In the Walled Gardens

This is a portrayal of the growing tensions within Iranian society in the years before the Revolution, told through the contrasting stories of an upper-class woman, gradually losing her innocence about the world she is living in, and a man who had been the son of her father's bailiff.

The two were childhood sweethearts, before they were old enough to realise that they could never be meant for each other. But the romance between them when they meet as adults is not really developed in any detail. Instead, the flashbacks to their childhood display a nostalgia for the innocent, feudal world where people knew their place and fulfilled their obligations, before Western influence and the arrogant behaviour of nouveaux riches created the show more social tensions which tore that world apart.

I found this a little hard going - while some of the descriptions were vivid and evocative, and there was a lot of interesting information, it felt like there was too much undigested research going into the story. For example, I found the ins and outs of the various underground political activists a little confusing. I admit that I didn't do myself any favours by putting the book down for a couple of months - but there was too much telling and explanation rather than bringing it out through the story. I also found that the two voices (the chapters are alternately narrated by the two main characters) sounded exactly the same - they both liked long lists and had a tendency to analyse other characters in a couple of sentences after they had been introduced into the narrative, which got annoying once I'd noticed it. show less

An interesting look at two perspectives of Iran just before the revolution, the rich elite and the idealistic revolutionaries. The portrait painted of the rich elite is particularly fascinating.