Stopping to Smell the Flowers

THE SAVAGE GARDEN

By Mark Mills

Putnam. 324 pp. $24.95

Mark Mills's second novel, "The Savage Garden," tells of a Cambridge student, Adam Strickland, who in 1958 journeys to the Villa Docci, near Florence, to write a scholarly paper on its celebrated 16th-century memorial garden. He hasn't been there long, sweltering in the Tuscan summer, when he becomes enmeshed not only in romance but also in two mysteries long buried in the past. In Mills's hands this becomes a grandly written literary thriller that I found alternately fascinating and frustrating. It isn't a novel for everyone, but if you love Italy and its landscapes, gardens, literature and art, all lavishly described, it might be one for you.

Upon his arrival at the villa, Adam meets its mistress, Signora Docci, a 70-something aristocrat with many secrets. He also meets her surviving son, Maurizio, and is told that her other son, Emilio, was killed by the Germans 14 years earlier, during World War II. Whether that is truly how Emilio died is one of the questions that come to obsess the young man. The other, more distant mystery is embedded in the statues, fountains, groves and grotto of the garden itself, which was built by Federico Docci as a memorial to his young wife, who died in 1548. Adam has not been in the garden long before he decides there is "something not quite right about the place."

Mills describes this haunted garden in loving detail. This, for example: "Having laid out this new kingdom, Federico had then dedicated it to Flora, goddess of flowers, and populated it with the characters from ancient mythology over whom she held sway: Hyacinth, Narcissus and Adonis. All had died tragically, and all lived on in the flowers that burst from the earth where their blood had spilled -- the same flowers that still enameled the ground in their respective areas of the garden every springtime." In time, by studying the garden's statues and Latin inscriptions, and by deciphering clues hidden in Dante's "Inferno," Adam decides that the garden in fact commemorates a terrible crime four centuries old.

The present-day mystery is more urgent. Did German soldiers kill Emilio, or did his brother kill him? Happily, as Adam struggles with these questions, he enters into a flirtation with Antonella, Signora Docci's lovely granddaughter. The romance is nicely sketched, as is Adam's roguish brother, Harry, who turns up to borrow money and then surprises us by being quite an interesting character. Signora Docci remains a charming enigma. Throughout, Mills's writing is filled with pleasant surprises. During a storm, "The treetops swayed like drunken lovers on a dance floor." A work of art is not a masterpiece, "but it was distinctive, an unsettling blend of innocence and intensity -- like the gaze of a child staring at you from the rear window of the car in front." Mills also does an admirable job of suggesting the physical and cultural landscape of what is, after all, one of the most beautiful and civilized corners of this planet.

With so much to admire, why do I call the novel frustrating? First, the opening sections move much too slowly. Each description of a statue or a landscape or a painting is lovely, but there are too many of them. If I hadn't been reviewing the book, I'm not sure I would have kept reading, and that would have been a pity, because in time the story becomes engrossing. My other objection is that much of Mills's plot is simply far-fetched. Adam and Harry make brief mention of Sherlock Holmes, which struck me as fitting: Too many connections in "The Savage Garden" are, like those in the Holmes stories, more clever than plausible. For example, Adam looks at an old picture of two brothers, and on the basis of their earlobes deduces that they don't have the same father; then, on the basis of another old photograph he puzzles out who the mystery father is. That's pure Holmes, and it's too easy for as ambitious a novel as this.

The ability to write elegant prose is like being blessed with a pretty face: It helps you get away with a lot. Many readers are going to ignore the holes in Mills's plot because his prose carries you along so smoothly you hardly notice them. People look for different things in novels. A friend tells me that she adored Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" for its writing and didn't care if precious little happened in its four lush volumes. To each her own, but my focus tends to be on plot; fine writing is a treat, but it's the icing, not the cake. Still, on balance, "The Savage Garden" is an impressive performance by a young British screenwriter whose first novel, "Amagansett," was much admired three years ago.