Early in Paul Perry’s powerful and absorbing novel The Garden, we glimpse what would appear to be a personal heaven. The description is offered by the book’s narrator Swallow who, accompanied by his boss Blanchard and their associates, is searching the south Florida landscape for the vanishingly rare and precious ghost orchid. Much is at stake in this hunt: yet another hurricane has just swept through, and possession of this plant – this most precious of commodities – may be key to restoring the fortunes of the eponymous garden, an orchid farm on the fringes of the Everglades.
This paradise, however, is already lost: horrors lurk in the shallows. “I preferred,” Swallow tells us, “to be closer to the mangroves and everglades, to the land in its natural habitat. Sometimes it felt like I’d been travelling to get here my whole life, and sometimes I just felt trapped by the beauty, and the sun, and by something else I didn’t even know the name to.” Swallow has barely begun to reveal himself, but already a tone is set: this is a place and a life in which sun and the fecundity of nature mingle with menace and the onset of danger in manifold forms.
The Garden fascinates in part because of Perry’s sly ironising of a variety of cultural and literary tropes. Swallow’s journey is a quest in search of a holy grail: and, as is the way with classic quests, we deduce early that he and his companions will encounter any number of obstacles on the road. The Garden also evokes all the characteristics of southern American Gothic literature: its characters are by turns eccentric, violent, and grotesque; they transgress moral boundaries with abandon, and suffer disfigurement of body and soul.
Swallow himself is far from a reliable narrator: his is a driftwood life, having left a shattered family in Ireland to enlist in the US military, with all its attendant brutalising experiences. It is evident that the wounds inflicted by life cannot be easily healed: “War leaves an indelible stain on the soul,” he remarks, “and no amount of drinking, of abnegation, or of getting lost can wipe away that black mark.” His experiences remain unspecified – but such is the novel’s intensely achieved atmosphere of claustrophobia and peril that the reader’s imagination can very readily fill in the gaps.
The novel also evokes the classic American western, transplanted now into swampy Florida, with the Everglades – pathless, potentially deadly – as the great frontier. The novel opens, Shane-like, with a stranger entering town: “When I first saw Romeo,” Swallow remembers, “I thought here comes trouble” – and sure enough, trouble follows in the stranger’s wake. These are characters who desire adventure, but also the comfort of love, home, security – and who know that none of the latter are necessarily to be had in such a degraded, doubtful and water-girt landscape.
Indeed, the power of this novel is generated by an urgent evocation of place and of time. South Florida’s extremity of character emanates in part from a collision between the uncontrollable power of nature and the uncontrolled greed of humanity. Few areas on the planet are as prone to looming destruction by violent climate change and rising sea levels, and few are as exposed to human development on a scale unsustainable. Swallow’s quest – his search of an orchid to be cut from its habitat and commodified – constitutes yet another Floridian violation of nature.
Yet the decision-makers will not be gainsaid, and the quest, like the human development on the fringes of the swamplands, must continue: “We call this place a river of grass,” says Harper, a Native American of the Seminole people who is guiding Swallow through the Everglades, “and I fear it’s dying.” The search for the orchid evokes another trope, that of the colonialist Victorian adventure novel: yet this is no King Solomon’s Mines but rather a clear-eyed contemporary fable set in a world of environmental collapse, casual racism, endemic aggression, surfeit and excess. There are no human heroes in The Garden.
Contemporary novelists from Barbara Kingsolver to Richard Powers have responded with urgency to the challenge and reality of the Anthropocene; and The Garden belongs with such writing. “Call it theft or call it trespass,” says Swallow: and, as we endure an increasingly extreme world of climate breakdown, Paul Perry has underscored our own responsibility for the context within which we live now, and offered an urgent and eloquent rebuke to our commodification and unsustainable pillage of the natural world.
