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The Garden Book
Australian edition. Text is in English. 316 pp. ISBN 1-920882-10-3
316 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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78 people want to read
About the author
Brian Castro
23 books19 followersBrian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of Portuguese, Chinese and English parents. He was sent to boarding school in Australia in 1961 (1962, Oakhill College, Castle Hill / 1963-67, St Joseph's College, Hunter's Hill.). He attended the University of Sydney from 1968-71 and won the Sydney University short story competition in 1970. He gained his BA Dip.Ed. in 1972 and his MA in 1976 from Sydney University.
He was joint winner of the Australian/Vogel literary award for his first novel Birds of Passage (1983), which has been translated into French and Chinese. This was followed by Pomeroy (1990), Double-Wolf (1991), winner of The Age Fiction Prize, the Victorian Premier's Innovatory Writing Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and subsequently After China (1992), which again won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction at the 1993 Victorian Premier's Awards. This was also subsequently translated into French and Chinese. His fifth novel, Drift, was published in July 1994. His sixth novel Stepper won the 1997 National Book Council 'Banjo' Prize for fiction. In 1999 he published a collection of essays, Looking For Estrellita (University of Queensland Press). In 2003 Giramondo published his 'fictional autobiography', Shanghai Dancing, which won the Vance Palmer Prize at the 2003 Victorian Premier's Awards, the Christina Stead Prize at the 2004 NSW Premier’s Awards and was named the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year. His most recent novel, The Garden Book, published by Giramondo in 2005, was shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the Queensland Premier's Prize for Fiction.
Brian Castro has worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer, and for several years was a literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine. He wrote the text for The Lingerie Catalogue, a collaborative project with photomonteur Peter Lyssiotis. Castro also contributed the text Stones for Al-Kitab for a limited edition work by Peter Lyssiotis entitled A Gardener At Midnight, produced in 2004.
Brian Castro currently divides his time between Adelaide and Melbourne.
Two of his novels, Pomeroy and Stepper (Stepper, oder Die Kunst der Spionage) have been published in German by Klett Cotta. His novel After China (L’Architecte Chinois), was published by Editions de L’Aube in France in 2003.
(from http://www.lythrumpress.com.au/castro...)
He was joint winner of the Australian/Vogel literary award for his first novel Birds of Passage (1983), which has been translated into French and Chinese. This was followed by Pomeroy (1990), Double-Wolf (1991), winner of The Age Fiction Prize, the Victorian Premier's Innovatory Writing Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and subsequently After China (1992), which again won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction at the 1993 Victorian Premier's Awards. This was also subsequently translated into French and Chinese. His fifth novel, Drift, was published in July 1994. His sixth novel Stepper won the 1997 National Book Council 'Banjo' Prize for fiction. In 1999 he published a collection of essays, Looking For Estrellita (University of Queensland Press). In 2003 Giramondo published his 'fictional autobiography', Shanghai Dancing, which won the Vance Palmer Prize at the 2003 Victorian Premier's Awards, the Christina Stead Prize at the 2004 NSW Premier’s Awards and was named the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year. His most recent novel, The Garden Book, published by Giramondo in 2005, was shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the Queensland Premier's Prize for Fiction.
Brian Castro has worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer, and for several years was a literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine. He wrote the text for The Lingerie Catalogue, a collaborative project with photomonteur Peter Lyssiotis. Castro also contributed the text Stones for Al-Kitab for a limited edition work by Peter Lyssiotis entitled A Gardener At Midnight, produced in 2004.
Brian Castro currently divides his time between Adelaide and Melbourne.
Two of his novels, Pomeroy and Stepper (Stepper, oder Die Kunst der Spionage) have been published in German by Klett Cotta. His novel After China (L’Architecte Chinois), was published by Editions de L’Aube in France in 2003.
(from http://www.lythrumpress.com.au/castro...)
