Customer Reviews

Rosemary Tree

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The first time I read this book I found it rather depressing. Then I read it again, and began to see a number of complex themes emerging. Basically, this is a book about second chances. Most of the characters are people who failed long ago, lived to regret it, then discover that sometimes there comes along a second chance to "do things right." Some of them get a second chance at love; others, at improving and deepening relationships they already have. The quiet and unobtrusive heart of the story is Harriet, the elderly, retired nanny, now crippled by arthritis and living in the care of one of her former charges and his family. The story opens with her sitting by her window at daybreak, first simply watching the sky and the landscape, and then watching the lives of the family as they go about their duties, praying for them, and wondering how they can continue to put up with someone as "useless" as she thinks herself to be.

Only one major character in the book refuses to take the second chance offered. Read the book and find out who it is.

Searching for meanings of life in a spiritually bleak world
Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, The Rosemary Tree contains several moments of mystical vision and dream.
There are recurring references to Shakespeare's "Ophelia", Cervante's "Don Quixote" and Lewis Carroll's "Alice" as well as numbers of poets.
The cast of characters include several elderly spinsters and widows and widowers in their fifties, sixties and older, a young school teacher, some of her pupils and their parents, an elderly coachman-cum-pig-keeper, two dogs, many birds and a vibrant spring.
It touches on themes of love, existentialism, lust, fear of death, suicide, betrayal, hatred, cowardice, war, selfishness, eccentricity, nervous breakdown and insanity, old age, cruelty, creativity, faith, prayer, shame and guilt, forgiveness, poetry, interior decoration, children's books and good food!
Certainly it is a rich mixture.
But this is often the way Goudge thinks, and writes.
She shares her enthusiasms, doubts, hopes, and loves with us.
But it is also at times very funny, where, for example, asking for second-helpings of a school dinner demands bravery deserving a V.C.!
(Incidentally, it is a stand-alone novel, and not part of the "Eliot" or "Damerosehay" trilogy.)
Several of the characters (and this is not a simple romance, nor a story with one main character -- it is about diverse individuals within a community), at different stages in the own lives, face fundamental questions about their personal view of life, purpose versus pointlessness, and the prospect of their own death.
In several ways Goudge ought to be compared with writers such as Graham Greene, as a novelist concerned with a search for meaning in a modern materialist brutal society.
Perhaps it is the diversity of her range, and the mis-perception that she is a gentle writer of romances (for women: some of her paperback editions put her in the same company as lesser writers such as Anya Seton!), that prevents her real achievement to be appreciated.

John Gough -- Deakin University -- jagough49@gmail.com