Not always a comfortable read, but it is a
fascinating exploration of two people. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer,
courtesy of The Witness)
Ceridwen Dovey was born in South Africa,
raised in South Africa and Australia, studied in America and now lives in
Australia. The relevance of all this is that one of the main characters in this
fascinating and complex novel follows the same path. So the author, as she
traces Vita’s emotional difficulties with this inheritance, knows of what she
writes.
Dovey has chosen to hark back to one of the
earliest novel forms in the Western canon – an epistolary story, one written in
the form of letters, which are now updated to emails. The two correspondents
are Vita, who lives in the Australian town of Mudgee, and Royce, who during
Vita’s years studying in America was a Svengali-like figure who gave her a
scholarship from his wealthy foundation but expected favours in return. He is
now dying and, in opening the correspondence, proclaims a “craven need for
absolution” both from Vita and from his dead love, Kitty Lushington, in whose
name he set up the foundation.
One of the questions in any first-person
novel – and this one has two first persons – is how far can you trust the
narrator? As Royce and Vita set out their lives both before and after their
estrangement, they often seem to be writing past each other rather than to each
other. It is a clever way of building up their history, allowing the observer
(the reader) to guess at hidden things, referred to obliquely.
Royce’s first love, long before he met
Vita, was Kitty, an archaeologist working in the ruins of Pompeii. She was in
love with her older Italian mentor, and tolerated and used the dog-like
devotion of Royce. But we know from an early stage in the book that Kitty died
young, though only at the end do we almost discover how.
Vita studied anthropology and film making
in America. After graduating, she returned to the South Africa of her
childhood, where she faced the rootlessness of the perpetual exile along with
the white liberal guilt and angst that stifled her creativity to a crippling
extent. Dovey cleverly juxtaposes these anxieties with those of the
archaeologists who are trying to recreate not just a long vanished civilisation
but the agony of its death throes.
In
the Garden of the Fugitives is not always a
comfortable read, but it is a fascinating exploration of two people, neither
wholly likeable but both deserving of some of our sympathy, as they reveal
themselves not just to each other but to themselves. Dovey deserves the
plaudits she has received as an up and coming force in fiction. - Margaret von
Klemperer
Publisher Hamish Hamilton - ISBN
978-0-241-32517-9
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