write children’s books, and for years I’d been thinking of a story for very young readers involving an isolated, supernaturally verdant garden. Something like The Vorrh meets Francis Hodgson Burnett. (I can guess why my subconscious was preoccupied with this – my mother is a relentless gardener of semi-magical talent, and I have a lot of bone-deep childhood memories of exploring our garden). I’d also had an itch to write a novel with elderly characters who were not one-dimensional, or pitiful, or comedic, but fully-fleshed, red-blooded, complex. (Again, from where? Perhaps my parents’ ageing; perhaps my own.) These two ideas found a happy kind of synergy in the context of a “utopian” novel: an elderly couple, tending a vast, flourishing garden, at the end of all things. Or, rather, the beginning. The biblical subtext of the setting wasn’t lost on me – in fact it felt perfect for the kind of timeless, mythic story I was hoping to write. This Eden, though, had to be wholly different in its project. The custodians of the garden would be sisters, a pair of Eves, and not an Adam in sight. Not yet, anyway.
But as with any new book the idea itself is not enough. I’ve heard it said that a book, a play, a poem, starts as a “hunch” – it takes its shape from books and other works of art that seem to resonate with it. Reading Cormac McCarthy was a revelation, and a catalyst to actually start writing. It is a cliché these days to describe his prose as “biblical”, or “mythic”, but to read him for the first time was to encounter a style and a voice that perfectly articulated the feel of the book I wanted to write. There is also a dreamlike quality his novels that I love – in The Road or Blood Meridian or Outer Dark he is somehow able to write stories that are grittily, bloodily real, and utterly strange – even supernatural – at exactly the same time. Alongside McCarthy, I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle in a state of disbelief – again, at that feeling that someone was able to articulate an inner strangeness, anxiety, melancholy, better than I could myself. And her relish of that strangeness: you cannot help cheering a character like Merricat, who within the first line of the novel has declared that she wishes she could have been a werewolf. The sisters of We Have Always Lived In The Castle inspired a lot of Evelyn and Lily. They are odd. They are sad. They are charming. They are monstrous.
A brief, but true, account of The Garden’s conception. Every book cannibalises the stories that inspired it – in the case of Lily and Evelyn, this metaphor feels particularly apt.