Author: Michael Springer
Publisher: Echo Books
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
The Flower Bed is an epic story of one man’s life. It spans more than 60 years from 1971 when Louis O’Brien turned 10 in the harsh environment of the Midtown West area of New York City until, as Louis Montgomery, he is living on a substantial property in Lincolnshire, England.
For a book that is focussed very much on the tribulations of one person, The Flower Bed, through telling Louis’s personal story, manages, also, to track and reference many events of the times spanned by Louis’s life.
The company for which Louis works for much of his adult life is BMI which looks, in its emerging phase, a lot like IBM as it transforms from a world of adding machines and typewriters to the brave new world of super computing. And an event happens in New York in September 2001 which leads to the destruction of a building and the loss of many lives but which does not involve the intervention of aeroplanes.
Louis’s early life in New York was particularly inauspicious. He lived with his father, Joseph, who was a low level organised criminal boss who was viciously cruel both in his work and in his treatment of Louis. He also lived with Aunt Mary who was not Louis’s aunt but was Joseph’s partner in a manner of speaking and shared Joseph’s proclivities for alcohol and sordid sexual activity not necessarily restricted to two people.
Louis had two faintly bright spots in his life. One was Mrs Fitzgerald, the across the corridor neighbour who treated Louis with kindness and fed him at night which was important because neither Joseph nor Mary were concerned for any aspect of Louis’s welfare. All too soon, Mrs Fitzgerald was taken from Louis’s life and this world.
The second was the local public school which Louis attended and where he excelled academically. His intelligence and willingness to learn were noticed by Louis’s teachers and there was talk and hope that scholarships to higher education might provide Louis a pathway out of the predicament that life otherwise offered.
That hope was short lived. Louis had been unmercifully bullied by a particular individual and his hangers on resulting in Louis being ambushed and badly beaten a number of times. On the one occasion that Louis decided that he had to fight back, his talent as a fighter proved too much and his impromptu methods went too far and he found himself on assault charges in the local juvenile court. No young man with a conviction could ever hope to win a scholarship such that that pathway was, forever, lost.
Joseph insisted, when Louis was 12 years old, that Louis spent time working at the Shed which was a workplace used for furthering the purposes of organised crime. Louis ran messages and delivered and received parcels but that was insufficient for his father. Louis was required to commit arson and stand cockatoo when murders were being committed. He witnessed violent acts that would have traumatised hardy individuals of a much less tender age.
When Louis was 17 and all hope had evaporated, a maternal uncle, Phillip, stepped from the shadows. Phillip informed Louis of the true identity of his mother and her fate. Phillip informed Louis of other important aspects of his heritage and even of an inheritance from his mother’s family.
Thanks to Phillip and the inheritance but, equally, at great cost to Phillip, Louis found himself with a new identity on a merchant ship working his way to Sydney, Australia. The new identity included a high performing, albeit, fake graduation certificate from a prestigious private American high school.
So, Louis escaped the life of poverty, cruelty and crime that had been foisted upon him. He escaped the clutches of his cruel and criminal father. When he arrived in Sydney, he was able to achieve entry into the business school of Sydney University. Louis had been given a fresh start that few people who experience circumstances of the kind he had endured ever receive.
Louis, through his widowed landlady, Mrs Smith, even found another kind and elderly lady who loved and looked out for him.
From his fresh start, Louis Montgomery achieved academic acclaim. He found good employment in the business world and he achieved great worldly success.
Socially, Louis found confidence in speaking to women such that his amatory success outnumbered the proverbial hot dinners for much of his university career. And, notwithstanding the crassness that excessive popularity can bring, Louis had the insight to identify the one woman he had met whom Louis’s heart recognised was the one for him.
Louis received his fresh start and he made full use of it. But he carried mental scars from the traumas of his early life and this led to flaws in his personality which would cause him and others much pain among those worldly successes.
The flower bed which gives its name to the book appears in the very first chapter of The Flower Bed and is visited by an older man and a five year old child who are mysteriously not identified. The reader wonders for much of the book where that flower bed fits into the whole narrative and the question is not fully answered until the very last chapter when the narrative returns to the side of the garden and the man and the girl are identified and reveal the thoughts in their hearts.
The Flower Bed is a gripping narrative and the reader is, throughout, keen to find out about the latest adventures that life has in store for Louis and those around him. Both the trajectory of the novel and the style of story telling reminded this reviewer a little of a Thomas Hardy novel. In The Flower Bed, the omniscient narrator is very much in control and foreshadows events to come and takes the reader into the inner workings of the characters’ hearts and minds. In style, The Flower Bed is unlike many modern novels in which enigmatic slices of action are revealed and the reader learns to put the greater picture into place, themselves.
The omniscient narrator also assures us that Louis is a sympathetic character for whom we should feel empathy and concern. I did feel that empathy and concern although the more rational aspects of my personality, at times, wondered whether Louis was deserving thereof as his lack of insight into his flaws and unwillingness to address them brought more chaos to his world.
The Flower Bed is not a short work at just over 400 pages. It is, however, an enjoyable and compelling read and, for those of us who have lived much of the last six decades or so, its tracking of life and technology and the interaction between the two will bring out a degree of nostalgia.
