skygiants | (no subject)

Last 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

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!)

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From:

sovay

Would love thoughts from anyone who's actually read it!

Would have to re-read to offer actual thoughts, since I do not believe I have read the book since it came out (or at least since 2005, when I drifted away from the series), but for some reason I always thought she was?

From:

thistleingrey

This, except that I read it in 2011 and haven't read most of the rest of the series.

From:

skygiants

It makes the most thematic sense if she is, IMO, but you have to presume the first two chapters of the book are just straight out lies in a way that you don't have to presume with anything else. (Drifting away from the series almost certainly the right call though.)

From:

mneme

Yah, this except that I read it...early. Maybe the year after it came out. And while I remember the basics of the premise it's just been so long (and I only read the first two books I think).

From:

conuly

(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!)

I went with the latter interpretation. Some jerkfaces who wanted to be eeeeeeevil made up a Satanic ritual for themselves and roped in a couple of poor kids for the evulz. But they didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!

From:

skygiants

When I read it when it first came out I didn't think to question it, but the wicker man narrative is such a disconnected thread from the rest of the book, and Joseph definitely seems to drop hints later on that Mendoza's memory may not be fully accurate, that I'm not really sure how to read it now!

From:

kore

I love that book! A friend sent it to me about....yeesh, at least a decade ago, because she loved it and knew I would love it too. I read the whole series because I am a completist, and L O fucking L that hurt. But I liked Sky Coyote! I even liked Mendoza in Hollywood (I LOVED the long descriptions of classic movies, which everyone else seemed to hate). Graveyard Game was sorta ehhhh but readable and from what I remember the ones after that were mostly terrible with some good bits. Oh ghod the concluding two books were just so awful. It didn't help they were so obviously fix-ups and disjointed and sketchy as well as batshit. Wasn't Garden sold as a standalone novel at first?

Like

sovay I think I just always assumed Mendoza was actually Jewish.

I've been meaning to read Empress of Mars but never did....I remember liking the short story collections a lot, maybe those could help scratch the itch if you don't want to go through the whole series again?

From:

skygiants

The short stories are some of my favorites. And I like 2, 3, and 4 (I actually love Graveyard Game, not because it functions particularly well as a book but because I enjoy extended Joseph and Lewis fanfiction), and I also quite liked 6 because it essentially functioned as another short story collection in a wrapper. Unfortunately, completionism. :(((

I haven't reread Empress of Mars since it came out ... my booklog from 2009 indicates that it's OK but I also do not trust my booklogs from 2009 as far as I can throw them. That said, of her last couple books, I would really recommend The Bird of the River; I think it's probably the best thing she ever wrote.

From:

starlady

I read this book maybe 12 years ago--not too long before Baker died, actually--but I always assumed Mendoza was Jewish.

ETA: I went back and looked at my review and I have misremembered, I called her Catholic in there.

Edited Date: 2021-11-10 05:28 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

It's quite ambiguous, IMO! I think your description of her in your post as Schrodinger's crypto-Jewish is about as close as one can get, probably.

From:

lirazel

I have never even heard of this one, but it sounds fascinating and I will definitely seek it out. And then maybe...not read the rest in the series...

From:

skygiants

For years I suffered under the belief that I could not recommend the series to anyone because of the inevitable conclusion, but, having reread, I think I can actually in good conscience recommend this book as a standalone as long as -- very importantly -- the person I'm recommending it to is not a completionist. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it if you read it!

From:

lirazel

I usually am a completionist, but if someone is adamant enough about not reading/watching a certain portion of whatever, I can overcome my inherent need to have The Whole Experience.

From:

grammarwoman

I have a weird memory hole for this series - I love the first book, recall bits and pieces of the next several, but I can never remember what the actual ending was. Maybe that's my brain trying to protect me, or maybe it just never made sense.

From:

skygiants

It's very justified for your brain to wish to protect you, it definitely never made sense, I would strongly recommend letting it stay forgotten. The first book is so lovely on its own!

From:

leaflemming

I love this book so much. Not least because it's historical fiction from someone who deeply knows the period and can write convincing facsimile 16th C dialogue. I remember it as having a similar effect to Patrick O'Brien & ER Eddison on my ability to read *perfectly decent* historical fiction by anyone with a less well informed ear -- like, for ages afterwards I just couldn't.