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 20, 2024
Authors like Brian Castro are stateless people; they don’t really have a home in the values or the prevailing thinking of any age. And in a nation with an awkward identity, a sense of its own inadequacies like Australia had, and still has, his characters are the parallels of his own story, what else can they be but out of step, out of place, like him mongrels of history. We have a Chinese intellectual, the first PhD from Melbourne university, whose family had been in Australia since the 1850s, who carries his Chinese psyche inside himself as a set of cultural attributes, is always judged by his appearance, the attributes of the oriental mind. His appearance is his entire worth, his culture, his homeland. Hay, his adopted name, has a daughter, Swan, a corruption of Shuan, whose life is worse, doubly cast out as Chinese and a woman and a free-thinker in a man’s world. She is smart, sensual, creative, ie, out of step. This all starts in the 1920s, outside Melbourne in the newly developing hills east of the city. These are beautiful temperate upland forests. I loved going there as a child on school excursions. You can stand under woodland canopy in filtered light and listen to the sound of a bell bird pealing, a sound that penetrates the forest so deeply, you cannot but assume it was always there waiting for you to hear it. A sound of great joy and musical harmony – a single note symphony. A YouTube video could never do it justice.
Garden Book was published while Australia was re-writing its own history as a creative project based on rugged, religious, entrepreneurial, conservative, righteous sportsmen. Again women aren’t part of it. These are still called the ‘culture wars’, or the Murdoch press and the American right’s view of the world, sadly transported and dumped on us. These absurd arguments left us battered and divided, like any war. Except we have no idea how to get ourselves out of it, if only there was death and rubble everywhere to mourn and start again. These bloodless wars only affect our minds. After which we call the problem a ‘mental health crisis’. That happens when enough middle class people are feeling a little vulnerable and something gets done about it. If we just recognised our mongrel heritage as a country, we’d all start to be the relaxed versions we project of ourselves on the world. Trust me, Australians are not a relaxed people, we seethe with contempt, anxiety, fear, loathing, spitefulness – like anyone else. We pretend otherwise in our casual dress, side of the mouth nasal speech. An Australian rarely sounds convincing when they speak, try listening sometimes. We sound insecure wanting some guidance and assurance with every utterance.
We are dissonant, seeming one thing, being another. So, nothing is harmonious of course in the Garden Book. Bulldozers, human vanity, construction, crime and economic goals spoil it all, of course they do. But these elements also bring our protagonists together. And a real war, WW2 which causes more and real damage to everyone’s life: as if the damage wasn’t already there.
Fire tears through these landscapes regularly bringing regeneration. But people don’t recover so easily. Hay can’t get work and becomes a pauper, as a result, Swan stops her studies and marries the hard working autodidactic Darcy. Swan writes poetry on the eucalypt leaves she finds all around her, they are easily destroyed by fire and time: ephemeral until Zelmin comes along and they find love and he publishes her by an obscure Paris publisher on the eve of war. He understands her – he’s a free-wheeling and thinking architect building a modernist mansion in the hills. Out of place, out of touch, but the cash flows easily until war looms and uncertainty begins. They get each other in that way that only tragedy and separation can explain.
Wordplay, big, bold language and weighty propositions abound in this book. There’s a joke about Prowst (sic) and Swan’s way. Darcy starts to read Prowst. Lacking an education, but with an autodidact’s vision, he tries to buy every book he can get his hands on and when he has piles of money, he buys an entire bookshop from its owner. There are limits, of course, he gets nowhere with his books, he ends up hating Swan’s university friends and becomes a nationalist (with a Chinese wife). Swan is always trapped; she can never be other than Chinese. If she returns to China she cannot come back. They keep changing the rules on everyone. Citizenship is not an absolute right but a slippery, morally flexible construct.
Australians like to think of themselves as egalitarian by being anti-intellectual: no smarty-pants please. Everyone in the novel is kind of doomed by their passion and intellect. They don’t fit, see: a Chinese PhD, an autodidact reader of French modernism, a great architect brought in because Frank Lloyd Wright thought Australia was too far away, and a poet.
A friend describes Castro as a French writer lost in the hills east of Melbourne, out of place, out of step. Especially here. There’s much anger in this book, but it is controlled, smouldering through its characters. The unfairness of racial ideology – a sad recurring part of the national psyche – is inescapable. But thank god its driven through story-telling, wild prose, lovely sentences, great big bold ideas.
Sadly, no one writes books like this in Australia any more. We only produce market driven books, polite, genial, self-adoring and genres; banality is everything. This book came out a little over 15 years ago. What happened? Funny, I almost didn’t read this book, a 50c purchase in an opportunity shop while on a beach holiday.
August 26, 2022
3.5 stars. An interesting historical fiction novel set in the Dandenong ranges, Victoria, Australia, mostly during the 1930s and 1940s. The novel mainly focuses on Swan, an Australian woman of Chinese descent. Swan marries Darcy Damon and they build and operate guest homes in the country for tourists. The relationship between Swan and Darcy is unusual and gradually they become very distant to one another.
There are some interesting comments on how Australian Chinese were treated in Australia during those times. Swan worried that if she went overseas she would not be allowed back in Australia, even though she was born in Australia.
This book was shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin award.
There are some interesting comments on how Australian Chinese were treated in Australia during those times. Swan worried that if she went overseas she would not be allowed back in Australia, even though she was born in Australia.
This book was shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin award.
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August 7, 2016I enjoyed this story which centers primarily on Dandenong in the years between the wars. Castro explores the often hidden history of the Chinese in Australia and with this the racism which simmers below ever day life. Shang He is an Australian born woman of Chinese ancestry who struggles to integrate two cultures. Well worth the read.
March 23, 2015
Such promise! So many good characters and themes. Written in a style which was agitating. Glimpses of profound beauty.
October 4, 2021
An important book in Australian multicultural writing.
August 21, 2020
Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: Brian Castro can write. Unfortunately I have a feeling this is akin to reviewing a play and commenting only on the sets and staging. It amounts to "damning with faint praise", which isn't what I intended, but which does provide some forewarning of my divided opinions of the novel.
The Garden Book tells the story of Swan Hay (born Shuang He), the daughter of a country school-teacher of Chinese ancestry, of her husband Darcy Damon, and of the American aviator-architect Jasper Zenlin, who becomes the love of her life. The main body of the book is set in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne in the period leading up to and during World War II. The novel is framed within the attempts of Norman Shih, a rare-book librarian, to piece together the story of the three from an old diary and a job lot of "Letters, postcards, ledgers, old paperbacks." The story is presented in a series of accounts around each of the characters in turn, in the order in which they enter the plot: Darcy, Swan, Jasper and then Shih to round it out, to tie up the final knots.
That arrangement is reasonable enough. The execution leaves something to be desired, however. Darcy's story is told in the first person as it appears that we are reading from his diary, though this is not made totally clear. He's a strong character, big in body and therefore deemed to be rather slow, though he does actually possess a powerful intellect which slowly manifests itself through the book. Castro is spot-on with his voice and the following quote could have been matched by just about anything from his part of the book.
I only remember my father as a smell. Pipe-bowl shag. His heavy goanna hand reaching round the back of my neck. His boots, ten sizes too big for me, stand empty on the back patio where my pet echidna shuffles back and forth, chiselling at the posts for ants. There's my mother through the kitchen window, boiling up plums for jam. her face is pale; she's sick again. The house is an arsenal of guns and axes. The only family portrait I have. Fleeting happiness tinged with remorse. At least everyone's got clean shirts.
The only difficulty with Darcy's story is that Shih keeps intruding without warning; adding to Darcy's story by filling in the gaps between diary entries. How he is able to write in such an omniscient narrative voice is difficult to determine, and starts to grate after a while. This effect is probably accentuated by the fact that it takes a while to work out that it is Shih speaking. I kept wondering why the point of view kept changing and had to keep checking back in Darcy's section to work out what was going it. I found it quite disconcerting.
