Book review: The Gardens of Delight

By Ian Watson. Not a bad book, but a meh book; having finished, I'm now wondering why I bothered. Perhaps because it is, refreshingly, a short tome: a mere 176 pages in this printing. Hardback, second hand, for £8, from Any Amount of Books, on the way from the NPG to KC.

The title is of course a reference to The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch; the book is constructed as a "well, what if there was one for real: a Garden, a Hell, and an Eden; how might that play out?". It plays out as a spaceship, visiting a distant planet, to check up on the previously-sent-out colonists from a hundred years ago or so (as an aside, the dynamics of this, especially the politics and economics, are absurd; thankfully they are not dwelt on). Mysteriously, the planet has been terraformed into the Gardens; the inhabitants speak of a God, but of course it is merely space-aliens, who have done this thing for their own inscrutable purposes. Naturally, it is possible to conjecture various reasons why they might have, and the book does, but these are only things you might have though of for yourself, so that aspect fails to interest.

A review that I largely agree with is here; from which I quote "The book is full of half-baked theories drawn from philosophy, theology and psychoanalysis. Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone come up frequently, as do Jungian archetypes... a modest book, despite its grandiose speculations on the nature of God and humanity. It doesn't claim to be anything more than what it is: a carrier bag full of the author’s quirks and obsessions".

So yes, not to be taken or judged too seriously, but nonetheless marred by rather too much explanatory dialogue of all these not-very-interesting systems; though perhaps they were more interesting in those distant days.

Oh, and I read this when young; but obvs retained little.