Apologia

The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys should be considered a great Canadian Novel. There are many reasons why someone should read this novel, the one I'm going to focus on is Helen Humphreys writing style. I'll quickly introduce Helen Humphreys as a poet, her writing style as well as the affect it had on me, as the reader.

First off, Helen Humphreys is not only a novelist, she is also a poet. That's why one of the most intriguing parts of this novel is her writing style. As a poet she has had four books of her poetry published(Wikipedia), and it is very evident in her novel, The Lost Garden. In the novel her lead character Gwen Davis considers what writing means to the author, "When a writer writes, it's as if she holds the sides of her chest apart, exposes her beating heart. And even though everything wants to heal, to close over and protect the heart, the writer must keep it bare, exposed"(182). I'm sure she approaches her writing the same way as many of the events in this book was based off of her parent's lives (January Magazine).

Secondly, as Helen Humphreys is a poet her novels show this through the vocabulary she has chosen to use. The novel is narrated by the main character, Gwen Davis. The poetic language is used in a way to describe what she is experiencing, "I remember being a child and sitting outside the house in the dark. The flowers in the beds were shadows beside me, swaying slightly in a way I was used to, a way I found comforting"(158). Imagine being a child finding the swaying of flowers that calming and peaceful, this is what it does for you. The vocabulary she has chosen puts you in the garden with those swaying flowers. You can picture it vividly. With the words she has chosen to express herself you can imagine everyday occurrences that you would not even consider describing the way she does, "His muscles move like water under his skin"(121). Also as I have previously mentioned, Gwen Davis is a horticulturist and because of this the language used refers to plants through the novel. Whether she is describing the falling of petals from a flower, "[D]ropped it waxy cache of petals to the ground in glorious failure"(120). Or if she is describing a person, "and [I] run my hands over his skin, soft as petals"(196).

Finally, what her language affects the most is the image she is trying to create with her story. As I read this book I felt like I was actually experiencing what the characters were. There were times when Gwen was describing a picture being shown to her as, ""If I peer hard at the photograph in David's hand, at the girl on the rock and the sweater on the girl, I can see stabs of white breaking open the black. I can see the stars he means"(192). Or describing flowers, "I stop in front of the wave of peonies, frozen in the act of crashing to the ground, of going overboard"(194). Not only does she describe what is happening but she gives the action personality - otherwise known as personification. This sheds a whole new light onto what is happening from page to page.

In conclusion, The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys should be considered a great Canadian novel. She is a poet that has created beautiful imagery that carries the readers attention throughout the novel with descriptions of little events. Her poetic license makes the novel that much better as it creates an image for which the reader can respond and relate to. "The moment opens. The moment closes. There is sunlight. There is frost. There is the brief idea of roses amid the patch of weeds"(140).