The Rain Tree by Mirabel Osler is a dense and poetic memoir, weaving backwards and forwards through the lives of the author and those surrounding her – her husband and three children, and her mother Phyllis and her mother’s best friend Stella Bowen, the famed Australian painter.

The text also encompasses Mirabel’s love and life with her late husband Michael, the sprawling garden they built and learnt about together, their three children, and living in exotic locations like Corfu and Thailand in the late 50s and 60s. Moreover, it is a story of ageing, of friendships, and of facing up to the conundrums of dying.

Phyllis met Stella when she moved to a hostel in London during the First World War, and it was there they also met the writer Ford Madox Ford, grandson of painter Ford Madox Brown. Ford subsequently introduced them to Ezra Pound, and this was their introduction to the world of literature and arts. Names such as Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot float through their lives. Pieced together through Mirabel’s memories and her mother’s letters, the sometimes disconcerting jumps through time and space parallel the author’s patchwork life.

But it is the travelogue that captured me. The years spent in Thailand is rich and heavy with humidity and the fragrance of curries and jasmine; of life with bamboo and verandahs, encounters with floods and cholera, and the loss of her sister.

They moved to Corfu just prior to the military coup in 1967. This shaky start together with the island’s isolation was for Mirabel mingled with enjoyment of the food, friends, and boating excursions. Life is filled with embroidered white cotton, olives, retsina and mandarin trees. Constant streams of ‘friends of friends’ visit from the continent. Most poignant is the story of the suicide of a dear friend, who leaped into the sea –
‘As a petal turning in water, moved by the current, with waterlogging lungs, she floats through luminous blue darkening to ultramarine, her limbs trailing ribbons of phosphorescence until she lies rocking to the pulse of the ocean.’

The Oslers return to England. Life goes on until Michael is diagnosed with terminal illness. Mirabel’s subsequent ponderings on the transience of life as explained through the loss of her husband and their garden is both profound and thought provoking.

Intriguing and beautiful, The Rain Tree is a wonderful journey, and reveals a life well-lived.

 

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London. ISBN 978 1 4088 1548 9