Mendoza in Hollywood
And so it’s come to Book Three of Kage Baker’s The Company series (see the full list here). In Book Two, Sky Coyote, I watched the world (well at least California) unfold through the eyes of Joseph, the veteran. And now it’s back to Mendoza, the ‘young’ (relatively speaking of course, since they are immortals), headstrong operative who specialises in collecting extinct and unique plants. This time she’s in Hollywood, or at least what will eventually become Hollywood. The Hollywood that Mendoza finds herself in is currently an expanse of wilderness, and she and the other operatives (Facilitator Porfirio, Anthropologist Oscar, Zoologist Einar, Ornithologist Juan Bautista, and the Anthropologist Imarte) live at a stagecoach inn in the Cahuenga Pass which is first plagued by non-stop rain and then by drought.
Life in the pass is comfortable enough, except for the never changing daily rations of steak and frijoles. It’s not particularly exciting though, except for the occasional bandits who shoot at them. The operatives pass their time watching old movies (there is one particularly long part on D. W. Griffin’s movie Intolerance, more significant perhaps, if I had actually some kind of inkling about this film). Juan Bautista adopts birds, Imarte enjoys her disguise as the inn’s woman of “easy virtue”, Oscar is determined to sell a pie safe to a local, Einar is a huge film buff. And Mendoza, well, she has dreams, bad dreams which feature Nicholas Harpole, the mortal man she loved in England on her first ever assignment.
However, as the drought continues, Mendoza finds herself with little to do as there are few, if any, plants around. That is, until British agent Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax arrives at the inn. He’s a spitting image of Nicholas Harpole and Mendoza, smitten and with nothing else to do, helps him in his task of trying to ensure British rule in the Americas.
So yeah, we’re kinda back to Book One again, where Mendoza has fallen headfirst and can’t see reason to do otherwise but help Edward. I’ll just leave it at that.
Baker really builds the plot rather slowly in this book. We don’t actually get to Edward until the last… third or so of the book. But the other operatives at the inn make for rather entertaining and unique characters, more so than in the other books, which tended to focus on Mendoza and Joseph. Baker continues to leave bits and pieces of clues about The Company for the reader (like, what exactly is Chrome?) but the operatives are for me the key interest of this series, and I’m wondering if the focus will be back on Joseph the next book around. I’m looking forward to seeing what time and what country Baker will take the reader in the next book. It is called The Graveyard Game, so I am quite curious.
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