Aussie author Kate Morton moves to the top tier of modern English dramatic authors with her two exquisitely written tales of loss and intrigue in stories that segue effortlessly from the distant past to the present. My opinion only, but high praise indeed for a woman who grew up not in England, but in the mountains of southeast Queensland, Australia. She has degrees in Dramatic Art and English Literature, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland. Ms. Morton lives with her husband and two young sons in Brisbane, and in this 2008 novel she returns home to Australia to site some of the story. 

Even though I had received a rave recommendation about "The Forgotten Garden" a few years ago from a beloved sister, I ended up first reading Morton's 2007 inaugural novel, "The House at Riverton," which I loved. My highly laudatory review of that book is here:

http://www.catsmeowbooknook.com/id93.html

After experiencing the delight of reading that book, I anticipated reading "The Forgotten Garden" with great pleasure. I might add that both books have been on the New York Times best selling lists, and Morton now has a third novel, "The Distant Hours" coming out in November.  

This is a very fine book, but please allow me first to indulge myself with a little sidebar musing... After reading it, I find myself intellectually intrigued by what appears to be a rather common literary quirk among some contemporary authors. Like a fair number of other authors I have read recently, I find Morton's first novel to be the far superior of the two. I find this to be somewhat counterintuitive, as I would have thought that a continuing experience at writing would have produced a finer product. What I call the "superior first novel syndrome" is common enough that I am going to have to rethink my original hypothesis. Perhaps the first novel is the "one great idea" of the author and the later novels end up being derivatives or shadows of the first. Maybe they need more time to get away from the burden, if you can call it that, of early literary success. 

I also have a sneaking suspicion that public adulation and critical acclaim may have unduly influenced the authors. It strikes me that perhaps they may have read too many of their own reviews, for it seems that whatever worked so well in the first novel is put on steroids in the second novel with the unsatisfactory result that the concept is worked to death. I'd be curious to hear what others think about this.

Please don't get the mistaken impression that I am down on this novel, for it is beautifully written and I have given it a superb grade and a strong recommendation to match. It just isn't as good as Morton's first effort, even though it comes off very well compared to most other books. 

Each of Morton's books are different with the first having a more simple narrative structure. It is hard to criticize the flaw in the second novel without pointing out the strengths of the first novel. "The House at Riverton" involves an elderly woman, a former lady's maid at an English country estate, musing about a tragedy which had occurred there during the 1920s. She is the last one alive who had been an eyewitness at the scene of the accident, and since then her lips have been sealed. Now a movie about those notorious events is being made, and she reflects on what actually happened 80 years before. We are not given all of the facts at once, and the story is slowly unwrapped like a beautiful Russian eggshell doll with a secret embedded in a secret until the very last moment when the final truth is revealed. The beauty of that story is that only one person, Grace Bradley, knows what really happened, and she remains the sole narrator throughout. 

I am awestruck by the ease and the beauty with which Morton segues back and forth in time in her writing. It is truly a work of art. While this novel evidences similar facility at language and expression, it is not quite the same from a structural standpoint. Whereas there was the one narrator in the first novel, here there are multiple narrators with each moving back and forth in time to the point that it becomes a literary three dimensional chess board. I felt like I needed a scorecard to keep track of the players. Perhaps I have overplayed my criticism on what is a minor plot conceit. It could just be nitpicking, but this is how I see it. 

In 1913 a woman and a young girl visit a ship bound for Australia before it leaves Liverpool. She secretes the young girl below deck and swears her to secrecy. It will all be a fun game, she promises. The little girl trusts this woman, who is not her mother, so much so that she follows her instructions to the letter. It is not until the ship is far at sea, too far to turn back, that she is discovered with nothing but her small suitcase and a beautifully illustrated volume of fairy tales. 

Her fellow passengers take pity on her and keep her well cared for until they land at Sydney. Sitting interminably on the dock with no one to pick her up, the dock master and his wife, Hugh and Lil, take pity on her and then take her in and raise her as their own, even moving to another city in Australia so that former friends and neighbors won't ask embarrassing questions as to how they suddenly ended up with a new daughter. 

"Nell" becomes a member of the family and retains only dim memories of those long ago moments back in England. Hugh and Lil always wanted to confess the truth to her, and, to their credit, they did search endlessly for information as to lost children or anyone advertising for a girl matching Nell's description. All searches were in vain.

In 1930, seventeen years later, Hugh decides to confess the truth of her parentage to her on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday. He has long thought it the right thing to do, and with the recent loss of his wife, he has no one left to argue otherwise. He tells her the story of how they found her and then he shows her the little suitcase and the book of illustrated fairy tales.

Nell does not take this news well, for she finds her whole world turned upside down. She no longer knows who she is, and her engagement to a local lad collapses because of her inner conflict. She spends many periods during the rest of her life back in England searching for her real parents. All clues, but no hard evidence, leads to the Mountrachet family who live at the Blackhurst Manor on the Cornish Coast. 

Seventy-five years later in 2005 finds Nell lying in a hospital bed close to death. Cassandra, her granddaughter, keeps her company. The two have always been close, even though Nell is estranged from Cassandra's mother, her own daughter. Cassandra worked for Nell at her antiques store for a number of years.   

Like a lot of family secrets, nothing is mentioned until the family gather at Nell's house to mourn her passing. Cassandra asks about a puzzling comment that Nell had made while lying in the hospital bed. Even after the passage of so many years, Nell's elderly siblings are reluctant to discuss the episode, for they all remember how this news had destroyed the happiness of their once close-knit family. 

It will now be up to Cassandra to search for the missing pieces of the puzzle and discover the significance of that long forgotten walled garden around the seaside cottage on the Cornish cliff falling into wrack and ruin. 2008, Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, originally published in Australia by Allen and Unwin.