In the Garden of Iden

As I write this review I get the sense of having hit some kind of record. It has been a long time, a very long time, since I managed to finish a book within a day. It was easy to do so when I was younger, when I had more time to do focus almost exclusively on reading for pleasure and schoolwork wasn't much of a chore, but recent years (and, perhaps, training) have slowed my pace down considerably. An enjoyable novel takes perhaps two to four days of reading between work and other things that need doing to finish.

And yet here I am, composing a review for Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden, having reached this point only after having started it sometime after lunch today. And it must be said, I am rather blown away by the book itself. It's taking some self-control not to just abandon writing this review to read the next book, skipping all the other books in my planned reading list along the way.

The Garden of Iden, the first book in The Company series, combines two of my favorite genres: sci-fi and historical fiction. I truly do love both, even separately, but what lured me towards Kage Baker's series was the fact that it combined those two genres, creating a way to explore one of my favorite sci-fi subgenres: time travel. I have loved the concept of time travel since I saw Back to the Future (I am a child of the eighties, so sue me), and have read whatever I can on the subject, including the wonderful works of Madeleine L'Engle and the novel Timeline by Michael Crichton.

Kage Baker's world, however, is unique, and can hardly be compared to L'Engle's works or even to Crichton's novel. In Baker's version of the world, immortality and time travel have been discovered in the 24th century - and one could not have come about without the other, because the developer of immortality, Dr. Zeus, needed a means of testing immortality out, and as a result, time travel was created. What would happen was that agents of Dr. Zeus's Company would be sent back in time, select a suitable specimen from the population of that time, make them immortal, and then the agents would come back to the present time, and see if their subject survived. If said subject survived, then the procedure definitely worked.

Except, as is often the case with many scientific experiments, one does not get the desired result immediately. This results in repetitions of the experiment until the perfect procedure is found that creates the best results with the least amount of flaws. And so Dr. Zeus's agents kept on going back into the past, making more and more subjects immortal, until they perfected the procedure.

But what then? What to do with all these immortals? What to do with the procedure itself? Another ingenious solution was created: since in the present of the Company, a great many things had been lost, the Company would use the now-perfected immortality procedure, handpick appropriate subjects from all points of history (going all the way back to the Stone Age, in some cases), and make them immortal. Once this had been done, the new immortals would be taken to special schools, where they would receive a superior education and proper indoctrination, and they would become agents of the Company, deployed into different points of history to acquire anything the Company might deem valuable. But since nothing from the past can be brought forward into the present, any new acquisitions must be stashed in safe places until they may be retrieved in the present. Invaluable artwork, the texts of the Library of Alexandria, and even extinct species are retrieved in such a manner. And the Company makes money from it all.

A part of this grand scheme is Mendoza, a young agent who was once a child rescued from the Inquisition by another agent. Now a fully-trained botanist, she is sent to England in the sixteenth century, on a mission to recover specimens of plants that will go completely extinct in only a few more centuries, if not within the century itself. While there, she meets a young man named Nicholas Harpole, and falls in love - an event that promises to reverberate in any books involving Mendoza further down the line.

It's difficult to talk about this book, to explain why I find it so good, without giving too much of it away. It involves time-traveling near-immortal beings, who are just as human as the rest of us for all their belief that they are not. Mendoza is a great example of this: in falling in love with Harpole, she shows herself to be as vulnerable emotionally as the “mortals” she finds so contemptible. Although it might be tempting to scoff at this aspect of the novel, to write it off as a romance-novel plotline (not that there is anything wrong with romance novels or their plots, under the right circumstances, of course), but Baker plays their relationship very well. It is sweet, true, and quite romantic, but it is real. The fact that their relationship is doomed right from the very beginning - because how can an immortal and a mortal really have a proper relationship? - adds to that romance. Every attempt Mendoza makes to save Harpole from his inevitable death only highlights this tragedy more. It is tempting to make comparisons to Romeo and Juliet, but it isn't quite appropriate, as Mendoza and Harpole's relationship is hardly as stormy as that. Besides, Shakespeare was not even around at the time this story takes place.

Another interesting aspect of this novel - perhaps because of the time and place it occurs - is what it says about religion and history, and the great damage that deeds done in the name of the former can do to the latter, particularly on the level of individual people. As a child, Mendoza was a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, and the memories of her time under their "care" often trigger terrible nightmares that cause her to wake up screaming. She, like all of the Company's immortal agents, are skeptical of religion, and many are intolerant of anything resembling religious bigotry. And yet, interestingly enough, she carries on a relationship with Harpole, who is a religious zealot. In the end, part of the tragedy of their relationship is that Harpole is unable to accept Mendoza for what she is, and he chooses his beliefs over his love for her, even when she comes to rescue him from being burned at the stake.

But I think what I enjoyed the most about this novel - and what made it go by so quickly - is Mendoza's tone, and the tone used by her fellow immortals. There were many times that I found myself chuckling aloud, mostly because Mendoza's insights, and the commentary provided by her fellow immortals, was amusing in the way that good witty, sarcastic banter is amusing. It felt like I was listening to one of my good friends tell a story, so close was Mendoza's tone to the one used by many of my friends in real life, and there was a lot of pleasure to be had in that.

It's truly difficult to talk about this book without resorting to simply repeating the phrase “Fantastic!” over and over again. It is mostly set-up, I suppose, for the other novels to come, an introduction to the world Baker has created, but what an introduction it is! Few series start with such a powerful opening, and while I will be reading other books before moving on to the next novel of this series, when I can finally pick up the next novel it will most definitely be with eagerness for the adventure to come.