ABSTRACT
A favourite book of the author written by Vikram Seth is The Humble Administrator’s Garden. He is imitating a Chinese analogue. The book has a China part, an India part and a California part named after the wutong, neem and live oak trees, respectively. The administrator here is his mother, Justice Leila Seth. The Golden Gate remains Seth’s longest work in verse. It is also the book that first got him noticed as a poet and established his reputation as a technically sound versifier. This chapter discusses the book’s novelistic features and considers it as a species of narrative verse, so as to include in the scheme both its status as a poem and as a novel. The book was first published in 1986 by Random House. Upon publication, The Golden Gate was extremely well-received by critics, reviewers and the reading public.
