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Nov. 9th, 2021 07:57 pmLast week I reread Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden, the first book in her Company series which contains simultaneously some of the highest highs (this book, among others) and lowest lows (unfortunately, the vast majority of the thrilling series finale) that I personally have ever encountered in fiction.
This is of course a biased perspective, because In The Garden of Iden has been incredibly close to my heart since the first time I read it at the extremely formative age of thirteen, and I was fully prepared to re-encounter it with my heart hardened by later experiences and discover it was not all that. Unfortunately! this was not the case! My heart is not hardened and I still love this book with every piece of it!
In the Garden of Iden is the tragedy of Mendoza, an early modern teenage cyborg botanist who was taken from the dungeons of the Inquisition as a child by the Company around which the series centers.
The Company is a dystopian (so, deeply realistic, lol) megacorporation that has invented both time travel and immortality, and, predictably, uses this technology to seed history with unpaid immortal cyborg operatives who are sold a grand mission of 'preserving culture' for a vague but glorious future but obviously of course in fact are working towards the grand mission of increasing the Company's profits. All the cyborgs have access to a broad sense of future chronology up through a certain date (and, as a perk, all its greatest film, literature, and trashy TV), but are still stuck living through history in real time and don't actually know many of the details and certainly not anything related to their own futures -- a brilliant choice, IMO! The contrast between the casual-ironic inner voice of someone raised on twentieth century pop culture and the lived experience and concerns of someone fully embedded in the past, Very Much Another Country, allows Kage Baker to make some very good jokes and also really just slide the knife in when she wants to, because, as aforementioned, this book is a tragedy.
Anyway, it's the reign of Mary Tudor and Mendoza is on her first assignment in a small British country estate that happens to have a garden which contains a rare species of shrub, which is deeply thrilling to Mendoza the botanist and to nobody else in the team of immortals who have accompanied her on this journey for facilitation and cover.
Unfortunately, Mendoza then meets dreamy mortal Nicholas Harpole -- a Protestant polyglot proto-martyr with a slant towards Utopian heresy and deep suspicions about Mendoza's fake-Catholic fake-Spanish fake-family -- and falls head over heels in love with him over multilingual theological debates in a garden, as teenagers are wont to do. Nicholas wants to save Mendoza's soul! Mendoza, a cyborg atheist who is also nineteen, is pretty sure that this is impossible but finds it so romantic that he wants to try! This is not at all a recipe for disaster!
And, on the other end, there's Joseph, Mendoza's fake father twice over. Joseph is the perfect Company man, a cyborg who has recruited hundreds of kids over his thousands of years of operation; it's just chance that he happened to get assigned to play Mendoza's father not ten years after pulling her out of the Inquisition, but it is going to ruin his immortal life, it turns out. Joseph would be absolutely disgusted if anyone described him as trying to save Mendoza's soul, but he is trying to save her future, the only future he thinks she can have: a perfect Company operative, like him, because they're immortal, and the Company owns them, and you have to find satisfaction in your labor, because what else is there? As I have said before, I love morally ambiguous mentors very much, and I have a tremendous amount of feelings about Joseph's unrequited paternal feelings. Rough out there for a bad cyborg dad who's trying his best, which is very bad!
There are a few other elements in play to make the tragedy wheels turn -- Nefer, cyborg livestock expert and Mendoza's immortal fake duenna, who's got a few bad decisions of her own; Sir Walter, Nicholas' boss and the owner of the garden, a perfectly nice Tudor gentleman who's taking to Joseph's health potions a little too well; the rising tensions all throughout the country as the Counter-Revolution takes place -- but the crux of it is Mendoza, learning to her great distress that for all her augmented immortality she is not immune from being human, and it sucks.
When I embarked on this reread project, I was fully prepared to soldier on through the rest of the Company series, savoring the highs until the time came to descend, inevitably, to the increasing disappointment of the lows. Now, I'm honestly not sure, because the thing is I enjoyed this reread so much, and In the Garden of Iden is such a perfect standalone tragedy in and of itself, and the last couple books in the series have such a horrible retroactive warping effect on everything that makes the book work. So maybe I could just ... stop here? This is, technically, a thing that is possible for me.
On the other hand, then I would miss the whole rest of Joseph's journey, which is perfect to me, and I really love a lot of the characters that only show up in later books, and also I promised![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija a really wild book review at some point in the near future and there's not MUCH that's wilder than the last book in the Company series. So ... we'll see!
(Sidenote: this book does get a bit weird about Jews/Jewishness sometimes wrt Mendoza's Inquisition experiences and for the life of me I cannot tell if it's meant to be implying that Mendoza is actually Jewish and has overwritten all her childhood memories with a bizarre fairy tale or if the whole unrelated wicker man scenario that kicks off the book really happened. Would love thoughts from anyone who's actually read it!)
