The Spanish Gardener
First edition (UK)
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| Author | A. J. Cronin |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher |
Gollancz (UK) Little, Brown (US) |
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Publication date
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1950 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 256 pp. (UK hardback edition) |
| ISBN | |
The Spanish Gardener is a 1950 novel by A. J. Cronin which tells the story of an American consul, Harrington Brande, who is posted to San Jorge on the Costa Brava, Spain with his young son Nicholas. The novel relates how Nicholas’s innocent love for his father is destroyed by the latter’s jealousy and vindictiveness when Nicholas forms a friendship with the young Spanish gardener, José Santero.
The novel was adapted for both film and television.
A restrained, precise man, Brande has an elevated sense of his own importance, believing his qualities have been overlooked in a series of postings around Europe which have failed to result in promotion. His other abiding resentment is the failure of his marriage to his wife Marion, who left him when his dispassionate and obsessively controlling nature overwhelmed her.
Brande’s paranoid need to be loved and respected are focused on his hobby, a manuscript on Malebranche, a French philosopher, and on his 9 year old son Nicholas. Nicholas is a delicate child who has been reduced to a state of invalidism by his father’s overprotective and restrictive regime.
At San Jorge, the Brandes take a villa for which a couple, Garcia and his wife Magdalena have been engaged to act as butler/chauffeur and cook/housekeeper. Nicholas takes an instinctive dislike to Garcia, fearing his dead fish eyes and his tendency to appear unannounced, but Brande sees the man’s obsequious servility as recognition of his own superior qualities. At Nicholas’s suggestion, a gardener, the 19 year old José, is hired to tend the neglected garden. José’s amiable and ingenuous nature, despite his poverty and the responsibility of providing for his family members, soon attract Nicholas’s curiosity and the pair strike up a friendship. Nicholas helps José in the garden and his health improves.
Garcia, to ingratiate himself with Brande and plant suspicion on José, informs Brande of Nicholas and José's friendship and, intensely jealous of Nicholas’s affection, Brande forbids the boy to speak to the gardener again. He has no justifiable cause to dismiss José, so he sets out to punish him and break his spirit by ordering him to build a rockery from boulders. Nicholas, however, realises that he only promised not to speak to José, and this does not preclude writing and exchanging secret notes with each other.
Brande then receives a letter summoning him to Madrid and informing him that his predecessor at San Jorge, who was promoted to First Consul, has suffered a stroke. Elated and assuming that he will be appointed to the vacant post, Brande hurries to Madrid.
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Wikipedia