Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

The book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was written by John Berendt and was

388 pages long. This was a non-fiction story of the beautiful town of Savannah, Georgia. John

Berendt was a reporter who lived in New York and one night while dinning out he realized that

one plate of food cost him the same amount of money that it would to fly to Savannah. So he did

and he found himself in love with the city and stayed. It is a spellbinding story peopled by a

gallery of remarkable characters: a fading belle who packs a pistol in her décolletage; a

charming, piano-playing con man who moves like a hermit crab from one empty showplace

house to the next, accompanied by his high-living entourage and pursued closely by his

creditors; a moneyed dowager who conducts business from a cruising Mercedes limousine; a

sour alcoholic inventor who claims to own a vial of poison so powerful that it could kill off the

entire city; a voodoo priestess in purple shades; and a foul-mouthed black drag queen who

passes so convincingly for a woman that she is able to extort abortion money from the parents of

her white boyfriend. With these and other people from savannah, Berendt reviles his alliances

and enemies in the town where everybody knows everybody else.

The exciting colorful town of Savannah is said to be the main character in this Novel, but

the main character was actually John Berendt, he was the narrator and main character . He was a

reporter from New York who made savannah and the people in Savannah his interest, his home,

and his life. He learned all about this secluded city through observation, meetings, and gossip.

He was an intelligent man who always knew where to be at the right time. There was this one

scene in the book where he was having an interview with Jim Williams when Danny Hansford

walked in, in a tirade, with a shirt on that said F-U on it. Well earlier that day his other friend

Joe Oldem had been talking about this strange man who woke up in his bed with that same thing

printed on his shirt. John was in the right place at the right time to put two and two together. Jim

Williams was the other major character in this book, he was an antique dealer who owned one of

the nicest homes in Savannah. He was a major ...

... middle of paper ...

...

job at it. The strongest features of the book was the way he described the people and the city as

being one, The weakest part of the book was that the actually story of the murder didn’t start

until the second part of the book. If I was the author I would probably incorporate more of the

murder story line into the first part of the book and introduce the character’s throughout the

whole book not just the first part ( the book was separated into a part 1 and part 2).

The ending of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was very satisfactory, Jim was

found not guilty of Danny Hansfords’s death. Jim threw his first Christmas party of the year for

the first time in 8 years, where he found himself remaking the guest list. Then at the very end he

died, I believe that it was ideal for him to die, it was uncanny though that he died in the

same place that he would of died 8 years ago if Danny had shot and killed him like he intended

too. After Jim’s death Savannah was still the same. It was growing inward away from the real

world, living in its own. The book starts with the town and ends with the town and I found that to

be very satisfactory.