xterminal's review
4.0
Eileen Goudge, Garden of Lies (Signet, 1989)
This book was, upon its release, not just a sensation; it posted numbers that scandalized the publishing world. How on earth could a romance, of all things, sell like this? Almost fifteen years in the future, we can look back and snicker at our naïveté, of course. The last piece of the genre fiction puzzle gained respectability, and now Danielle Steel, Sandra Brown, and Nora Roberts sit atop the bestseller lists as comfortably as do King, Clancy, and Grisham. Steel was already on the brink of megastardom (and was, of course, a megastar in the romance world long beforehand), but most, if not all, other romance writers owe a great deal of their present respect in the world of modern literature to Eileen Goudge's debut novel.
Garden of Lies is the torrid tale of two girls switched at birth. After one's mother dies in a hospital fire, Sylvie, the mother of the other, switches the two babies in order to prevent her spouse from realizing her actual daughter is the product of an affair. The two girls, Rose (Sylvie's natural daughter) and Rachel (Sylvie's "adopted" daughter), lead oddly parallel lives despite their vast gulfs in economic and social status. Through a series of coincidences, the two both end up in love with the same man, and the close ties both have to him threaten to reveal Sylvie's long-held secret.
The first thing to say about this novel, as any romance novel, is to benchmark it against the doyenne. And Garden of Lies is so much better than the works of Danielle Steel that they may as well not be on the same planet. Aside from the proofreading (I've never yet encountered a Danielle Steel novel that looks as if it had been proofread at all), Goudge seems to have turned her back on the cookie-cutter philosophy of genre fiction (simply stated, "create character who fits plot, insert here"). Not that you haven't seen this plot and these characters before, but unlike most straight genre fiction, Goudge's characters are three-dimensional, they react to the plot as if they were actually reacting to it instead of doing what thousands of cookie-cutter characters have done before them, and when they emote, they're not giving us dialogue straight out of the pages of the scripts for The Guiding Light. Refreshing, to say the least.
This epic (and really, when a romance novel goes over 500 pages, it's acceptable to call it an epic, no?) has a whole lot going for it. It's probably best to have your suspension-of-disbelief mode set pretty high; there are a few "okay, that's too coincidental" events, and the whole stretch that takes place in Vietnam is too pat. But by the time you hit either of the above, the novel is barrel-racing along too fast for you to stop and compare Goudge's jungle to, say, Lucius Shepard's, you only have time to hang on and enjoy the ride. A rollercoaster ain't a rocket, either, but it's still fun.
Garden of Lies has rightly carved itself a place in the history of the modern romance novel. Probably the best of the bunch I've encountered since the glory days of Stephanie Blake in the early eighties. Definitely worth your time if you're looking for a good, easy summer read. *** ½
This book was, upon its release, not just a sensation; it posted numbers that scandalized the publishing world. How on earth could a romance, of all things, sell like this? Almost fifteen years in the future, we can look back and snicker at our naïveté, of course. The last piece of the genre fiction puzzle gained respectability, and now Danielle Steel, Sandra Brown, and Nora Roberts sit atop the bestseller lists as comfortably as do King, Clancy, and Grisham. Steel was already on the brink of megastardom (and was, of course, a megastar in the romance world long beforehand), but most, if not all, other romance writers owe a great deal of their present respect in the world of modern literature to Eileen Goudge's debut novel.
Garden of Lies is the torrid tale of two girls switched at birth. After one's mother dies in a hospital fire, Sylvie, the mother of the other, switches the two babies in order to prevent her spouse from realizing her actual daughter is the product of an affair. The two girls, Rose (Sylvie's natural daughter) and Rachel (Sylvie's "adopted" daughter), lead oddly parallel lives despite their vast gulfs in economic and social status. Through a series of coincidences, the two both end up in love with the same man, and the close ties both have to him threaten to reveal Sylvie's long-held secret.
The first thing to say about this novel, as any romance novel, is to benchmark it against the doyenne. And Garden of Lies is so much better than the works of Danielle Steel that they may as well not be on the same planet. Aside from the proofreading (I've never yet encountered a Danielle Steel novel that looks as if it had been proofread at all), Goudge seems to have turned her back on the cookie-cutter philosophy of genre fiction (simply stated, "create character who fits plot, insert here"). Not that you haven't seen this plot and these characters before, but unlike most straight genre fiction, Goudge's characters are three-dimensional, they react to the plot as if they were actually reacting to it instead of doing what thousands of cookie-cutter characters have done before them, and when they emote, they're not giving us dialogue straight out of the pages of the scripts for The Guiding Light. Refreshing, to say the least.
This epic (and really, when a romance novel goes over 500 pages, it's acceptable to call it an epic, no?) has a whole lot going for it. It's probably best to have your suspension-of-disbelief mode set pretty high; there are a few "okay, that's too coincidental" events, and the whole stretch that takes place in Vietnam is too pat. But by the time you hit either of the above, the novel is barrel-racing along too fast for you to stop and compare Goudge's jungle to, say, Lucius Shepard's, you only have time to hang on and enjoy the ride. A rollercoaster ain't a rocket, either, but it's still fun.
Garden of Lies has rightly carved itself a place in the history of the modern romance novel. Probably the best of the bunch I've encountered since the glory days of Stephanie Blake in the early eighties. Definitely worth your time if you're looking for a good, easy summer read. *** ½
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