The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

 

This is a quite breathtakingly beautiful novel about one woman’s attempt to find closure for the atrocities she and her family suffered at the hands of the Japanese in World War II. It’s a multilayered book and really defies any meaningful synopsis. On one hand it is an ambitious work and on another it presents as a work with some staggeringly simple truths. So many themes are explored within the expansive, poetic narrative. It examines memory, those we choose to remember and those we choose to forget. It explores the futility of war and conflict. There’s the politics and history of south east Asia contained within its pages The book is full of love and hate and prompts us to reflect on how the two can often become entangled into one indefinable emotion. The book is in some ways a study of paradoxes, the devastation of war combines with the creation of beauty exemplified by the garden of Aritomo. In fact it’s a sublime observation of yin and yang at work. 

There is a collision of cultures, Malaysian, South African, Chinese, Japanese. There are secrets and revelations, there are mysteries solved and unsolved. There is violence and there’s peace. And running through it all is the garden. Aritomo’s garden, which symbolises so much of how life could be, should be lived?

Yun Ling is the constant in the story and in many ways it is her story. But like many stories there are numerous others who play a part, appearing and disappearing, fading in and fading out. And I think the story shows how people touch our lives, for good and for bad and how their actions leave footprints on our souls. It’s a haunting story. Something else I find fascinating was that as I began to read I believed this story to be the work of a female writer. It isn’t. And I was impressed by the sensitivity and empathy toward the female perspective. Despite some of the disturbing incidents in the book, overall I found it to be a book of peace and calm.

I’m not surprised that it was shortlisted for an award. It is not a run-of-the-mill novel. It is a work of literature. I was lucky enough to take part in Canongate Books readalong which offered me the opportunity to read and reflect upon the book in sections which is not normally how I like to read but it seemed perfect for this particular book.