In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker, is the first book by her I've ever read, and I got interested in reading it because of an enthusiastic review by Jenny.
I literally couldn't put it down. I kept trying, because I had other things to do--at one point Ron pointed out that I'd said I was coming in the kitchen to help him make some food for a party we were going to that evening, and I meant to finish a paragraph and then go do it, but that paragraph led to another, and every time I went back into the room where I'd put the book down, I'd forget everything else I meant to be doing. (I did manage to make some guacamole, watch the U.S. tie England in the World Cup and play a card game called Plague and Pestilence before finishing the book.)
The plot begins with a five-year-old girl in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition (ha, nobody expects that!) who is selected to join "The Company" and made into an immortal genius, one of a number of agents who travel back in time to save things that would otherwise be lost. This story begins with the girl, Mendoza, now 18 and traveling back to Tudor England as a botanist charged with saving some rare plants, among them one that can cure a certain type of cancer in the future. It's interesting to see how she fears the frailty of mortals--at a point only 13 years removed from them--like the driver of her coach:
"He was young, there were no traces of alcohol or toxic chemicals in his sweat, his vision was normal, heartbeat and pulse rate normal, muscular coordination above average. He did have an incipient abscessed tooth, but he wasn't aware of it yet, so it wasn't going to distract him from his task."
The way the luggage of the time travelers is disguised is also interesting: "everything issued to a field agent is disguised to look like something else. Even Joseph's book of holo codes for Great Cinema of the Twentieth Century was bound in calfskin with a printer's date of 1547."
But when Mendoza drops her "calfbound copy of the latest issue of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly" in front of a mortal chambermaid, she and fellow agent Nef have to convince the chambermaid that the picture of a robot she has just had a glimpse of is something foreign:
"'Do not be afraid, good Joan. It is what we call in Spain an iron maiden. You have such things here, have you not, to punish the wicked? In this book it doth depict the torments awaiting sinners,' she said firmly, scooping up the magazine and snapping it shut. 'For shame, thou, Rosa. Holy monks labored a year to paint this missal for thee, and wilt thou carelessly drop it?'"
The connotations of the title are not wasted, coming in for their most explicit treatment in a temper tantrum thrown by Mendoza in six different languages. Ideas about perfection and immortality run throughout the story, usually in both historical and time-traveler context, as here:
"In the sixteenth century, Christmas was celebrated from Christmas Day to January 6. In future times, of course, it would shift forward until it began in November and ended abruptly on Christmas Eve, which is how it was calendared at Company bases. I observed the Solstice by climbing from bed to watch the red sun rise out of black cloud, and marked his flaming early death that evening through black leafless branches. So the mystery passed, and the mortals hadn't even begun their celebration yet."
One of my favorite parts is incidental, a description of one of the dishes served at a Tudor Christmas celebration:
"When it hit the table, everyone really stared: it looked great, a sort of sweet rice pilaf, a big mound of rice and nuts and raisins, but all around the edge of the dish were perched big insects sculpted out of almond paste."
When the agents ask why the bugs are there, one of the servers explains:
"Please you, signior, but you said that we must have syrup of locusts to pour about the top, signior, and we had it not, wherefore Mistress Alison made locusts out of marchpane."
This is a fascinating story full of incidental delights. Although I'm still getting the term for Baker's "company" mixed up with the term for Iain Banks' "culture," I think reading a few more novels in each series will clear that up, and now I'm definitely going to read everything I can get my hands on by Kage Baker.
Showing posts with label Iain M. Banks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iain M. Banks. Show all posts
Monday, June 14, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Consider Phlebas
Iain M. Banks creates worlds that are interestingly detailed and overwhelmingly cruel. I described the first novel I read by him, The Wasp Factory, as repulsive and creepy. The second one I've read, Consider Phlebas, is only that way in parts. Identified on the cover as "a Culture novel," it's the first of a space opera series centering on a civilization called the Culture that depends upon "machines without illusions which prided themselves on thinking the thinkable to its ultimate extremities."
In this novel, there's a war between the Culture and the Idirans, an almost-immortal race of believers. The protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, a changer who can mimic the appearance of others, is fighting on the side of the Idirans. His enemy Balveda, a Culture agent, has the upper hand at the beginning of the book, but that position is reversed with each new adventure.
