The Gardener

Product Information

Hassie plans to live there permanently, but Margot, who has a job in the city, will simply visit on weekends or stay over when she needs a respite from London life.

The Gardener - Penguin Books UK

Baleful nettles, hunched brambles and ivy-engulfed trees govern the garden of Knight’s Fee, a sprawling Jacobean house that narrator Hassie Days, an illustrator, has just purchased jointly with her financier sister, Margot. No, there is some semblance of a story as regards Hass settling down, and some indication of a kind of fairy legacy regarding the building and its environs, but nothing that ever gels into the form of a decent story. One of the main criticisms was that the ending appeared to be ‘out of kilter’ with what had gone before it.It’s a job too big for one person, so Hassie hires an Albanian migrant who has broken up with his English wife to help her.

Salley Vickers (Author of The Librarian) - Goodreads Salley Vickers (Author of The Librarian) - Goodreads

it got better toward the end, but then again the ending is a whole other story, because that random last-three-pages frame work was so unnecessary and also completely unrealistic and random?The problem with this book is not just its leisurely growth into its own story – taking its time to find a theme to bring to the table. Of especial interest, and one which Vickers develops slowly, is the relevance of the mysterious pool in the wood adjacent to Knight’s Fee, and the allegations of the village that Nelly East was weird and believed she had fairies at the bottom of her garden. I was sure at around the halfway point that my rating for The Gardener would be higher, but I personally found the ending extremely unsatisfactory; in my opinion, it did not tally with the characters’ behaviour up to that point, and it felt rather rushed.

The Gardener (Audio Download): Salley Vickers, Salley Vickers The Gardener (Audio Download): Salley Vickers, Salley Vickers

Knowing she will need help with the heavy digging required, she employs Murat, an Albanian refugee to help her in the garden. And that leisurely growth is forever stunted – even a power out, or blown fuse, or whatever it is that afflicts the house before it's shipshape, is just mentioned and then ignored. it comes across at Robert and Hassie‘s relationship being mostly physical, but then why would Hassie be unable to get over him? The satisfying neatness of the novel is defined firstly by an opening address to an unknown person and a concluding one to a now named one, secondly by Hassie’s narrative mirroring Nelly East’s journals, and thirdly by the way the relationship between Margot and Hassie is unpeeled and recast. Lovely in parts, and I wanted to enjoy, but not a fan of a book where the characters are terrible to the Muslim character and… nobody is ever held to account?There are also occasional and pertinent quotations from Housman, Hopkins and Hardy – so there you are, my juvenile hifalutin notions of literature helped me out there. Elfine’s author had sent me a breathy synopsis of her heroine’s adventures which were to be published in a ‘Bumper’ volume.

The Gardener by Salley Vickers | Goodreads

We hear a bit more about Hassie’s life – how she had her heart broken then went straight to care for her ailing father. I’m a huge Salley Vickers fan having enjoyed two of her previous books, The Librarian and Grandmothers. However, for me, it offered a diverting and rather absorbing story, which took my attention away from current world events.The characters I found particularly engaging and I loved the premise – the woman inheriting a tumbledown house in a rural area has all the hallmarks of a great fairytale. But overall, The Gardener is a delightful tale about resilience, fresh starts and hope for the future.