The residents of the separatist enclave of Wahrheit have their idyll shattered by the news of a murder-suicide by community member Matthias Orion. They are a group of German immigrants who have gathered together to await their Messiah, and are quick to blame Matthias' contact with the outside world for this shocking news.

The community lives by the Book of Seasons: prescriptions from their founder about what they should be doing at all times of the year, in order to be prepared for the coming. The founder's son, Pastor Helfgott, continues to preach to his flock but lacks his father's zeal.

Matthias' son Benedict, who discovered his dead mother and father, begins a slow descent into madness. He moves from the house to the barn, lives with the animals and neglects the farm and the strictures of the Seasons. The community avoids contact with him because they cannot deal with the enormity of what happened. Benedict subsumes his need for human contact by looking after his horses and ceases to speak. Pastor Helfgott continues to visit him and worries that his madness may become worse. But Helfgott has a deeper worry: is Benedict some sort of harbinger of the Messiah that his father foretold? And what would that mean for Wahrheit?

This is a splendid book. Parts of it reminded me of Equus in the portrayal of Benedict's relationship with his horses. It is beautifully written, with bucolic descriptions of the changes in the countryside, the farming activities and the cultural events as the seasons shift. It also captures an important element of the immigrant experience; farmers from the other side of the world adjusting to a new reality. Finally, it tells a thoughtful story of religious doubt and the blights that can hide even in the gardens of paradise.

The Last Garden has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and I think it would be a worthy winner. ( )

Such beautiful writing. Poetic and powerfully emotional. Wonderfully told by a writer with genuine gifts. But what a sad, even gruesome story. The subject matter took the gloss off it for me. ( )

Eva Hornung is a Victorian-born author who now lives in rural South Australia, and her love of the bush environment dominates this intriguing novel. I’ve had The Last Garden on my TBR since I bought it last year, but it’s been long-listed for the 2018 ALS Gold Medal so this seems like a good time to read it.
#Understatement I wasn’t very keen on Dog Boy (which won the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award, so I was well-and-truly out of step there!) but The Last Garden is a less confronting novel. It does, however, include grotesque elements that Hornung seems to favour. This is how it begins:

On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.
He spent a strange day in surly, secret violence, compelled to destroy anything he considered to be part of himself, but almost unaware of where his black mood was taking him. He could find no release. He walked, reloading as he trod, crunching up his own driveway and entered his beautiful house as if blown by a harsh wind, unable to stop and remove his boots.
Ada came out of the kitchen, wiped befeathered hands on her pinafore.
Her eyes widened, travelled up and down with a storm brewing behind them as her mouth moved, but he heard nothing above the roar in his head. A wave swept over him, and before he had stopped to think he had shot his wife through the heart as she stood by the sideboard. She crumpled into silence, a hush that he recognised as unique among hushes: the end of everything. (p.3-4)

Horrific, yes, but irresistible too. There are puzzling elements in this striking introduction. A quick Google search told me that ‘Wahrheit’ is a German word meaning ‘Truth’, but I had to read on to confirm my suspicion that the Wagnerian-sounding ‘Nebelung’ was derived from an archaic calendar. Each chapter, one for each month of the year, is prefaced by a quasi-religious tract describing the climate, but if Nebelung, preceding the Old High German ‘Christmond‘, is November, then these events are not taking place in the northern hemisphere. The European calendar’s ‘Wintermond’ isn’t an appropriate name for a mild November like this:

Now we have Nebelung, but what a Nebelung! The grass ripens at a marvellous height, the baby animals gambol at their mother’s sides, the heavens are mild, the rain enriching, the sun warm. Our gardens are places of praise. Our houses are places of worship, our fields ring with the songs of scythe and reaper and our children’s songs of joy. No fog or mist darkens our world, no ice bars our labours. No snow falls. We plan marriages and we harvest as we have sown. (p.1)

This is a 19th century German religious settlement in South Australia…
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/22/the-last-garden-by-eva-hornung-bookreview/ ( )