Continuing my plan to try and take my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge by the scruff of the neck, today I’m off to Malaysia. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (2012) has been hugely lauded and it had completely passed me by. I rectified this situation by taking it with me on a long weekend in the New Forest recently, and it definitely suits those moments when you have a decent amount of time to commit to it.

Back at the end of May when Kim at Reading Matters very kindly invited me to take part in her Triple Choice Tuesday, I chose The Secret Garden as a book that changed my world due to its themes of gardens and healing. So The Garden of Evening Mists was always going to be a winner for me as it explores these themes.   

The story opens in the 1980s, Yun Ling is a high court judge, just about to retire. This means she is leaving the bustle of Kuala Lumpur to return to her home in the Cameron Highlands.

“Most people in Kuala Lumpur couldn’t bear the stench, especially when the river was running low between monsoon seasons, but I had never minded that, in the heart of the city, I could smell the mountains over a hundred miles away.”

She hasn’t been back for years, and her return encourages her to reflect on her past:

“The garden’s name in English: Evening Mists. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.”

The main focus of her reflections is the time she spent as apprentice to a gardener who had been employed by the Emperor of Japan. Nakamura Aritomo is a mysterious figure, best known to his South African neighbour Magnus Pretorious, who still doesn’t know him hugely well, or why he seems to be in self-imposed exile in this remote part of Malaysia.

The past narrative begins in 1951 and Teoh Yun Ling is the sole survivor of a Japanese POW camp, where her sister died. She wants to build a Japanese garden in memory of her sister:

“Yun Hong kept our spirits up by talking about the gardens we had visited in Kyoto, describing even the smallest details to me. ‘This is how we’ll survive,’ she told me, ‘this is how will walk out of this camp.’”

In order to build her garden, Yun Ling is going to need the help of Aritomo, and for that to happen she needs to learn to trust a Japanese man despite associating him with her torturers.

“The imminent rain in the air smelt crisp and metallic, as though it has been seared by the lightning buried in the clouds. The scent reminded me of my time in the camp, when my mind had latched onto the smallest, most inconsequential thing to distract myself: a butterfly wafting from a patch of scrub, a spider web tethered to twigs by strands of silk, sieving the wind for insects.”

The relationship between Yun Ling and Aritomo is undoubtedly the centre of the story, but this is an ambitious novel and covers a great many themes, including the aftermath of World War Two and pre-independence Malaysia. (There are a few info-dump moments but not many.) It shows how power is achieved through violence, during British colonialism and beyond.

Within a carefully evoked historical context, Tan Twan Eng explores how we heal from trauma; how we reconcile to ourselves and to others; how we find redemption, and how we can forgive. It’s an immensely powerful story, and Yun Ling has to navigate her survivors guilt and overwhelming anger, to try and work out how on earth she is going to continue with her life.

“Walking in the garden I had heard about almost half a lifetime ago, I wished Yun Hong were here with me. She would have enjoyed it more than me. I wondered what I was doing here, living the life that should have been my sister’s.”

From goodreads I know some readers found Yun Ling too detached and remote a voice within her own story. Although some of the characterisation in the novel felt thin at times, I didn’t have a problem with Yun Ling’s voice. I thought it worked well in conveying her detachment through trauma, and it also balanced the style of storytelling. The descriptions are so richly detailed (sometimes a bit too much for my austere tastes) that to have a highly emotive voice amongst it all would have been too much.

“Birdsong song sparkles the air; mists topple over the mountains and slide down their flanks, slow and soundless as an avalanche witnessed from miles away. Instinctively I turn to look behind me, expecting Aritomo to chide me with a look or a scathing word. I see only my own footprints on the dusty floorboards as the bamboo blinds creak softly in the wind.”

Amongst this beauty are some gruesome scenes too, both in the 1950s setting and in Yun Ling’s memories of the camp. I didn’t find this gratuitous at all and thought they were responsibly handled, but wanted to warn any readers late to The Garden of Evening Mists like me that it is certainly not an unrelentingly pretty read.

Underpinning all periods is the theme of memory, effectively evoked through the shifting back and forth between timelines. Tan Twan Eng demonstrates how we cling to memory, how important it can be despite its unreliability. He shows how this can limit our knowledge of ourselves, others and circumstances, yet it remains vitally important.

The Garden of Evening Mists presents complex people and situations and demonstrates how, even when we don’t know everything and can’t rely on what we do know, all are worthy of compassion.

“Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?”

To end, has anyone seen the adaptation from 2019? From this trailer I can’t decide if I want to watch it…