The Torture Garden     by Octave Mirbeau, Translated by A.C Bessie Original title: LE JARDIN DES SUPPLICES Original language: French Published by Juno Books Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback, 175 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.37 x 11.04 x 8.41 ISBN: 0965104265 List Price: $12.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.39 Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK List Price: £7.99 Not available for ordering

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The Torture Garden starts out as a critique of corrupt Western democracy but turns into a masterpiece of violent eroticism. In its first section, a group of educated men — moralists, poets, philosophers and doctors — discuss murder, deciding that it forms the very bedrock of our social institutions. One of them claims that women are the most murderous and cruel of all Earth’s creatures and, to prove this point, reads an account of a journey he once made to the far East. His story lands us in a Chinese garden in the company of a sensuous and depraved European woman with whom he is infatuated, and the few hours that the couple spend here form the bulk of the novel.


Among the garden’s beautiful beds of nusas, tamarisks and peonies, prisoners have their skin cut into strips while they’re skillfully kept alive, or are eaten into by rats, or slowly boiled in giant kettles, or shaken to pieces by the vibrations emanating from a huge bell. As elsewhere torture has at times been practised with great diligence in Chima and Mirbeau dwells on the ‘exquisite’, the ‘beautiful’ aspect of violence and pain in his prose, charging it with intensity. A random scan of adjectives throws up words like palpitating, pestilential, scorching, mutilated, bulging. The blood and flower-filled scenes are so intense that reading the book is almost physically unbearable — jolts surge down the spine, from a chemical reaction triggered by the mingling of repulsion and fascination, and one can end up like Mirbeau’s anti-heroine Clara, delirious and exhausted.


Anglo-Saxon readers may see The Torture Garden as pornographic, misogynistic or simply disgusting (it is all three). But it’s worth considering why: a vital difference between English and French fiction is that the latter has a tradition of extremity, of excess, running from Lautréamont and Sade to Céline and Bataille and this extremism sometimes gives a certain edge — and an ability to deal with the horrors of the century face on. As The Torture Garden’s narrator says: ‘What I saw today, and what I heard, exists and cries and howls beyond this garden, which is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth.’

‘And in the midst of this floral magic, there arose scaffolds, the apparatus of crucifixion, gibbets with violent decorations and black gallows, on whose tops there leered frightful demon masks; high gallows for simple strangulation, lower gibbets mechanically equipped for the tearing of flesh. On the shafts of these torture columns — as a diabolic refinement — pubescent calystegia, ipomoea from Daoura, lophospermum and colocynth spread their blossoms, and clematis and atragene. Birds piped their love-songs there’. p80