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Gone Wild in the Garden
A review of the White Garden
by Michael Sharkey, The Australian, October 1995
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This review Copyright © Michael Sharkey 1995.
All rights reserved.
We might have had a chronicle of woe. But it is, after all, Carmel
Bird who is writing the book, so we can be sure there'll be fireworks.
the doctor is a creep, but he has moments of frightening self-awareness,
and his sangfroid doesn't just relate to his games with others'
lives. If he is fascinated by the reaction of two deluded patients
to a little piece of theatre he has arranged to fit in with their
fantasies, he is also capable of writing one of the funniest suicide
notes in Australian fiction.Bird takes full advantage of the comic possibilities of the speech
and thought patterns of every character. Shirley Temple is a very
knowing nut case who prowls the wards in the costume of her role
model, helping the management and befriending other patients while
keeping up a brilliant line of patter in which self-consciousness,
play and sheer naivety weave in and out. Bird strings together
convincing dialogue with the ease of a practiced actor. I imagine
she would read passages from this novel aloud with terrific wicked
glee.And the murder mystery? A young woman dies from a bee sting in
the garden of a private clinic established in the grounds of a
former convent. The woman's sister attempts to reconstruct the
circumstances 20 years afterwards, and an extraordinary series
of interviews confirms her suspicions. But there's a lovely twist:
I think it's fair to say a lot of readers won't identify who-done-it
until the last handful of pages. And the identification will send
them back to read certain extracts for missed clues. Nicely managed.Along the way to enlightenment the story assumes several formats:
the interior and exterior monologues of patients enacting their
delusion with the encouragement of the doctor who controls them
all; journalistic accounts of the institution's establishment
and reception; fly-on-the-wall renditions of interviews with patients
and parents; segmented exerpts of saints' and patients' memoirs
of religious ecstasy and self-abasement; clinical details of drugs
and their effects; histories of serial rape of comatose patients
by the doctor who aims to give the world the ultimate book on
delusion.The novel's prose ranges from lush to spare, and there is a lot
of play within chapters as well as between them.There are beautiful period pieces where Bird gathers in preoccupations
of the 1960s and 70s and in particular an anarchic individualism
that makes mincemeat of theories that the 60s were a time for
ineffectual ego trips.The surface stuff -- hip phrases, snatches of 50s and 60s songs
(beautifully placed in the chatter and raves of the characters),
the religious transcendental longings pursued through meditation,
retreat, psychedelic and other drugs, colour and aroma therapy
and so on -- is all glitteringly portrayed, only to be dissolved
into present-tense preoccupation with justice and pity. The White
Garden reprises themes from Vita Sackville-West's study of two
saints, and it's possible to read the novel as exploration of
the thin divide between religious ecstasy and self-deception.Above all, the inmates' re-creation of the White garden of Sissinghurst
poses questions about the perils of framing a life that strives
for beauty and detachment from the noise of the world.The meditations include erotic dreams, and readers who have been
impressed by Bird's sensuous vignettes in her short stories will
appreciate the skill with which she weaves sensual ( and at times,
cruel) interludes into The White Garden. Bird write fiction every
bit as spectacular as Angela Carter's but, I think, with infinitely
more sympathy for ordinary people relegated to the fringes of
psychiatric and spiritual wellbeing. The book is a clever, wise
and humane triumph.Return to homepage