What do you think?
Rate this book
The Fungus Garden
The Fungus Garden is an engrossing tale, both adventure and allegory, fantasy and social commentary, about an individual who must rebel - whether against the eccentric dreams of a termite king; a mechanical world of psychologists, android police, and claustrophobic tortures; or the revolutionaries who seek to overthrow the ruling order. The Fungus Garden offers an imaginative, compelling, and disturbing journey into the world of future possibilities.
- GenresScience Fiction
128 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1988
17 people want to read
About the author
Brian Brett
17 books13 followersBrian Brett, former chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and a journalist for four decades, is best known as a poet, memoir writer, and fictionist. He is the author of twelve books including the poetry collection, “The Colour Of Bones In A Stream,” and the novel, “Coyote: A Mystery.” His memoir, “Uproar’s Your Only Music,” was a Globe and Mail’s Book Of The Year selection by Ronald Wright: “The most exciting Canadian book I’ve read all year. ” His best-seller, “Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life,” won numerous prizes, including the Writers’ Trust annual award for best Canadian non-fiction book. His new poems: “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” won the CBC poetry prize in 2011. A collection of poems and prose poems about an endangered watershed in the near-arctic, “The Wind River Variations” has just been released. He is currently completing the third of a trilogy of memoirs, “Tuco And The Scattershot World: A Life With Birds.”
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2012
Review from 1989:
i have argued elsewhere that one of the strengths of Canadian sf is that it is less isolated from the mainstream than its American counterpart, and consequently that Canada's literary greats often contribute to the genre. It must be admitted, however, that this does not always work to our advantage. Blundering into a genre they don't understand, and ignorant of its long traditions, some mainstream authors clumsily reinvent the clichés the rest of us have bannished to our better-fogotten pasts.
Unfortunately, Brian Brett's The Fungus Garden is one such example. Like innumerable mainstream writers before him, Brett has been seduced by the painfully obvious political allegory of ant society to produce yet another heavy-handed social commentary. The plot concerns a rebellious youth (cliché #1) who escapes an oppressive robot-controlled society (cliché #2) by running through some caves with luminous slime (he doesn't actually say "radioactive", but I think we can still count this as cliché #3) which causes him to become the incredible shrinking man (cliché #4) where upon he is captured by termites (cliché #5) and through the application of termite hormones, is himself turned into an insect (a concept too dumb to be cliché). And, like the worst episode of Dallas, the whole thing turns out to have been a dream (cliché #6). Needless to say, one's suspension of disbelief quickly collapses under this weight of compounded cliché and ludicrous psuedo-science.
At a literal level, the novel does provide a glimpse of the workings of a termite colony, but a National Geographic article would serve this purpose better and without having to grant the author so much poetic license. Frederik Grove's Consider Her Ways, written nearly 60 years ago, was better researched and more thoughtfully extrapolated.
At a metaphoric level, the allegory is simplistic and naive. Termites, robots, and the rebel's Central Committee are clichés precisely because they are the too-easily identified bogeymen thrown up by capitalist ideologues to distract us from the real dehumanizing forces in society. By focusing on such strawmen, Brett not only reveals his complete lack of imagination and originality, but also his lack of any true social insight.
To pile on yet another cliché -- to add insult to injury -- Brett's only response to these forces of oppression is to have his hero build a guitar and sing protest songs. By individualizing rebellion and channeling it into harmless outlets like rock'n'roll (rather than, say, fermenting constructive mass action) Brett is ultimately serving the very conservative forces he believes himself to be condemning.
Allegory has a long and honourable tradition in sf, and much of literary merit in our genre derives from the allegorical parallels drawn between extrapolated worlds and various contemporary issues. Here, however, the allegory has been allowed to dominate the story to the exclusion of a plausible narrative, and given the essentially shallow political analysis underlying the alegory, it quickly degenerates into unfocused whining. One need only contrast The Fungus Garden with the effective use of allegory in such books as Negovan Rajic's The Mole Men to realize just how badly Brett has overreached himself.
Nor does the book succeed stylistically. Brett's background as a poet is clearly evident in his preoccupation with imagery at the expense of plot, characterization, dialog, and the other elements of good novel writing. The style is so ponderous that it is unlikely that even the most pretentious English prof could find anything good to say about it.
I am at a loss to explain how such a weak book could get past the usually sensible editorial board at Thistledown Press.
[Reviewed by Robert Runté, reprinted from NCF 1989]
i have argued elsewhere that one of the strengths of Canadian sf is that it is less isolated from the mainstream than its American counterpart, and consequently that Canada's literary greats often contribute to the genre. It must be admitted, however, that this does not always work to our advantage. Blundering into a genre they don't understand, and ignorant of its long traditions, some mainstream authors clumsily reinvent the clichés the rest of us have bannished to our better-fogotten pasts.
Unfortunately, Brian Brett's The Fungus Garden is one such example. Like innumerable mainstream writers before him, Brett has been seduced by the painfully obvious political allegory of ant society to produce yet another heavy-handed social commentary. The plot concerns a rebellious youth (cliché #1) who escapes an oppressive robot-controlled society (cliché #2) by running through some caves with luminous slime (he doesn't actually say "radioactive", but I think we can still count this as cliché #3) which causes him to become the incredible shrinking man (cliché #4) where upon he is captured by termites (cliché #5) and through the application of termite hormones, is himself turned into an insect (a concept too dumb to be cliché). And, like the worst episode of Dallas, the whole thing turns out to have been a dream (cliché #6). Needless to say, one's suspension of disbelief quickly collapses under this weight of compounded cliché and ludicrous psuedo-science.
At a literal level, the novel does provide a glimpse of the workings of a termite colony, but a National Geographic article would serve this purpose better and without having to grant the author so much poetic license. Frederik Grove's Consider Her Ways, written nearly 60 years ago, was better researched and more thoughtfully extrapolated.
At a metaphoric level, the allegory is simplistic and naive. Termites, robots, and the rebel's Central Committee are clichés precisely because they are the too-easily identified bogeymen thrown up by capitalist ideologues to distract us from the real dehumanizing forces in society. By focusing on such strawmen, Brett not only reveals his complete lack of imagination and originality, but also his lack of any true social insight.
To pile on yet another cliché -- to add insult to injury -- Brett's only response to these forces of oppression is to have his hero build a guitar and sing protest songs. By individualizing rebellion and channeling it into harmless outlets like rock'n'roll (rather than, say, fermenting constructive mass action) Brett is ultimately serving the very conservative forces he believes himself to be condemning.
Allegory has a long and honourable tradition in sf, and much of literary merit in our genre derives from the allegorical parallels drawn between extrapolated worlds and various contemporary issues. Here, however, the allegory has been allowed to dominate the story to the exclusion of a plausible narrative, and given the essentially shallow political analysis underlying the alegory, it quickly degenerates into unfocused whining. One need only contrast The Fungus Garden with the effective use of allegory in such books as Negovan Rajic's The Mole Men to realize just how badly Brett has overreached himself.
Nor does the book succeed stylistically. Brett's background as a poet is clearly evident in his preoccupation with imagery at the expense of plot, characterization, dialog, and the other elements of good novel writing. The style is so ponderous that it is unlikely that even the most pretentious English prof could find anything good to say about it.
I am at a loss to explain how such a weak book could get past the usually sensible editorial board at Thistledown Press.
[Reviewed by Robert Runté, reprinted from NCF 1989]
November 6, 2022
Read it in highschool. It taught me a valuable lesson about individualism, politics, I just wanna read it again lol
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews