By Daphne Guinness
The Beast's Garden
KATE FORSYTH
Random House, $32.99. Buy now on Booktopia
Kate Forsyth is a prolific fantasy author with 25 titles to her credit. She has a kooky style of writing but for fans who admire her easy-reading and love clichés, this is no problem. Those who do not must grit their teeth and, surprisingly, forgive her. Her style may be annoying, but it eventually works to the extent that she shifts from her fantasy genre and even ticks the status of historian.
The Beast's Garden, by Kate Forsyth.
In The Beast's Garden she covers in great detail the rise of Adolf Hitler to the chancellery, the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi brutality with sufficient suspense to keep readers on their toes. She doesn't really need the reference to the Grimms' fairytale Beauty and the Beast: her story is fact mixed with fiction and stands up on its own, beginning with the preposterous idea of a perceived Jewish girl falling in love with a Nazi officer.
Ava was born of a Spanish mother and German father but her black hair and dark good looks make her a suspected Jew. Her pal Rupert is Jewish, born the same day as Ava, and they are inseparable. He is also homosexual, therefore a candidate for extermination under Hitler's new regime. Other characters in the mix include Ava's sister, Monika, a blonde Aryan beauty who works for the SS, and the Jewish Fiedler family, brutalised by the Brownshirts.
Early on Forsyth has Ava colliding with with Leo von Lowenstein, a handsome Nazi officer, in a dark tunnel. "His clasp tightened, holding her close to him ... he would not let her go." On page 68, they meet again. He kissed her: "It went through her like a leaping flame. 'I'm so madly in lust with you,' he murmured. 'I want you so much."' Ava, horrified at her feelings. runs away. He kisses her again 127 pages later: "Leo made a deep guttural noise in his throat ... his mouth devouring hers, Ava let herself be drowned. Engulfed." You get the drift.
Meanwhile, Jew bashing is in full flight, yellow stars issued, and it is here that Forsyth's research pays off. She has read a mountain of World War II biographies, memoirs, diaries, and watched countless documentaries to write The Beast's Garden.
So at the first mention of Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain's fascist leader, and Unity Mitford, the English aristocrat who fell in love with Hitler, we move from fictitious characters to real and the mood changes. Ditto with the Germans – Admiral Canaris, boss of the Abwehr spy agency, and Himmler, the head of the SS and chief of police, even Hitler – chatter. Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, sexually molests Ava. The author's characters mix and match with reality so comfortably that we learn what it was like in wartime Berlin and to be German on the receiving end of British bombing. Unspeakable. Forsyth describes these scenes with toe-curling detail and she's rather good at the ghastly stuff.
Rupert is captured writing his reactions to the cruelty on scraps of paper stuffed in his shoes. Monika marries an SS officer to save her skin and, yes, Ava marries Leo von Lowenstein, who turns out to be a nice guy and secretly plots to assassinate Hitler. Leo is arrested, charged with treason and is due to be hanged at dawn by piano wire, the most agonising death of all.
It is up to Ava, now starving and physically crushed on Berlin's bombed streets, to help the German resistance to find a way to rescue him. What she plans is mind-blowing, but can she pull off the impossible?
I won't spoil the ending except to say it is nail-biting. But first read Forsyth's afterword explaining why she took two years to write her tome: crisp and compelling prose, not a cliche in sight.