Yes, I am back. I’ve been on a dreadfully long hiatus from blogging on account of dental hygiene college consuming every waking moment of my day for the last six months, but I’ve been on summer holidays for a scant few days now and I have dived headlong into my novels. Last time, I revisited Juliet Marillier’s Sevenwaters Saga. This time, I’m delving back into the work of another beloved Australian author. Kate Forsyth is best known for her fairytale retellings, and I’ve been re-reading them while I wait for her latest novel, Psykhe, to arrive by snail mail. My grandmother brought me two of her novels after passing through Sydney over a decade ago, and I was immediately drawn in. Ever since, I’ve had to get creative about acquiring her books from overseas and I have the exorbitant postage fees to prove it. While I wait for the post, here are my honest thoughts of the books on her backlist.
Beauty in Thorns
It’s hard to review this book because it has no proper beginning, middle or end. Beauty in Thorns is more of a theme than a linear story, and that theme is the lives of the artists who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites. It follows several prominent artists and the women who were drawn into their bohemian circle, including Ned Burne-Jones, William Morris and their wives. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife Lizzie Siddal, who was a talented artist in her own right, were the most interesting characters and where I felt the Sleeping Beauty fairytale element come alive. Forsyth is a very visual writer, and in Beauty in Thorns, I could visualize the drafty studios, the cramped Victorian laneway houses coated with ash, feel Lizzie’s pale, boney fingers as consumption ate away at her body and taste the stale bread and thin soup they subsisted off.
I didn’t appreciate this book properly when it was first published. Since seeing the movie Summer in February, I came to appreciate how a story can simply be about the hardships of living with an artist. Overall, I didn’t feel the story went anywhere, and the most captivating part of it was Lizzie Siddal’s chapter. I felt like the story could’ve easily done without the other women’s perspectives, and it could simply have been about Lizzie’s and Rosetti’s tempestuous relationship with each other, with their art, and her tragic relationship with laudanum that plunged her into an eternal sleep.
The Wild Girl
Dortchen Wild grew up next door to the Grimm brothers in Hessen Cassel and always loved Wilhelm Grimm. When Napoleon Bonaparte invades Prussia and establishes his brother as king there, the brothers decide to collect old tales to preserve their heritage. Dortchen tells Wilhelm many of his most famous tales, including Rumplestiltskin, Hansel and Gretel and The Six Swans.
I adored Forsyth’s style of writing and the tenderness between Dortchen and Wilhelm, but I found this story long-winded. Five hundred pages about a blossoming romance seemed a trifle excessive. Although, apart from Bitter Greens, it’s the story that most closely resembles the fairy tale upon which it was based. All Kinds of Fur is a much darker variant of Cinderella, and Dortchen’s father treats her cruelly, forbids her from speaking to the bitterly impoverished Grimms, and keeps her at home to think on her sins while her elder sisters traipse off to the new king’s balls every other night. True love does conquer all, but not without trial and tribulation.
The Blue Rose
This story is different from the others because it takes inspiration from an old Chinese fable of the same name. In it, the emperor’s daughter grows into a beautiful young woman who will accept none of her suitors. She pines for her long-lost friend, the gardener’s son, who went away to war. She tells her father she will only accept the man who can bring her a blue rose, which the gardener’s son eventually does. In Forsyth’s retelling, the Welsh gardener David tells the Marquis’s daughter, Vivianne, that there are no truly red roses in Europe but they are rumoured to grow in China, and he will bring one back for her. The Blue Rose is part quest, part tale of impossible love and a fight for survival, living hand to mouth in one of the darkest times in France.