By the time I got to Swan's part of the book, I'd started to figure out the technique and wasn't so put off by it. That is, until Castro changes his methodology again and starts to interleave entries by Darcy and Swan, each headed by their name. At least he forewarns us this time:
Outside my office window, a jet creases the sky with condensation trails while Swan's entry for this day fades into bluish patches of ink. In the margin near the spine she's teasingly pressed a small blank leaf. The gaps in these notes invite my participation. What does Darcy say?
At this point in the book I was starting to think that it was going to be an exercise in technique and structure over plot and story, but things start to pick up when Jasper enters the scene. Darcy and Swan are married and Darcy has fortuitously acquired a degree of wealth which enables him to engage Jasper the architect to build a house and a series of outbuildings for them. The arrival of Jasper completes the triangle, Swan is smitten by his other-worldliness, his charisma and the chance he offers for an escape from a country that barely acknowledges her existence. But the outbreak of war scuttles any hopes she might have of utilising her new-found celebrity as a poet and it all ends as we might expect of such an arrangement, at such a time.
Castro himself has acknowledged that a number of large publishers refused to accept this book in its current form, demanding more changes to the structure and content than he was willing to permit. As a consequence he has taken up with the small Sydney publishing house Giramondo. I believe Castro was right in sticking to his guns and I can see why this novel had difficulty in finding a place. The trouble is I think he should also have taken some notice of the original criticisms. It might have made the book more approachable.
In the end I believe the author has produced a magnificent failure. As I said at the start, the man can write. For days after finishing this book I was still thinking about it, trying to work out what he was up to and how he hoped to achieve it. He got there in the end, but the route he took wandered down paths that left this reader feeling more than a little lost a lot of the time.
The Garden Book tells the story of Swan Hay (born Shuang He), the daughter of a country school-teacher of Chinese ancestry, of her husband Darcy Damon, and of the American aviator-architect Jasper Zenlin, who becomes the love of her life. The main body of the book is set in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne in the period leading up to and during World War II. The novel is framed within the attempts of Norman Shih, a rare-book librarian, to piece together the story of the three from an old diary and a job lot of "Letters, postcards, ledgers, old paperbacks." The story is presented in a series of accounts around each of the characters in turn, in the order in which they enter the plot: Darcy, Swan, Jasper and then Shih to round it out, to tie up the final knots.
That arrangement is reasonable enough. The execution leaves something to be desired, however. Darcy's story is told in the first person as it appears that we are reading from his diary, though this is not made totally clear. He's a strong character, big in body and therefore deemed to be rather slow, though he does actually possess a powerful intellect which slowly manifests itself through the book. Castro is spot-on with his voice and the following quote could have been matched by just about anything from his part of the book.
I only remember my father as a smell. Pipe-bowl shag. His heavy goanna hand reaching round the back of my neck. His boots, ten sizes too big for me, stand empty on the back patio where my pet echidna shuffles back and forth, chiselling at the posts for ants. There's my mother through the kitchen window, boiling up plums for jam. her face is pale; she's sick again. The house is an arsenal of guns and axes. The only family portrait I have. Fleeting happiness tinged with remorse. At least everyone's got clean shirts.
The only difficulty with Darcy's story is that Shih keeps intruding without warning; adding to Darcy's story by filling in the gaps between diary entries. How he is able to write in such an omniscient narrative voice is difficult to determine, and starts to grate after a while. This effect is probably accentuated by the fact that it takes a while to work out that it is Shih speaking. I kept wondering why the point of view kept changing and had to keep checking back in Darcy's section to work out what was going it. I found it quite disconcerting.
By the time I got to Swan's part of the book, I'd started to figure out the technique and wasn't so put off by it. That is, until Castro changes his methodology again and starts to interleave entries by Darcy and Swan, each headed by their name. At least he forewarns us this time:
Outside my office window, a jet creases the sky with condensation trails while Swan's entry for this day fades into bluish patches of ink. In the margin near the spine she's teasingly pressed a small blank leaf. The gaps in these notes invite my participation. What does Darcy say?
