Title: The Garden
Author: Claire Beams
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Publication date: April 9, 2024
Length: 304 pages
Genre: Thriller
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley
Rating:
The discovery of a secret garden with unknown powers fuels this page-turning and psychologically thrilling tale of women desperate to become mothers and the ways the female body has always been policed and manipulated, from the award-winning author of The Illness Lesson (“A masterpiece” – Elizabeth Gilbert)
In 1948, Irene Willard, who’s had five previous miscarriages in a quest to give her beloved husband the child he desperately desires and is now pregnant again, comes to an isolated house-cum-hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband-and-wife team of doctors who are pioneering a cure for her condition. Warily, she enlists herself in the efforts of the Doctors Hall to “rectify the maternal environment,” both physical and psychological. In the meantime, she also discovers a long-forgotten walled garden on the spacious grounds, a place imbued with its own powers and pulls. As the doctors’ plans begin to crumble, Irene and her fellow patients make a desperate bid to harness the power of the garden for themselves—and must face the incalculable risks associated with such incalculable rewards.
With shades of Shirley Jackson and Rosemary’s Baby, The Garden delves into the territory of motherhood, childbirth, the mysteries of the female body, and the ways it has always been controlled and corralled.
The pressure to produce a baby and the risks women accept in order to fulfill what they’re told is their true purpose are at the heart of this dark novel. I’m not sure that I’d call it a thriller, but I can’t really come up with another category that fits.
In a nutshell, Irene is one of many women who’ve suffered multiple miscarriages and have given up hope of becoming a mother. But when a married pair of doctors offers a supposedly new and innovative approach to increase the odds of a successful pregnancy, Irene and her husband jump at the chance to participate in their program. Newly pregnant again, Irene checks into the country home turned hospital where she’ll live for the rest of her pregnancy, following a strict regimen of rest, carefully monitored food, daily exams, psychoanalysis, and hormonal injections.
From the start, Irene doesn’t seem like a particularly good fit for the program. She’s prickly and rebellious, and immediately acts up and speaks out against the strictness of the protocols. Still, when another woman heads home after successfully delivering a healthy baby, Irene sees that there may be a reason to go along with all the rules and requirements.
But in exploring the grounds, she discovers an overgrown walled garden that seems to have some unusual properties. Before long, she and two other women begin to experiment with the power of the garden. Could this be the secret to the doctors’ success? And if not, could this offer them a last-ditch resource in case the worst happens?
Oh, where to even begin with a review of this book? I didn’t get along particularly well with it from the start, but there were enough glimmers of possibly intriguing developments yet to come that I hung in there to see it through.
First and foremost, I didn’t care for the writing style. The prose, and especially the descriptions, are overwrought and overstuffed.
She held up a second finger and turned her eyes, blue like a wrong note, on Irene alone.
Blue like a wrong note? I have no idea what that means.
What did it matter if her inner self was like these other women’s somehow — the corridors or caverns all their babies occupied, or even their minds? No one could make her own that self, whose contours were only visible in what it had killed, as her true one.
Parsing some of these sentences can be exhausting.
Beyond the writing style, the plotline about the garden, as well as visions of the house’s past inhabitants and what they show Irene, goes nowhere — or at least, not in a truly coherent way. There could be truly eerie things happening… or the women could be experiencing some sort of mass delusion. I wanted something more definite out of all of this, but didn’t get it.
Most interesting to me was the author’s afterword, in which she talks about the popular use of DES in the 1940s as a treatment for infertility and miscarriage, and how that was a piece of what inspired this book. The pressure to bear children, the emptiness of considering oneself a failure after miscarrying, the desperation to have a baby at any cost — these are all themes that resonate and are well conveyed through the characters’ thoughts and actions. The garden and its supernatural essence are superfluous — I would perhaps have been more interested in a story about the women and their medical treatments without the eerie elements.
Overall, the various plot threads and themes never quite add up to a riveting story. I was disengaged throughout, and although I was determined to see the book through to the end, I never found myself caught up in the story or dying to see what happens next. Unfortunately, my thought at the end of the book was that I probably could have done without this particular reading experience.
One quick final note: I do love the cover! Look closely at those flowers, and see the shape they form…
Bookshelf Fantasies 