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darkling_talesI recently read A Garden Lost In Time by Jonathan Aycliffe. Some of you may remember that I had been very impressed by his vampire novel The Lost (see here), so I approached A Garden... with high hopes.
The novel tells the story of an old man, Symon Lysaght, who returns to the Cornish countryside where he spent most of his childhood in order to unravel some mysteries surrounding Trevelyan Priors, the manor where he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle following the death of his father. The reader follows Lysaght as he gradually pieces together a chain of strange and unsettling events from bundles of old letters that passed between members of the Trevelyan and Lysaght families from 1917 onwards. Mysterious children are encountered wandering the estate, and their influence on the Trevelyan children is sometimes less than friendly...And what does Simon's uncle get up to, locked away in the library at night with his friend, the exiled Marquis de Remiremont?
Anyone who's read Aycliffe's previous book The Lost will know that he is a dab hand at the epistolary form of novel-writing, and he revisits this technique just as successfully in A Garden.... He skilfully depicts the confusing world of war-time rural England, where the splendour of the Cornish countryside and coast, the genteel life of the landed gentry and the simple, age-old ways of the local villagers stand in agonizing contrast with the horrors of a war that cost millions of families their sons, fathers and lovers and brought social upheaval in its wake. The war intrudes further and further into the heart of the Trevelyan home as the novel progresses, and I found that Aycliffe's use of soldiers' letters from the trenches brought home the horrors of WW1 to me in a way that no novelist has ever done. However, the war is only one of the manifestations of evil that permeate the lives of the Trevelyans, who have dark secrets of their own stretching back through the centuries, and which gradually emerge in parallel with the progression of the war. Moreover, while the war ends, the supernatural forces linger on in Trevelyan Abbey, warping and often entirely consuming the minds of all who live there...
Despite my love of Cornwall and my interest in the era in which most of the novel is set,I did not enjoy it quite as much as The Lost. A Garden... contains some truly brilliant writing - the boys' first expedition to the shot tower, for instance, is of itself almost enough to justify reading the book - and Aycliffe brings the idyllic but often dark, secretive Cornish countryside to life as well as Du Maurier or E.F. Benson. The way the characters talk and behave never seems jarringly modern and the reader truly feels like they are looking into a lost world - though Aycliffe's modernity allows him to lace the plot with sexual intrigue in a very outspoken way that would have been unthinkable for a wartime author. There is also a bit of a feminist subtext, as Aycliffe touches on the often unbearable lives led by upper-class women, who at the time were frequently forced into early marriage with no prior sexual education.
However, I found the novel as a whole to lack drive, to meander more than was strictly necessary. Obviously, all other things being equal, a novel composed entirely of letters and memoirs is never going to be as direct and to-the-point as one written from the point of view of just one narrator, but while Aycliffe managed a racing plot with a fantastic climax in The Lost, A Garden Lost In Time left me with a faint sense of having been cheated. So much attention is paid to the creation of an atmosphere of brooding evil that one expects more of a "big bang" at the end.
Nonetheless, I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys a good haunted house novel and likes their hauntings subtle and melancholy, but ultimately vengeful.
The novel tells the story of an old man, Symon Lysaght, who returns to the Cornish countryside where he spent most of his childhood in order to unravel some mysteries surrounding Trevelyan Priors, the manor where he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle following the death of his father. The reader follows Lysaght as he gradually pieces together a chain of strange and unsettling events from bundles of old letters that passed between members of the Trevelyan and Lysaght families from 1917 onwards. Mysterious children are encountered wandering the estate, and their influence on the Trevelyan children is sometimes less than friendly...And what does Simon's uncle get up to, locked away in the library at night with his friend, the exiled Marquis de Remiremont?
Anyone who's read Aycliffe's previous book The Lost will know that he is a dab hand at the epistolary form of novel-writing, and he revisits this technique just as successfully in A Garden.... He skilfully depicts the confusing world of war-time rural England, where the splendour of the Cornish countryside and coast, the genteel life of the landed gentry and the simple, age-old ways of the local villagers stand in agonizing contrast with the horrors of a war that cost millions of families their sons, fathers and lovers and brought social upheaval in its wake. The war intrudes further and further into the heart of the Trevelyan home as the novel progresses, and I found that Aycliffe's use of soldiers' letters from the trenches brought home the horrors of WW1 to me in a way that no novelist has ever done. However, the war is only one of the manifestations of evil that permeate the lives of the Trevelyans, who have dark secrets of their own stretching back through the centuries, and which gradually emerge in parallel with the progression of the war. Moreover, while the war ends, the supernatural forces linger on in Trevelyan Abbey, warping and often entirely consuming the minds of all who live there...
Despite my love of Cornwall and my interest in the era in which most of the novel is set,I did not enjoy it quite as much as The Lost. A Garden... contains some truly brilliant writing - the boys' first expedition to the shot tower, for instance, is of itself almost enough to justify reading the book - and Aycliffe brings the idyllic but often dark, secretive Cornish countryside to life as well as Du Maurier or E.F. Benson. The way the characters talk and behave never seems jarringly modern and the reader truly feels like they are looking into a lost world - though Aycliffe's modernity allows him to lace the plot with sexual intrigue in a very outspoken way that would have been unthinkable for a wartime author. There is also a bit of a feminist subtext, as Aycliffe touches on the often unbearable lives led by upper-class women, who at the time were frequently forced into early marriage with no prior sexual education.
However, I found the novel as a whole to lack drive, to meander more than was strictly necessary. Obviously, all other things being equal, a novel composed entirely of letters and memoirs is never going to be as direct and to-the-point as one written from the point of view of just one narrator, but while Aycliffe managed a racing plot with a fantastic climax in The Lost, A Garden Lost In Time left me with a faint sense of having been cheated. So much attention is paid to the creation of an atmosphere of brooding evil that one expects more of a "big bang" at the end.
Nonetheless, I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys a good haunted house novel and likes their hauntings subtle and melancholy, but ultimately vengeful.
