Gardens in the Dunes Book

In a novel that moves with extraordinary fluidity and grace between two diametrically opposed worlds -- the timeless, "traditional" world of Native American peoples and the elaborate, stylized world of European and American upper-class culture at its glittering, falsely glamorous zenith before the First World War -- Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of such highly praised works of fiction as Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, has written what Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, calls "a little masterpiece."

With the sure hand and unerring eye of a mature artist, Silko takes the reader on a Grand Tour of England and Europe in the era of Henry James (in a novel peopled with characters whose sensibility and language are brilliantly Jamesian), as seen through the eyes of a young Native American girl, Indigo, who is in flight from the destruction at the hands of the whites of her own tribal world. Indigo's fascination with the world of luxury and privilege never eclipses her instinctive faith in the traditions and the culture of her own people, or her desire to return home to what remains of her tribe and her family.

Spanning the jungles of Brazil, the gardens and stately homes of England and Europe, the desert of the American Southwest, and the great estates of the American rich at the height of the Gilded Age, Gardens in the Dunes is an ambitious, fully realized novel about the fatal collision between two cultures, that of the colonizers and that of the indigenous peoples they have conquered, and about the ideas, beliefs, and structures of time, mind, and habit that bind and sunder them.

At the heart of the book is Indigo herself -- a young child of the Sand Lizard people, who runs away from the government school to which the soldiers have taken her to be brought up in the ways of the white world.

Until then, Indigo and her sister, Sister Salt, have lived with their grandmother, Grandma Fleet, a last, tiny remnant of a tribe that has been driven from its home among the garden terraces carved out of the sand dunes, and so reduced that Grandma Fleet and the girls have fallen from selling handmade baskets to tourists at the railway station to scavenging from the town dump. Yet they have not lost their tribal identity or their faith in the coming of a Messiah who will return to their people -- perhaps to all the Indian peoples -- their land, and whose coming is sought by means of the Ghost Dance, which has been strictly forbidden by government.

Hattie, Indigo's kindhearted and determined rescuer, is herself something of rebel. Married to Edward, an older man, wealthy, well-connected, a much-traveled gentleman-scholar, botanist, and explorer who nurses complex schemes for making a vast fortune with exotic plants. Hattie has defied the prevailing Victorian standards for young ladies by pursuing her own career as a scholar (she is something of a bluestocking) and by not producing an heir.

In Indigo, Hattie finds at once a cure for her own loneliness and lack of love (for Edward, however well-intentioned, is at best a diffident, remote, and unpassionate husband) and a new object of study. Kind, observant, optimistic, full of good intentions, Hattie methodically sets about transforming Indigo, whose high spirits and native intelligence soon re-emerge into a "proper," well-brought-up American child, a transformation that is doomed to fail, for Indigo's view of the world is very different from Hattie's. In the end, by small degrees, they (and we) begin to understand that Hattie has at least as much to learn from the child as the child does from her -- perhaps more.

Gardens in the Dunes builds to a rich and unexpected climax in which Hattie finds herself reduced to poverty, thrown out of the society in which she has always lived so comfortably (however much she chafed at its rules), and is herself rescued by Indigo's people at the precise moment when the Ghost Dance is sweeping through the pueblos and reservations of the Indian peoples of the Southwest, bringing relationships between them and the whites to a new and dangerous level of tension.

Satisfying, multifaceted, wise, and compassionate, Gardens in the Dunes is cause for celebration -- a major novel by perhaps the most gifted and best-known of Native American writers today.