The Garden by Nick Newman: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
The Garden, Nick Newman (Doubleday UK 978-0-85752-999-2, £16.99, 288pp, hc) January 2025. (Putnam 978-0-59371-773-8, $29.00, 320pp, hc) February 2025.
Depending on your frame of reference, any tale of two sisters living in ritualized isolation until some guy shows up to disrupt everything can evoke anything from Tennessee Williams to Shirley Jackson, especially We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The latter seems especially apt with Nick Newman’s The Garden, although there are also a couple of oblique references to Virginia Woolf and – perhaps most jarringly – echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, not only in terms of the novel’s pared-down prose but in its grim postapocalyptic setting, some decades after an unspecified disaster has nearly depopulated the planet. Newman, we are told by the publisher, is the ‘‘adult pen-name’’ of Nicholas Bowling, author of well-received children’s fantasy novels, although a quick search shows that a couple of earlier SF-related adult novels, Alpha and Omega and The Follower, were published under Bowling’s own name. (I haven’t read either, but one can’t help but wonder if a bit of rebranding is going on.) But while it eventually makes a few significant gestures toward Gothic horror and environmental apocalypse (massive dust storms seem to be the main threat), what is most striking about the first half of The Garden is its quiet, almost ruminative tone, as we watch the daily survival rituals of two elderly sisters while glimpsing some darker secrets involving their late parents, who remain offstage except for a few flashback chapters.
The rambling house which Evelyn and her younger sister Lily have inherited is certainly worthy of Shirley Jackson, with its ‘‘vast battlements’’ and ‘‘many gables and chimneys,’’ but the sisters confine their lives to the kitchen area, strangely fearful of entering the closed-off rooms of the main house, where they had previously lived with their parents. The entire compound is surrounded by a stone wall, beyond which, they believe, is an unpopulated wasteland. They manage to subsist with their garden, beehives, and a nearby icehouse which contains some rather questionable meat, with water from a spring-fed pond. After noticing some odd anomalies – a beehive moved a few inches, a broken jar of honey – they discover a boy of indeterminate age hiding out, claiming to have escaped from ‘‘the others’’ on the outside of the wall. At first, Evelyn wants to simply kill him, but as he gradually proves useful performing chores that have become challenging for the aging sisters, she becomes his defender as the younger Lily grows more distrustful. Inevitably, and even though he remains something of a cipher as a character, his presence not only dredges up old memories, but exacerbates the tensions arising from the sisters’ different approaches to survival.
The Garden begins as something of a slow burn, but soon the graceful and almost serene prose of the early chapters begins to give way to darker tones and rawer emotions, and eventually the offstage parents emerge as pretty disturbing characters in their own right; the mother has even left behind a detailed ‘‘almanac’’ with rigid instructions for their daily routines. Like McCarthy in The Road, Newman doesn’t seem much interested in the causes or details of the apocalypse, although the few glimpses we get of those dust storms sound more like a tsunami-sized version of the 1930s Dust Bowl than any particular geological or nuclear event. Nor is there much detail about what might have survived in the outside world, although a working cell phone which shows up late in the narrative seems pretty unlikely, especially since we are told that electrical power had disappeared decades earlier (not to mention such details as how cell towers or battery chargers might still be working). But it’s pretty clear that Newman is less concerned with such SFnal consistencies as with the exploration of vulnerable and often quite affecting characters – elderly protagonists who are still far too rare in SF – as they try to negotiate strategies of survival between a dark past and a diminished future
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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