CHILDREN'S BOOKS

A Garden's Delight

by John O'Connell

The Rose Round

by Meriol Trevor

Bethlehem Books * Ignatius Press

211 pp., $11.95.

1-800-757-6831

The Rose Round is a beautiful, sensitive novel of the human drama informed by a Christian vision of life. Written for "young adults," the book also engages the not-so-young adult reader. Meriol Trevor has crafted an exquisite story that gradually unfolds the mystery of the human heart in the lives of its characters who display a range of virtues and vices: resentment, compassion, cruelty, mercy, pride, and forgiveness. In a stunning way, the novel manifests the power of grace to overcome all human limitations and sinfulness.

Thirteen-year-old Matt Rendal comes to stay with Caro, his step-sister and guardian. Caro, is waiting for her fiancé to muster up the courage to inform his wealthy, disapproving father that he intends to marry a penniless woman. In the meantime, she has taken a position as a cook at the great, but decaying estate of Woodhall in Wyre Forest in western England. At Woodhall Matt discovers a ringed rose garden - the Rose Round - in the heart of a neglected walled garden, and in the center of the rose garden a broken fountain shooting up streams of water. It was there that Matt first met Alix, Madame Ayre's granddaughter, his introduction to the Ayre family.

The novel details Matt and Caro's growing involvement with the Ayres while informing the reader of the history of Woodhall and the Ayres. Madame Ayre is the imperious mistress of Woodhall. The death of Madame's daughter as a child and her favorite son in the war embittered Madame, and she turned her bitterness toward God and her surviving child Theo whom she had already rejected because of his congenitally deformed hand. The story relates how love, kindness, and magnanimity overcomes bitterness, selfishness and pusillanimity.

Like any good book for younger readers of The Rose Round it has a strong plot, but it is also rich in symbolism and possesses many fine contemplative passages. Here is an example:

"Then why is it our Lady who is here in the middle of the garden, Theo? Why not him?"

"Because this is our world," said Theo. "He chose to come into it through her. He is too great to fit into the ring of the world, this little pattern of our sun and our hearts, except by becoming her child, and so one of us. And yet if you look at it inside out you will see that all of this, the solar circle, the seasons of time, the fountain of life, the fourfold living signs of the soul, and the Lady herself who said yes to the will of love, are all in him. There are some people who only see everything in themselves, but don't be one of them. Our selves are only moons to his sun: in his light all things are revealed as they are."

The book makes a strong appeal to the reader's moral imagination. But the author is never heavy-handed or preachy, and she accomplishes her art with a sure-handed delicacy.

The reader learns that at the Woodhall estate there is an observatory called Betrand's Tower because it was built by Betrand Ayre in the 17th century. Betrand was a natural scientist and Catholic royalist, who eventually entered the monastery of La Trappe, France. Theo often took refuge in the tower as a child to escape his mother's rejection and his brother's cruelty. The Latin inscription on the tower reads: BENEDICTE LUX ET TENEBRAE DOMINO, "Light and shadow bless the Lord." Meriol Trevor, in her masterful novel, has woven the lights and shadows of life to bring forth a shining Christian work of art that testifies to the triumph of grace in the human heart.

© 1997 Inter Mirifica