Gardens…
Many people love their gardens, whether they’re filled with flowers, shrubs, and trees, or vegetables. More generally, many people love expansive places where they can jog, feed the ducks, or just sit on a bench enjoying the sun or shade while maybe talking to a friend. What would New York City be without its High Line or Central Park? What would DC be without its Mall or National Zoo? What would Boston be without the Commons and Gardens? What would San Francisco be without Golden Gate Park?
I can go on and on. My sci-fi thriller Evil Agenda features both the Botanical Garden in Barcelona and “Needle Park” in Zurich, if I remember correctly (that’s one problem with having written so many books—I can’t keep things straight anymore!). The first is beautiful; the second not so much. But that’s not the point of this post. My point is that gardens and parks are used in literature for multiple things, from a tryst between lovers (vampires or otherwise) to murders and rapes. Even in big cities, there are out-of-the-way places and times where the gardens or parks are deserted. That makes them ideal for staging certain events that we write about.
The reason for the goings-on is often disassociated with the garden. They can happen in that setting for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the park is almost a main character, though, like in Jurassic Park (the book by Michael Crichton existed before the famous movie, of course). One short story that was part of the Man-Kzin confrontations (Larry Niven created the setting) had a Kzin, a cat-like ET, on the hunt for a human in a park the Kzin had created especially for the hunt—predator v. prey (is it possible the Schwarzenegger movie’s screenwriters stole this idea?). Colleague Scott Dyson has a short story in the Quantum Zoo sci-fi collection set in a garden (technically a preserve) on the now forgotten planet Earth. Jeffery Deaver’s best novel, Garden of Beasts, is intimately related to Berlin’s Tier Garten. One of my little ET friends, an Odri, leaves his camcorder-like device in a Colorado cave in an ancient Earth forest for his colleagues who will follow him. That arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin tries to exploit this device in several of my sci-fi books—it has a source of power that lasts millions of years.
Yes, gardens and parks are prevalent in sci-fi, from the far past to distant future. They’re ubiquitous in a lot of fiction, in fact. A spy making a secret package drop or meeting with his handler in a garden or park is a common scene in thrillers and mysteries. The Hanging Gardens in Babylon are only superseded by the Garden of Eden in historical importance if we ignore little Odri. That biblical garden perhaps explains why other gardens are so prevalent in literature. Three major religions—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—all have that common root, a beautiful place where both good and evil existed. All fiction is about good and evil in some way. Every garden scene somehow relates back to Eden in some fashion. When Castilblanco and his wife chase their stalker in the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in Aristocrats and Assassins, we have a metaphor for Adam and Eve chasing the snake—they didn’t do that, and should have, of course, because we’ve been in trouble ever since!
Gardens are ideal for contrasting innate tranquility and peace with disorder and violence. A pitched battle in Barcelona’s Botanical Garden takes place in Evil Agenda. This is used so often in fiction that a writer has to be wary of clichés and stereotypes. On the other hand, putting disorder and violence in a dreary, dark place is more of a cliché; I prefer the contrast. At the beginning of The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, a murder is committed in broad daylight in Hoboken’s park fronting the mighty Hudson. One person thought this was a boring cliché—he’s entitled to his opinion, but I disagree. It’s that clash of peace and tranquility with chaos and violence again.
I was amused when we recently saw the Mark Morris Dance Group and friends perform Mozart’s rewrite of Handel’s Acis and Galatea in the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. I attended with some trepidation. I’m not particularly a fan of the dance genre (maybe because I have two left feet, unlike my character Castilblanco), but Mark Morris always uses live music, and I am an avid fan of live music. My qualms were somewhat mitigated when I realized the story was disorder and violence set in the tranquility and peace of a forest, portrayed on stage as more of a garden. People are often surprised when I tell them where I get the idea for a post, but during that performance I was thinking, “Steve, one of your book’s scenes plagiarized Handel and the Greeks!” Not really, of course, because gardens are ubiquitous in literature, but it was a bit of epiphany, a humbling realization that I might not be doing anything more than repeating what the ancient Greeks did in creating their immortal stories.
In libris libertas….
