The nurseryman Lewis Kennedy of Hammersmith built American Gardens at several estates in the Home Counties

The nurseryman Lewis Kennedy of Hammersmith built American Gardens at several estates in the Home Counties. At Fonthill Abbey, his vast and killingly expensive estate in Wiltshire, the eccentric William Beckford made what he called an American Plantation above the lake. It featured a large collection of flowering American trees and shrubs such as magnolias, robinias, liquidambars, azaleas and rhododendrons.Though at first they were not very interesting - mostly unexciting shades of pink or mauve - rhododendrons were destined to become the stars and the nemesis of the American Garden. Peter Collinson had introduced the first American variety in 1736, the Carolina rosebay (R maximum), planting it in his garden in Peckham, and more followed. Somewhere around the 1760s or 1770s R ponticum - not from America, but from the Black Sea coast of Turkey - opened its gross purple blooms in England for the first time. His marriage is stale and becoming violent; his young son is miserable and often absent; his libido is, he often says, like a monkey scratching itself on a stump. As she tells a journalist in bed, having lunched and "cabbed at speed back to her flat'' for sex in a manner which Hughes thinks is typical of media people but which is more stereotypical, "It's not a book It's a ravening wolf.

It chases you through the dark forests of yourself.'' This is not intended as a humorous parody of PR talk. Hughes repeats and embellishes the wolf image in his own voice elsewhere in the text. To some extent he gets away with it, and much more besides, by maintaining an eloquent flow of language, but there is still a certain clumsiness in expressing the concept of untamed truth by recourse to a conventional fallacy. Even starving wolves are reluctant to attack humans and it is hard to find a single recorded case of it.On the subject of critics and their niggling points, Hughes explains how, being a work of transcendent genius, the imaginary book inevitably gets a bad press "A review or two sluggishly appeared. They displayed a bitterly judicial tact, as though edging customers away from a product that might trouble them.'' This contrasts nicely with the glowing notices for Hughes's best-known work, The Pork Butcher, quoted on the back of the real book's dust jacket, but again no humour is intended.He then pictures the launch party in Covent Garden, attended by people who hold Oxford professorships and jobs in the Cabinet, "positions I might easily have filled'' (Oh might you?), as well as by those "others I so despised'', the gilded dross of literary London, everyone grabbing their free copy and "intending to read it as soon as they came home from the opera or finished a session with a girl.''When the public get hold of the book, many pack in their jobs or commit suicide, unable to bear the revelation of how trivial their existence is.

A sense of enlightenment does not imply any actual discovery: when we wake feeling euphoric and inspired, it does not mean the brilliant idea we've had in a dream will prove to be other than twaddle.Hughes likens the imaginary book to the improvised music he plays on church organs, a fair enough example of "an idea that can't be put into words.'' He does, however, give a few paraphrases of the book's mysterious message. It is against consumerism and the keeping up of "needless appearances.'' It rejects blind chance in favour of people "unconsciously choosing their own destinies'', a standard reactionary view.But what is it all about? "Looking back,'' says Hughes , "I have really no idea.'' Perhaps it's about wondering what it's all about, a state often brought on by illness and advancing age. The keenness with which the transient pleasures of summer are evoked, in the basic narrative, suggests as much.. People who write the blurbs for book jackets have their own agenda: we take their effusions with a pinch of salt. Yet a pinch is far too little to savour the blurb-writer's description of this novel. Hughes never admits that he could not produce such a potent masterpiece for real; he says he chooses not to: "Writing it down might reduce it.''The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, of course, but we only have Lao-Tzu's word that the eternal Tao amounts to anything. Next, write a book about it, expletives, dirty tricks, furtive copulations and all, as a roman-a-clef account of a young Southern Governor's quest for the Presidency.