The Garden of Evening Mists - Eng, Tan Twan, oh and Terms of Enlistment - Marco Kloos

So the Garden continues along its slow path, but less garden and more relationship, so the juxtaposition of formality and beauty against politics and war is muddied by the silt of the protagonist's relationships. It's as if we are dipping into the mundane - well people have to live - even characters in books. Where the book felt like a spacious canvas, on which well spaced pebbles and plants were lining up for the perfect formal garden, now we are stuck in one of the service paths, overgrown with all sorts of plants that shouldn't really be there, if we want to keep our beauty intact.

And then there's Terms of Enlistment - free again through Kindle Unlimited, in the sub-genre Military Sci-fi, and firmly entrenched in every single cliche of genre - but nonetheless readable for that. It is Starship Troopers written all over again - Heinlein perfected the genre even as he started it (well he may not have started it but he was the first one that I read). I am a sucker for these - the escape into the platoon, the training and the drill sergeants where most people drop out - everything the same even down to the female recruits being the ones who get to be the pilots (so much less messy than being a marine don't you think). I suppose I'll finish it, but I have a feeling that it ain't going anywhere that I haven't been before.

The Garden of Evening Mists - Eng, Tan Twan

One of the first books I saw for my trial subscription on Kindle Unlimited. I had clocked it in a Guardian review and put it on the back burner - I can't buy every book I read about. But, here, for free - absolutely. But it is far better than that. So far so generic - so to say something meaningful about it.  The descriptions ( fuck this is going to sound like a school essay) of the garden are so wonderfully peaceful and well formed. They contrast with the horror that is laid on in spades of the wars and politics that surround the concept and making of the peaceful garden. The cruelty of the Japanese internment in Malaysia, the Malaya "Emergency" - a war by any other name but so called so that the planters could still claim on their insurance (apparently - source Wikipedia), the Boer Wars and the British savageries there - don't forget the Brits invented the concentration camp. There is a beautiful moment where the protagonist dips her head to take some water from a stone basin, and in the act of doing so is able to see the mountains framed by a gap in the hedge only visible if you dip your head to take the water. It is a mimicry or copy ( wrong words) of a famous garden in Japan where, against all the advice a master gardener cut off the view of the mountains with a hedge  as it  was too precious to be seen without effort and humility.