The Beast's Garden
Kate Forsyth
Vintage, $32.99
The idea for Kate Forsyth's new book, The Beast's Garden, came to her in that cloudy state between sleep and waking, the place she calls the shadowlands.
While working on her doctorate in fairytale studies, and researching her breakthrough novel The Wild Girl, Forsyth learnt that the Allies had banned the Grimm Brothers' fairytales in Germany after the war as part of their denazification program.
Restless one night and unable to sleep, she grabbed a book to read, an old World War II thriller. The next morning an image rose up in her mind.
"I saw a young woman dressed in a glamorous 1940s golden gown, leaning on a black piano and singing to a room full of officers in the sinister black uniforms of the SS," Forsyth says.
"I knew, somehow, that she was German and that she was some kind of spy or resistance fighter. I saw other images tumbling through my imagination like a trailer for a movie.
"I saw her clutching a tattered old book of fairytales to her chest, as she crept through the rubble of a bombed city, and I saw her living wild in a dark forest, tearing up weeds to eat."
Forsyth wrote such imaginative flurries down in her diary – about five pages of ideas and images – and then began to research the little-known story of the German resistance, returning to them two years ago.
The result is The Beast's Garden, the five-act story of Ava Falkenhorst, her love for a young Nazi officer, and their secret efforts to wreck Hitler's war machine.
As with much of Forsyth's recent fiction, The Beast's Garden is shaped around the master narrative of a single fairytale, in this case The Singing, Springing Lark, a lesser-known version of the French tale of Beauty and the Beast.
In The Singing the heroine marries a beast to save her father and does her best to make a happy life for herself. It's a universal lesson, Forsyth says, to recognise, beneath surface appearances, courage and steadfastness in others.
Forsyth's previous bestseller, Bitter Greens, is a retelling of Rapunzel interwoven with the dramatic life story of the woman who first told the tale, the 17th century French writer Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force.
As a toddler Forsyth was bitten on the face by a dog and left without a tear duct in one eye and vulnerable to dangerous infections. During hospital stays she felt like Rapunzel, imprisoned by her inability to shed tears. So began her reliance on fairytales as a source of comfort and strength.
"Fairytales work on two levels," she says. "On a conscious level they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears."
Forsyth is drawn to telling stories about forgotten women and forgotten causes. Until her vivid dream sent her back to the history books, she hadn't heard of the underground German resistance.
"One reason why so little is known about the German resistance is because it was never a united movement in the way that it was in France or Poland. It was simply too dangerous. The German people were living in a Gestapo-ruled society.
"Most of the groups were small cells of friends and colleagues who had to live double lives - pretending to be supporters of the Third Reich while secretly and desperately working to sabotage the deadly war machine."
Forsyth considers The Beast's Garden the most difficult book she has written, first as diary entries and letters, then rewritten in the first person. On the advice of her sister, writer Belinda Murrell, she rewrote 140,000 words again in six weeks, as a third-person narrative.
The published novel gives a rounder version of history, she says, doing justice to the real stories of the resistance.
"I spent two years researching Hitler and the Holocaust and all the different ways people tried to resist and it was incredibly moving, heart-wrenching and harrowing. All the time I would ask myself, 'In the same circumstances, would I have resisted? And if I wasn't deeply involved, how could I live with myself?' "
