Six days to go...

 

Six days until The Sea Garden is published in the United States, and the nerves are kicking in. It's always the same, each time a book is sent out into the big, wide world. Some readers will like it, some won't. Some who like it the most will stay the quietest, while those who didn't will be ferocious in letting others know.

 

Either way, the novel won't come to life until a reader starts reading the words on the page and joins in the creative process by allowing the sparks to reach the imagination, to form pictures and soundtrack in the mind. It won't be exactly what was in my mind when I wrote them, but that's the magic of reading: when we read, we make the scenes suggested by the words personal to ourselves. With any luck, the experience will take you to somewhere you never thought you'd go to, touch you emotionally or unsettle you in the delicious safety of your chair in a the sun.

 

All I can do is to give you some pointers to the background, like the picture above of the garden at the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat, quite rightly considered one of the most beautiful hotels in the South of France, "a tranquil retreat amid secret gardens and fragrant pines". It's the blue, blue sea beyond that gives it that edge of excitement and cachet. The fictional Domaine de Fayols on the island of Porquerolles in the first section of the novel has just that quality, though hidden under dilapidation. 

 

The light and the colour of the sea is captured in this picture. The turquoise seems unreal, but it isn't. 

 

When night begins to fall, the setting sun still casts unexpected patches of brightness, while leaving secluded corners unexpectedly dark. If you want to take that as a metaphor for the mood of the book, please do. 

 

 

Then there's the water, with its effortless evening glamour: shades of lilac and texture of chiffon. 

 

The Sea Garden is on blog tour very soon with TLC Book Tours running through into July. And it's no good any writer telling you they don't care or even look to see what readers are making of their work; I wouldn't believe them if they did, because a book without a reader's reaction hasn't fully come into existence.

Daphne...and subtlety

Following my post about the fragrance and romance of Daphne Odora, here’s where this beguiling scent makes an olfactory appearance in The Lantern. During a work trip to Geneva, Eve makes the short journey around the lake and across the French border is Yvoire with its renowned Labyrinth of the Five Senses. In the maze in the grounds of the château, she meets Dom for the first time.

   I wandered quite happily on my own, unconcerned by the maze but ever more certain with every sense that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere in life. My so-called career was in a dull phase, and as such a reflection of my own limitations; it was one of the reasons I accepted the job that had brought me briefly to Switzerland. As for any social life, it seemed as if high tide had receded, leaving only wrinkles and minor wreckage to show for the fun.

   Then everything changed.

   There, in a living cloister of hornbeam, the air richly perfumed by a line of daphne, there was Dom.

                                                       From The Lantern

Those readers who enjoy subtlety will appreciate how the details in this tiny scene encapsulate many of the novel’s themes. There’s perfume, of course, but with the added implication (for those who are familiar with the show-stopping qualities of daphne) that this is a moment charged with heady romance. But it bears a warning too, from the mythological Daphne being chased by Apollo to her frightening transformation. You can draw your own conclusions about the hornbeam…

This is the introduction of the sensuous theme – the interplay of all five senses - and the garden, with all its Edenic associations, enclosed here around a puzzle.

Finally, in the plant daphne is the seed to the sub-conscious that leads Eve to read Daphne du Maurier. When she discovers that Dom’s ex-wife is called Rachel (another of du Maurier’s mysterious titular characters, from My Cousin Rachel), Eve is drawn to re-read Rebecca, and in her over-imaginative isolation, she will impose that story on her own situation.

My intention was show Eve intensifying her own experience in Provence, so deeply sensitive to every detail that the dazzling world she narrates is partly her unspoken escape from reality – into a hyper-reality formed of books and stories. This rose-tinted world masks her fears about the relationship, begun with such dreamy optimism in what seemed like paradise in the South of France.

For an author, there is nothing better than a reader/ reviewer who really understands what you have tried to achieve. I know there are plenty of others who feel that the descriptions in this book are overdone; it’s a matter of personal taste, after all, and also how quickly you want to skim along the surface of a book. The Lantern is currently on a TLC Book Tour (link here) and among some lovely and receptive blog reviews is one from Courtney at Stiletto Storytime, who made my heart sing when she wrote:

The Lantern is really a feast for the senses bringing both the past and the present to life through thoughtful descriptions (…) in such lush detail from the smell of a flower to the slant of the sun and yet you never feel overwhelmed by her details just included, (…) layering events, people and every day nuances just so throughout her writing. To read this book is to really be taken away from the average and thrust into another world. A world of sights, smells and mystery…

Thank you, Courtney – a posy of Daphne Odora for you! The whole review is here. And if anyone is interested in how I see the novel, including the reasons for the entanglement with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, then click here.

 

 

Labyrinth of the Five Senses, Yvoire

Click on the link here for the garden website: Gardens at Yvoire

Baroque fruit in Avignon

I was wandering around Avignon a few weeks ago, on a day of coshing heat. After a lovely shady lunch opposite the northern end of the Palais des Papes, I set off through the great cobbled square, looked up and really noticed for the first time the frieze on the Hôtel des Monnaies: festoons of ripe fruit and vegetables amid the coats of arms of the Borgia family.

It is so typically Provençal – even in the stones of the most ostentatious buildings, are celebrations of the pure joy of living here in the sunshine and the natural produce of the region. Grapes and pears and courgettes are carved with acorns and the pumpkins of the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ now stealing up on us.

The Hôtel des Monnaies, a mansion built in 1619 in the Baroque style, is now used as a conservatoire of music. It was dedicated to Pope Paul V, one of the more restrained Borghese family Popes, though there’s still a sense that those overblown fruits were alluding to the culture of excess in the papal palace across the way during previous centuries.

If you’ve read The Lantern, you’ll know important the landscape and the fruits of the land are to the story, and what they represent. Among all the blog reviews I’ve had the pleasure of reading over the past few months, are some that have really engaged with this aspect of the novel. A lovely one that came out this week, on Reading the Past by Sarah Johnson, from which I quote this paragraph:

 “Reflecting the bounty of the land, the language is ripe and sensual (tomatoes are "as ribbed and plump as harem cushions"). The regional specialties, like vin de noix – sweet walnut liqueur – sound mouth-wateringly delicious. Armchair travelers will revel in Lawrenson’s lush descriptions of the lavender harvest, an event in which Bénédicte participates in order to share the experience with her blind sister, Marthe, who grows up to be a renowned parfumeuse. The cycle of life is evoked in full, from birth and growth through death and decay – as it affects local crops, the structure of Les Genévriers, and the affairs of its human inhabitants.”

Click here to read the whole review.

Throughout August and into this month, The Lantern has been on an internet blog tour run by TLC. There are all sorts of views and reviews, which you can access by clicking here to the blog list.