The Walled Garden

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

“With this novel,” writes Toronto sound poet and performance artist
Michael Dean, “I have undertaken the task of replacing the central
metaphor in a piece of continuous prose, and of finding a new image that
will bind the elements together in a centripetal configuration around
it. The end of my marriage is the event I am using to illustrate this
process.” Dean’s curious story uses the image of a rose in the
walled garden behind his Toronto house. More to the point, it is the
hole in the garden from which the writer/narrator pulls a dead rosebush
that symbolizes the end of his 10-year marriage. The hole represents the
dead soul of his marriage; on another level, the walled garden itself
marks the circumscribed limits of the writer’s life, particularly in
his relationship with his wife, Claudette. The novel is further
populated by a potpourri of saints and spirits, most notably Tante
Huguette, Claudette’s aunt, who died of consumption at the age of 21.
Huguette’s phantom flits through the novel, curiously embodied in
physical, even sensual forms.

This unsettling, evocative novel will need to be read at least twice by
most of us, but is well worth the effort.