This is of course a biased perspective, because In The Garden of Iden has been incredibly close to my heart since the first time I read it at the extremely formative age of thirteen, and I was fully prepared to re-encounter it with my heart hardened by later experiences and discover it was not all that. Unfortunately! this was not the case! My heart is not hardened and I still love this book with every piece of it!
In the Garden of Iden is the tragedy of Mendoza, an early modern teenage cyborg botanist who was taken from the dungeons of the Inquisition as a child by the Company around which the series centers.
The Company is a dystopian (so, deeply realistic, lol) megacorporation that has invented both time travel and immortality, and, predictably, uses this technology to seed history with unpaid immortal cyborg operatives who are sold a grand mission of 'preserving culture' for a vague but glorious future but obviously of course in fact are working towards the grand mission of increasing the Company's profits. All the cyborgs have access to a broad sense of future chronology up through a certain date (and, as a perk, all its greatest film, literature, and trashy TV), but are still stuck living through history in real time and don't actually know many of the details and certainly not anything related to their own futures -- a brilliant choice, IMO! The contrast between the casual-ironic inner voice of someone raised on twentieth century pop culture and the lived experience and concerns of someone fully embedded in the past, Very Much Another Country, allows Kage Baker to make some very good jokes and also really just slide the knife in when she wants to, because, as aforementioned, this book is a tragedy.
Anyway, it's the reign of Mary Tudor and Mendoza is on her first assignment in a small British country estate that happens to have a garden which contains a rare species of shrub, which is deeply thrilling to Mendoza the botanist and to nobody else in the team of immortals who have accompanied her on this journey for facilitation and cover.
Unfortunately, Mendoza then meets dreamy mortal Nicholas Harpole -- a Protestant polyglot proto-martyr with a slant towards Utopian heresy and deep suspicions about Mendoza's fake-Catholic fake-Spanish fake-family -- and falls head over heels in love with him over multilingual theological debates in a garden, as teenagers are wont to do. Nicholas wants to save Mendoza's soul! Mendoza, a cyborg atheist who is also nineteen, is pretty sure that this is impossible but finds it so romantic that he wants to try! This is not at all a recipe for disaster!
And, on the other end, there's Joseph, Mendoza's fake father twice over. Joseph is the perfect Company man, a cyborg who has recruited hundreds of kids over his thousands of years of operation; it's just chance that he happened to get assigned to play Mendoza's father not ten years after pulling her out of the Inquisition, but it is going to ruin his immortal life, it turns out. Joseph would be absolutely disgusted if anyone described him as trying to save Mendoza's soul, but he is trying to save her future, the only future he thinks she can have: a perfect Company operative, like him, because they're immortal, and the Company owns them, and you have to find satisfaction in your labor, because what else is there? As I have said before, I love morally ambiguous mentors very much, and I have a tremendous amount of feelings about Joseph's unrequited paternal feelings. Rough out there for a bad cyborg dad who's trying his best, which is very bad!
There are a few other elements in play to make the tragedy wheels turn -- Nefer, cyborg livestock expert and Mendoza's immortal fake duenna, who's got a few bad decisions of her own; Sir Walter, Nicholas' boss and the owner of the garden, a perfectly nice Tudor gentleman who's taking to Joseph's health potions a little too well; the rising tensions all throughout the country as the Counter-Revolution takes place -- but the crux of it is Mendoza, learning to her great distress that for all her augmented immortality she is not immune from being human, and it sucks.
When I embarked on this reread project, I was fully prepared to soldier on through the rest of the Company series, savoring the highs until the time came to descend, inevitably, to the increasing disappointment of the lows. Now, I'm honestly not sure, because the thing is I enjoyed this reread so much, and In the Garden of Iden is such a perfect standalone tragedy in and of itself, and the last couple books in the series have such a horrible retroactive warping effect on everything that makes the book work. So maybe I could just ... stop here? This is, technically, a thing that is possible for me.
On the other hand, then I would miss the whole rest of Joseph's journey, which is perfect to me, and I really love a lot of the characters that only show up in later books, and also I promised
rachelmanija a really wild book review at some point in the near future and there's not MUCH that's wilder than the last book in the Company series. So ... we'll see!(Sidenote: this book does get a bit weird about Jews/Jewishness sometimes wrt Mendoza's Inquisition experiences and for the life of me I cannot tell if it's meant to be implying that Mendoza is actually Jewish and has overwritten all her childhood memories with a bizarre fairy tale or if the whole unrelated wicker man scenario that kicks off the book really happened. Would love thoughts from anyone who's actually read it!)
