Kathryn Harrison, A Thousand Orange Trees. (Fourth Estate, 1995). Reviewed by Holly Davis.

Deep South v.3 n.1 (Autumn 1997)

A Thousand Orange Trees is Kathryn Harrison's third novel, in which she turns her attention to Seventeenth-Century Spain. The novel is concerned with the lives of two women, born on the same day, but from very different backgrounds. Francisca de Luarca is the daughter of a Castilian silk-grower, whereas Marie Louise is the niece of the Sun King, Louis XIV, but their lives and fates become eerily intertwined in Harrison's complex tale. Where Franciscaís illicit love-affair sees her doomed to the prisons of the Inquisition, Marie Louise's political marriage to the impotent Spanish King Carlos sees her forced into a different kind of imprisonment. Harrison's novel gives the effect of a rich tableaux; rather than telling the story chronologically, she flashes from past to present, from place to place, with the ease of an expert story-teller. A memory, a related image, a smell, or a contrast, serve as the vehicle for the narrative jump, either in the life of one of the women, or as a connection between the two. And so the novel has the effect of a beautifully woven tapestry - an apt metaphor for a novel in which the production and weaving of silk are at the heart.

Harrison is completely at ease with the historical material, evoking with frightening detail the world of the Spanish Inquisition, whose prisoners reside, almost literally, in the bowels of Madrid. The Spanish court, too, is described with precision and colour, and its formality and restraint contrast strikingly with the splendour and exuberance of the French Court. In many ways, Harrison's evocation makes the Spanish court seem more similar to the prisons of the Inquisition than a royal court, as Maria Luisa loses every freedom at her arrival in Spain. Everything is determined for her, from minor details such as the meals she must eat, to more personal affairs, such as the style of her hair, and how she makes love with her husband. Her entrapment within the royal court is not at all dissimilar to Franciscaís imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition.

Harrison's creation of the claustrophobic world of Madrid is balanced with her characters memories of their happy childhoods. Maria Luisa dreams of the court at Versailles, which is full of light and noise, and the fragrance of the thousand orange trees of the title, "exud[ing] perfume so sweet that it makes everyone drunk" (p. 236) these trees being symbolic of hope and freedom in the face of the confining circumstances of Madrid. Francisca, too, remembers the wide-opened landscapes of her youth, describing Castile as having, "A magic altitude, of precipice, a magic gulch, gully and chasm" (p. 25). In these excursions into childhood, the grandeur of Harrison's language is most evident, and we are mesmerised with the exquisite beauty of the womenís childhoods, so soon to be interrupted.

So if you do not like the idea of a novel containing, among other things, a beautiful, impulsive woman, a princess who becomes the queen of an impotent king, an illegitimate baby, a series of feigned miscarriages, witchcraft, torture, prisons, dwarfs, drugs, pilgrimages, poisoning, the freedom of the Spanish countryside, and the splendour of the Royal Court, at least read A Thousand Orange Trees for the richness of Harrison's language. She is like the de Luarca silkworms, and spins a tale that is strongly imagined, expertly controlled, and spell-bounding.