At this point in the book I was starting to think that it was going to be an exercise in technique and structure over plot and story, but things start to pick up when Jasper enters the scene. Darcy and Swan are married and Darcy has fortuitously acquired a degree of wealth which enables him to engage Jasper the architect to build a house and a series of outbuildings for them. The arrival of Jasper completes the triangle, Swan is smitten by his other-worldliness, his charisma and the chance he offers for an escape from a country that barely acknowledges her existence. But the outbreak of war scuttles any hopes she might have of utilising her new-found celebrity as a poet and it all ends as we might expect of such an arrangement, at such a time.
Castro himself has acknowledged that a number of large publishers refused to accept this book in its current form, demanding more changes to the structure and content than he was willing to permit. As a consequence he has taken up with the small Sydney publishing house Giramondo. I believe Castro was right in sticking to his guns and I can see why this novel had difficulty in finding a place. The trouble is I think he should also have taken some notice of the original criticisms. It might have made the book more approachable.
In the end I believe the author has produced a magnificent failure. As I said at the start, the man can write. For days after finishing this book I was still thinking about it, trying to work out what he was up to and how he hoped to achieve it. He got there in the end, but the route he took wandered down paths that left this reader feeling more than a little lost a lot of the time.
December 28, 2018
REVIEW FORTHCOMING
May 12, 2020
Hmmm. A bit too "try hard" and wordy (worthy?) for me. While the first third of the book was interesting & well written, it started to bog down in the middle third. Too many convoluted sentences & paragraphs that were like wading through treacle. The prose was just too dense (but also vague), which made it difficult to get a real sense of the characters. By the final third I had largely given up & simply skimmed through to at least know what happened to the main characters. I just found this book just too difficult to get into.
September 24, 2018
Literary and obscurely poetic, Brian Castro’s meditation on loneliness, addiction, abuse and racism is a perverse and unappealing narrative...
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July 28, 2009
I had selected this book to read as an own choice for my book group and was disappointed.
As I have written in my journal - A NO SHOW on this BOOK.
Written on a much high level of words than I enjoy. - skipped quite a lot of pages but still couldn't get enthused.
Basically the story is set in the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria (Australia) in the years between the Depression and the Second World War.
The story revolves around Sway Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country school teacher, her marriage to the brutal Darcy Damon and her love affair with the aviator and architect, Jasper Zenlin.
50 years after her disappearance, Norman Shih, a rare book librarian pieces together Swan's chaotic life from clues found in libraries and antique bookshops and her own writings.
As I have written in my journal - A NO SHOW on this BOOK.
Written on a much high level of words than I enjoy. - skipped quite a lot of pages but still couldn't get enthused.
Basically the story is set in the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria (Australia) in the years between the Depression and the Second World War.
The story revolves around Sway Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country school teacher, her marriage to the brutal Darcy Damon and her love affair with the aviator and architect, Jasper Zenlin.
50 years after her disappearance, Norman Shih, a rare book librarian pieces together Swan's chaotic life from clues found in libraries and antique bookshops and her own writings.
October 18, 2020
There's a sly episode where Swan talks about writing with Jasper, which is really Castro referring to his own writing, because he has said elsewhere that he doesn't expect his readers to understand what's going in a first reading:
It's something you can't quite grasp, neither closed nor allegorical. Something disintegrating before your eyes... exploding into fragments and disappearing towards its origins in the future, then returning to the damnation of its slow revelation.
The pleasure in reading Castro is making discoveries each time you read it.
Maybe not for everyone, but rewarding for those who like a challenge.
It's something you can't quite grasp, neither closed nor allegorical. Something disintegrating before your eyes... exploding into fragments and disappearing towards its origins in the future, then returning to the damnation of its slow revelation.
The pleasure in reading Castro is making discoveries each time you read it.
Maybe not for everyone, but rewarding for those who like a challenge.
April 16, 2022
The main characters are well depicted with their 20's and 40's attitudes, trapped by themselves in themselves and to each other. I enjoyed this book, the characters were credible, all living with insanity, loneliness and addiction.
April 28, 2014
Did not finish.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews