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The Purest of Human Pleasures

by Kenneth Radu

Kenneth Radu’s fourth novel borrows its title from a well-known quote by Francis Bacon praising the pastime of gardening. The intended irony is that though this novel is full of gardens, no one actually gets any pleasure out of them. The opposite, in fact: people hanging about in their immaculate gardens have a tendency to wind up dead.

The Purest of Human Pleasures takes place in an affluent college community in the suburbs of Montreal, where having the perfect garden is an important status symbol. The most knowledgeable gardener around is Morris Bunter, and his services are constantly in demand. One morning, Morris finds a client lying in her garden with a decorative axe embedded in her skull. He expects the community to react to this news, to change somehow, but nothing really happens. The news is received with about the same level of concern as a minor dip in property prices – unfortunate, but not disastrous. Even the police don’t seem that concerned. As worse things keep happening, the question haunting the novel is whether the community will ever wake up.

The novel is deeply introspective. Radu’s characters seem almost shy, afraid to talk to one another. Everything Morris experiences is internalized and then finally expressed through a prism of horticultural metaphor. A head wound reminds him of the blossoming of a red poppy; he experiences a bog of confusion; the day collapses like the spires of foxtail lilies blown by the wind; he feels like a man lost in a forest of brambles and menacing trees without a compass or hatchet – all in the span of a single page.

At the end of Candide, the old Turk explains that the way his family stays out of trouble is by ignoring the outside world and tending their gardens. He credits this with keeping away the evils of idleness, vice, and want. In contrast, here Radu gives us a community so engrossed in its gardens that the outside world, no matter how violent, can barely make a dent in it. The Purest of Human Pleasures serves as an interesting rebuttal to Voltaire.

 

Reviewer: Ken Hunt

Publisher: Penguin Books Canada

DETAILS

Price: $24

Page Count: 280 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-14-301629-6

Released: Jan.

Issue Date: 2005-2

Categories: Fiction: Novels