In the Garden of Iden

August 19, 2010

Sleep just gets in the way of my reading. If I didn’t have to sleep I would’ve finished this book in a day. But sleep got the better of me and I had to reluctantly put the book down on Tuesday night and doze off. But I gleefully picked up where I left off the next day and devoured the rest of the book. Yeah, I think it’s going to be pretty obvious when I say that I pretty much liked this book.

Now the problem is, how does one go about describing it? The easy way would be to say that it’s a good mix of science fiction and historical fiction. But a description like that wouldn’t really attract me. So let’s see… perhaps a more attractive way would be to describe it as immortals sent back in time… to Elizabethan England!

Ok it really is more complex than that. Little Mendoza is rescued from Spanish Inquisitors by  the Company (called Dr Zeus, Inc) and recruited as one of their immortal agents (there’s a lot of surgery involved). Her job – to travel back in time to collect botanical specimens that have become extinct. And her first task is in 1553 England, in the garden of Sir Walter Iden, with two other operatives, Joseph, who poses as her father, and Nef, who plays her duenna. Iden’s secretary Nicholas is suspicious of these Spanish visitors, and Mendoza is more or less tasked to distract him, although one can easily guess what will happen with her and the tall secretary with the nice face.

The idea behind the Company is quite fascinating. It invents time travel (although one can only travel back in time) and  immortality, and discovers that recorded history cannot be changed, and the implications?: “You can’t loot the future, but you can loot the past.” This applies not just to monetary assets but also art and supposedly extinct species. And the orders from collectors, sentimentalists etc started coming in. But what of the immortals? They are taught that:

“no nation, creed or race was any better or worse than another; all were flawed, all were equally doomed to suffering, mostly because they couldn’t see that they were all alike. They did enjoy killing one another and frequently came up with ingenious excuses for doing so on a large scale – religious, economic theories, ethnic pride – but we couldn’t condemn them for it, as it was in their mortal natures and they were too stupid to know any better.

No, our job was to protect them from their own butchery, and (better still) to protect the other inhabitants of the Earth from the destruction wreaked by human nature.”

Our young and spunky narrator, Mendoza, is only 19 when she begins her first task but the rest of the series promises more from her. And will probably probe more into the issues of morality, human nature, immortality.

Baker is a great storyteller, and I breathlessly turned page after page, wanting to read more. Her Elizabethan England is vividly described, using rather clever methods (involving radio broadcasts from operatives on scene, for example), and the way the operatives blend their futuristic lives and technology into the 16th century is quite fascinating. The first thing I did after finishing the book was to request book 2 of The Company series, Sky Coyote . Can’t wait!

Written by olduvai Posted in Reading, review, SciFi Tagged with Kage Baker