Bizarrely, The Savage Garden started out as a murder mystery set in late nineteenth century Dutch colonial Java. In fact, Signora Docci, the octogenarian matriarch of the finished book, featured in the original story as a thirteen year old girl dragged off to the Malay Archipelago by her father, a deeply religious Italian naturalist set on disproving the theories of Charles Darwin.
Several factors combined to make me abandon nineteenth century Java for an altogether different story set in 1950s Italy. It wasn’t an easy choice to change tack so completely; I had spent six months in the Bodleian Library in Oxford researching the original idea, and had even travelled to Java. This was when things began to go wrong.
I was woken on my first morning in Jakarta by the sound of a loud explosion. It turned out that Jemaah Islamiyah, a radical Islamist organization, had just tried to blow up the Australian Embassy. I found myself locked down in my hotel, and was strongly advised to abandon my plans to visit Sunda, the western province of the island, where my story was set. Sunda, it turned out, was a hotbed of anti-western fundamentalism.
Having travelled half way around the world, I ignored the advice, and aside from one awkward incident everything went fine. Nevertheless, I had lost valuable days, and I returned to England with the uneasy feeling that I’d failed to complete a proper reconnaissance of the place.
Then came the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. The climax of my story was the destruction of the small coastal town of Anyer by a giant wave following the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, a volcano located just off the western coast of Java. Given the terrible death toll of the 2004 tsunami, I felt very uncomfortable about using an identical natural disaster in the book. Somehow, it seemed exploitative, disrespectful, and yet the whole thrust of my plot was towards this cataclysmic ending.
I had written sixty or so pages of the book when I phoned my editors and told them I was abandoning it. Fortunately, another idea had been creeping up on me for a while. At that time, we were renting a cottage on an estate north of Oxford, where I would go to write. Rousham is home to one of the most beautiful gardens in the country – an Italianate masterpiece laid out by William Kent in the early eighteenth century. It’s a magical world of temples and statues, streams and waterfalls, strung out along a lazy bend in the river Cherwell. The garden’s symbolism and iconography are open to debate, and I was taken with idea that such a garden might hold the clues to an historical mystery, possibly a murder. It made sense to locate the garden and the story in Italy; William Kent had drawn his inspiration from his travels there, and I had lived in Italy for a number of years and was eager to write about the country.
Apart from a couple of key themes (and one of the characters) the only thing the second book shares with the first is the title. I left that unchanged.
