Secrets of the Italian Gardener (2013)

This review contains minor spoilers, nothing that would ruin the book, but you've been warned.

Writing fiction set around a reallife scenario can pose a considerable challenge for any writer. The restrictions introduce a risk of either embellishing the nature of the setting to the point of ludicrousness for the sake of driving the story, or, conversely, simply not taking advantage of it at all.

Real-life ghostwriter Andrew Crofts (who has tackled some serious and heavy subjects from unsolved murders to child brides in the Middle East) takes on this genre of historical fiction with Secrets of the Italian Gardener, setting it around the Arab Spring movement. The political movement, which sought to fight against what was perceived as government tyranny and corruption, began in 2010 with a wave of protests and self-immolation in Tunisia, sending ripples of change around East Africa and the Arab world.

Drawing from his experiences from covering these events, Crofts creates a fictional unnamed Middle Eastern nation on the verge of a regime shift. The book's unnamed protagonist, also a ghostwriter, is hired under great secrecy to help the country's perpetually busy dictator, Mo, write an autobiography to correct the so-called falsehoods perpetuated by Western media. It is during this pursuit that the ghostwriter encounters Lou, the titular Italian gardener, a former business associate of Mo, now retired to groundskeeping and dispelling fortune- cookie advice.

To put it out there, Secrets doesn't really take advantage of its heated setting as well as you'd hope.

With a book like this, one wonders how well the Arab Spring movement is represented in this book, and the answer is: not at all. There is no real mention of the political upheaval in the surrounding region, which adds a feeling of timelessness to the story (the depiction of modern conveniences aside). If anything, knowing that the book is set around the waves of change only makes it easier to guess the outcome of the tiny fictional nation. Disappointment aside, the book more or less focuses on its characters driving the story, which is where the problems begin.

Considering the location of the book's setting, the story element of Mo as a bloodthirsty tyrant hiding behind a façade of being a benevolent dictator feels rather silly with the seriousness it is given. You won't exactly be shocked that the regime really did torture and brutalize dissenters, *gasp*. While the book doesn't exclusively focus on what goes on behind the political curtain, the occasional reference to the ghost's cat-and-mouse game with finding out the true nature of regime does tend to be distracting simply because how predictable it is.

The book also includes, in flashback chapters, the story of the ghostwriter's encounter with his now-wife, his love of gardening, his daughter and the tragedy that befalls her. However, it ends up being undercooked and rushed, without attempting to have the reader truly make a connection with the characters. With that said, the interwoven chapters of his personal life do eventually coalesce with the present-day regime change story to create something meaningful.

The gardener himself is arguably the most interesting character in the book. We learn about himself, his family, his various Confucian philosophies about gardening, and of course, his titular secrets, with hidden pasts being an ongoing theme in this book. Even though his background is given the most detail (aside from the ghost, obviously), it still feels somewhat glossed over, and ends up leaving an air of nagging incompletion rather than mystery.

To chalk up the book's one glaring flaw, the characters aren't fleshed out enough for the reader to really care for them, outside of being players in the overall story. While not every book has to introduce complex characterization to be on top of it all, a book with this premise could very well benefit by telling us why we should care about these characters, or at least tell us more about who they are. The story doesn't exactly suffer, but it doesn't end up being everything it could be either. Perhaps an extra 120 pages of backstory would add some much-needed meat to the barebones characters.

At a relatively light 100 pages, Secrets of the Italian Gardener seems to suffer a rather conventional problem of setting up something interesting without trying to push the limit and truly explore it. Nonetheless, its short length and interesting historical fiction setting makes for an entertaining afternoon read.

Rating: 3 out of 5