I have never reread the final books in the series. If you wanted to blog them for us, um, that would be a service? I do remember thinking The Life of the World To Come was actually pretty good. And that the phenotype/genotype distinctions between [SPOILERS] Mendoza's three lovers were interesting and plausible.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I love Baker's ear for historical dialogue, it's so enviously effortless! That's the other thing that makes the conscious anachronisms work so well -- she just has the most incredible control over when to lean in on the contrast. (I'm not familiar with ER Eddison, btw, but this comment makes me think that perhaps I should be?)

From:

leaflemming

Eddison's the great pre-Tolkien what-if of epic fantasy, as in, "what if THIS had kick-started the big fantasy publishing spree?" (For one thing, Terry Brooks would have had a much rougher time trying to get his career off the ground by copying it). The Worm Ouroboros is the title people tend to know -- it has some amazing highs (literally, in the case of the bravura mountaineering sequence) but Mistress of Mistresses is the better place to start overall. I went looking for him after reading this remark of Le Guin's:

"The archaic manner is indeed a perfect distancer, but you have to do it perfectly. It's a high wire: one slip spoils all. The man who did it perfectly was, of course, Eddison. He really did write Elizabethan prose in the 1930s. His style is totally artificial, but it is never faked. If you love language for its own sake he is irresistible".

From:

mneme

I would -love- to see

skygiant's take on Eddison; he's just so delightfully wacky.

Warning: the text can get...wraught. I didn't have any issues with Worm Oroboros, but I just kept stalling and then losing the physical book for Mistress of Mistresses; eventually I just reversed the problem and read the Zimavia trilogy backwards (which makes an odd sort of sense aside from the third book being literally unfinished on death and stitched together using a surviving outline, as the three books are written/published in reverse chronological order). In particular, there's a description of a throne room early in Mistresses that puts Umberto Echo's apocalyptic door to shame, if "shame" is not being described in enough florid detail.

From:

leaflemming

I had the opposite experience! -- it took me years to finish TWO, despite loving it every time I managed to read any of it, whereas I read MoM quite quickly. The latter sits in my memory as a very focused and unified book, and Worm I remember as more of a sprawling grand mess of thing. Though the individual scenes of Eddison's that stand out for me mostly do come from Worm. You're right that he never describes anything with one adjective if he can see a way to do it with seventeen.

From:

stranger

I read the whole series, probably ten years ago now, and share your conviction that only the first few books (maybe three, maybe parts of four?) are worth reading except to see the series implode in 2355. What happens then? Massive sunspot EM flare that wipes the cyborg memories (and humans) completely? Humanity has etiolated itself out of survival? The Corporation achieves Singularity? What? (I confess I wasn't reading very deeply at that point, and if there was a new reality after that date, it just didn't seem worth figuring out.)

But Mendoza was terrific, and Joseph's continual care-taking of his ever more distant nephews' families was touching, and the good bits were really good.

From:

skygiants

I like much of 4 very much, but I don't know that it works as a book; I like 6, which is mostly shorts and worldbuilding; in my memory, 5 is boring, 7 is absolutely unsalvageable, and 8 has a few infuriating glitters of genius in among a pile of a pile of explosive dross -- but the good bits are so good!

From:

ceitfianna

I started this book but it was far too dark for me that I gave up on it. This is encouraging me to go back to it, since I think when I started it, I had far too many dark books going on.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, it's definitely a tragedy and one does have to be braced for that going in! But very much worth it, IMO.

From:

pedanther

I remember that I read this book, and enjoyed it a lot, and then somebody warned me that the series doesn't end well so I decided to treat it as a standalone and never read any of the others.

From:

skygiants

Fantastic decision!

From:

pedanther

I used to be a completionist, but by the time I got to In the Garden of Iden I'd learned my lesson. (Not least because of another series where somebody very clearly told me to read the first book and then stop, and I didn't stop, and I lived to regret it.)

From:

sovay

(Not least because of another series where somebody very clearly told me to read the first book and then stop, and I didn't stop, and I lived to regret it.)

Which one?

From:

pedanther

On a Pale Horse, my introduction to the weird and wacky world of Piers Anthony.

From:

sovay

On a Pale Horse, my introduction to the weird and wacky world of Piers Anthony.

I bailed on that series after Being a Green Mother and it was still too late.

From:

rachelmanija

I would enjoy that. I never read it but have gathered from osmosis, I assume from you, that Mendoza gives birth to her boyfriend's clone-baby. I feel that this requires an explanation.

From:

skygiants

That's perfectly correct but also only about, like, 25% of the actual storm of nonsense regarding the Mendoza/romance/clone-babies situation; there is much more price to come!