The Butterfly Garden Book - Hutchison Date

Inara, the main heroine of the novel, is a victim of a maniac named Gardener rescued by the FBI, who for thirty years kidnapped young girls and placed them in his "collection of butterflies". 20, or even 25 live girls were called upon to decorate his huge garden, hidden under a glass hood somewhere in the United States, to please him sexually, and then become a kind of cicada in amber - a formalized corpse frozen in resin. The garden is finally found, the girls are saved, but the police need to sort out this long and complicated story and find out who is really the victim and who is the culprit.

The "Butterfly Garden" has absolutely the wrong presentation: our marketers bet on comparing the novel with the "Collector" by John Fowles, and as a result they got the wrong target audience of readers. Of course, given the motive of collecting, the images of butterflies, the presence of a maniac and a victim and their difficult relationship, this comparison suggests itself, but, in most cases, people who have read the Collector have read Fowles' "Magus", "Worm", or even "Wormholes", and perfectly understand that for him the form of a thriller was exactly that form.

But the content did not fit into the framework of the genre work in any way, numerous Shakespearean references turned this text into a postmodern game, which eventually became a classic of literature of the last century. "Butterfly Garden", of course, was not lying around in the sense, although Hutchison, of course, is trying to juggle his knowledge of the works of Edgar Poe and Dostoevsky, but it turns out something like the following: And then he pressed a red-hot piece of iron against her thigh. "But if there is no God, then everything is allowed," she thought.

This major blunder may well put an end to the commercial success of The Butterfly Garden, and hence the translation into Russian of Hutchison's next works, because people write negative reviews about the novel, and then, when fans of action-packed thrillers actually get involved, they will simply get a pile of negativity addressed to the book and decide to pass by, in the direction of Nesba or Hawkins Field, for example.

I personally will be sorry, because it is as a thriller that the novel is good: it is interesting to read it, sometimes creepy, sometimes disgusting, but all this is quite acceptable within the genre. I personally read a lot, if I had the opportunity, I would definitely have sat with the book for a couple of hours in a row (the novel is only 320 pages) and read it at a time, which, by the way, is the best option for a relationship with the Butterfly Garden: the fewer breaks you have in reading to think, the better the book will seem, because in thinking willy-nilly you begin to pick at its shortcomings (and there are many of them!), and from this all its magic gradually evaporates.

Well, now about the shortcomings, how can it be without them! The key is the unreality of everything that is happening: if in the same "Collector" or in Kirino's "Chronicles of Cruelty" I could believe that all this really happened, or at least could happen, then the "Butterfly Garden" for me went into the same category where there are films whose characters run for two hours with arterial bleeding and constantly shoot and, of course, fall without changing the clip in the gun.

Without touching on the psychology, motivation, and behavior of the heroes, I just don't believe that such a garden with a harem could exist and be serviced, not counting gardeners and other specialists, by just two people, one of whom doesn't even live there. Well, imagine at least 20 bedrooms that need to be washed every day, because, damn, there is a garden around, which means land. And it's not clear when a maniac earns money for the maintenance of this colossus with artificial caves and lakes, if he walks with his wife at lunch, and hangs out with girls in the evening.

Well, it's okay, a book is a book, I can make a number of assumptions (for example, a couple of robot vacuum cleaners and untold wealth inherited), if the relationship and behavior of the characters seem real. But even here a slip came out: the main heroine of the novel Inara/Maya is the embodiment of this now popular new type of literary heroine, when she herself is with quirks and at the same time "I can do everything, I can handle everything myself," but, damn, for several years of being "under the dome," she never even tried to run, never encroached on the maniac.

And, let me remind you, 20-25 girls live there at one time, who, of course, are still young and physically not very pumped, but still together they are able to overcome one old man, even without using knives, clubs and any other improvised materials (by the way, if this is a garden with trees, there are also branches at least!). And, it seems, she is all such a sociopath, abandoned by her parents and accustomed to relying only on herself, she is sarcastic with the FBI, but in the Garden she performs the functions of Mother Teresa.

Why all of a sudden? Another annoying moment is some kind of inhuman submissiveness of everyone else: girls, in order not to forget that the world outside the Garden exists at all, constantly draw/ sculpt something that reminds them of home, loved ones, etc., but at the same time, when a maniac says to each of them "So, Masha, you are now Roxalana", they obediently become these very Roxalans and in personal conversations do not ask anyone to address them with a familiar name associated with normal life.

Something from the category of an experiment with monkeys who were electrocuted when they tried to get out of the pen: there are no longer those monkeys who have ever even seen others being electrocuted, not that they themselves would be beaten, but still no one is trying to get out of the pen, fearing that there will be a bo-bo. It seems to me that when there is nothing to lose, people become more desperate, and here they sit quietly and wait for the hour of death, knowing exactly that it will come and when exactly.

In general, psychologically, the "Butterfly Garden" is a completely unconvincing thing, and although the heroine, taking the narrative into her own hands, constantly tries to explain what motivated whom, it does not fit well with the described personality type and, in general, with human behavior in certain situations.

There is also a strange love line in the novel, I don't want to say anything about it, so as not to destroy the intrigue, but I can't help but mention that its very presence is just some kind of cap. And the hero with whom she is connected - he is generally the most muddy and incomprehensible here: it seems that the brain is in place, not a psycho, unlike the Gardener and another friend, empathy is present, but, damn... Aah! In general, read it and find out.