The Hanging Garden: A Novel
In January 1981, having posted his completed autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, to his editor for review, White—the only Australian ever to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature—immediately began work on his next novel. It was to be a love story, tracing the intertwined paths of two young adolescents who have escaped the war in Europe to find tenderness despite bleak and foreign circumstance. Eirene is from Greece; her Communist father was murdered in prison, and her mother has abandoned her in Australia to return to the war (and her new lover). Gilbert, lean, blond, and rapidly shedding his boyhood, has been sent to Sydney to escape the Blitz. Their connection is initially elusive, fraught with childhood politics and the bristling closed-off-ness of orphaned children. But, one senses, there are profound and beautiful epiphanies in store for the young lovers. The precise contours of these moments are, however, left for us to imagine: White, failing in health and increasingly distracted by political issues, stopped work on the story in April (on ANZAC Day, Australia’s Memorial Day, to be precise) and never completed it. This book is, therefore, but a glimpse—a tantalizing, sensate, glimpse—of one of the twentieth century’s top writers, in raw but still beautiful form. --Brendan Driscoll