The only disappointment I felt was that the scene setting in Imperial China wasn’t as vivid as in Revolutionary Paris. Forsyth had plenty of practice bringing the French court to life in her earlier novel, Bitter Greens, and does a masterful job of making a distinction between the glittering Sun King’s court in Bitter Greens and its dying days in Louis XVI’s darkest hour in The Blue Rose. I adored the first part of the novel set in Brittany at the fictitious Chateau de Belisima sur le Lac, Vivianne’s home and where David comes to plant an English-style garden. It felt straight out of a gothic tale with iron gates, tall turrets and a maze of hedgerows, boarded-up rooms with dusty velvet curtains, ice skating on the lake and rose gardens planted in the dead of winter with the promise of bloom hanging in the air.
Vivianne’s and David’s romance is so sweet, and like a monster out of a gothic tale, the Marquis de Ravoisier sets the dogs on David and drives him from the chateau grounds. Thereafter, Vivianne is taken to Versailles and married to a duc, witnesses the early days of the revolution and barely escapes with her head still on her shoulders, while David sails with a British ambassador to Canton in search of a blood-red rose. Lost in the back alleys of Shanghai’s French Concession, he realizes he still loves Vivianne and becomes determined to return to France and find her in the chaos.
Bitter Greens
Where do I even begin? This book is everything. It’s dark and a little twisted. It’s also lavish and utterly spellbinding. Bitter Greens is the Rapunzel story told in three parts. First, there’s Charlotte-Rose de la Force’s story. The original author of Persinette—which would later serve as the framework for Rapunzel—was exiled from Versailles by the Sun King for her scandalous love affairs and gossip-worthy novels about his relatives. Shut away in a convent, she befriends an elderly nun, Soeur Seraphina, who tells her the story of another young girl who was locked away.
One hundred years earlier in the Venetian Republic, a man slips over the wall of a garden belonging to the beautiful and ruthless courtesan Selena de Leonelli to pick a handful of bitter greens for his pregnant wife. Caught and threatened with having both of his hands cut off, he reluctantly agrees to give up his newborn daughter. Selena takes Margherita to the shore of Lake Garda near Limone, where she shuts her away in a high stone tower and visits her each new moon to bathe in her blood and keep herself youthful, until one day, a Medici nobleman hears her singing. The third story is Selena’s. Student of a wise old woman and muse and mistress of the Renaissance master, Titian.
Bitter Greens balances innocent young love and black magic. One can tell that this was Forsyth’s foray away from writing children’s books because of how innocent Margherita comes across. Forsyth transitions to a more mature style of writing through Selena and her self-serving intentions, and these two narratives stand in stark contrast to one another. Overall, Bitter Greens is a sumptuous novel and Forsyth does a masterful job of bringing the intrigue of Renaissance Venice blazoning to life.
The Beast’s Garden
This book was obviously difficult to write. I believe it started out as a secondary narrative in The Wild Girl before becoming a story of its own, and then it was first written as a series of letters between the characters before taking its final shape. Some of those gaps show, but ultimately, The Beast’s Garden is my favourite because the fairytale Forsyth chose for its framework was so beautiful. It’s a variant of Beauty and the Beast that appears in the Grimm Brothers’ fairytale collection where the beauty unwittingly betrays the beast, like Psyche did to Eros in the Roman poem thought to be the fairytale’s origin, and has to follow his trail and outwit the enchantress who first cursed him. Metaphorically speaking, of course. This book is set in Nazi Berlin.
Ava has watched the Nazi regime close its fist around all she holds dear. To save her leaflet-writing father from the Gestapo, she agrees to marry a Nazi officer, Leo von Lowenstein. As the war drags on, Ava joins the Red Orchestra, the true-to-life resistance network that worked against the Nazis from inside Germany, and begins to fall in love with the husband she spies on, who isn’t at all what he seems. It’s suffused with pain and perfectly captures the raw terror of life under the iron hand of the Third Reich. But Ava’s and Leo’s love story is like a glimmer of sunshine, and it’s much more seamless than the blending of light and dark elements in Bitter Greens. Also, it tears my heart to shreds when Leo digs up his beloved rose garden to plant Ava vegetables.