The novel is exciting, full of interesting planets and creatures, fights to the death, space stations that explode, and spaceship drivers who take crazy chances, like Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid belt in Star Wars. Only imagine seeing Han's adventures as he and Leia fall in love, finding out that Leia is pregnant, and then seeing her and Han die. That's pretty much the story arc of this novel. I was so much on Horza's side by the end that I couldn't quite accept his death on the last page. I kept reading through the appendices...which is, I think, exactly the right thing to do.
From being immersed in the adventures of war, the appendices bring you through the years to the long view of what was achieved, and what has lasted. The seeming tragedy (from Horza's point of view) of the Culture's eventual victory in the war is revealed to be bigger than any one creature could make sense of, and the memory of the hero Horza, whose point of view has been lost, lives on in the infallible memory of the computer-like "mind" of a ship, thousands of years after his death.
Even more than that, the opening of the novel, in which Horza repeats what sounds like the opening of a children's story ("The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season") even as he is about to meet the same fate as the villain of that story, is revealed to be more important than you might have thought, on first acquaintance.
The novel is well crafted in a way that continually makes readers think the next adventure will be one thing, but then leads them to examine bigger issues in the history of this imagined world. When Horza ends up on a kind of pirate spaceship, the Clear Air Turbulence, he has to fight to the death for his right to continue living, as the captain informs him "I've no place on this ship for somebody who hasn't the taste for a little murder now and again." But unlike the space pirates on Firefly, these pirates don't have a complicated ethical take on their place in the universe, and they're not the best shots in it, either. There's a lot of turnover in crew, and they do leave crew members behind in life or death situations. At one point when Horza is left for dead and crash-lands on a desert island, he is captured by a group of cannibals and almost eaten alive by their leader after having seen it demonstrated:
"Fwi-Song was lifted and carried on the litter to just in front of the young man; he bared the blade-teeth, then leaned forward and with a quick, nodding motion, bit off one of Twenty-seventh's toes.
Horza looked away.
In the next half-hour or so of leisurely paced eating, the enormous prophet nibbled at various bits of Twenty-seventh's body, attacking the extremities and the few remaining fat deposits with his various sets of teeth. The young man gained fresh breath with each new site of butchery."
As a changer, Horza is armed with poison in parts of his body, so when it's his turn to be eaten, the eater gets his just desserts. And still, every time Horza wins a battle, he considers whether his ends justify his means, which is a kind of existential crisis for him as a member of a race engineered for pursuing warfare: "killing the immortal, changing to preserve, warring for peace...and embracing utterly what we claimed to have renounced completely, for our own good reasons."
The cruelty, the death, even the extinction of Horza's entire species are examples in this novel, of what war is, and what can be its effects on everyone and everything. It's space opera because it's big, and it's loud and beautiful, and you'll need a hankie by the end.
In this novel, there's a war between the Culture and the Idirans, an almost-immortal race of believers. The protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, a changer who can mimic the appearance of others, is fighting on the side of the Idirans. His enemy Balveda, a Culture agent, has the upper hand at the beginning of the book, but that position is reversed with each new adventure.
The novel is exciting, full of interesting planets and creatures, fights to the death, space stations that explode, and spaceship drivers who take crazy chances, like Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid belt in Star Wars. Only imagine seeing Han's adventures as he and Leia fall in love, finding out that Leia is pregnant, and then seeing her and Han die. That's pretty much the story arc of this novel. I was so much on Horza's side by the end that I couldn't quite accept his death on the last page. I kept reading through the appendices...which is, I think, exactly the right thing to do.
From being immersed in the adventures of war, the appendices bring you through the years to the long view of what was achieved, and what has lasted. The seeming tragedy (from Horza's point of view) of the Culture's eventual victory in the war is revealed to be bigger than any one creature could make sense of, and the memory of the hero Horza, whose point of view has been lost, lives on in the infallible memory of the computer-like "mind" of a ship, thousands of years after his death.
Even more than that, the opening of the novel, in which Horza repeats what sounds like the opening of a children's story ("The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season") even as he is about to meet the same fate as the villain of that story, is revealed to be more important than you might have thought, on first acquaintance.
The novel is well crafted in a way that continually makes readers think the next adventure will be one thing, but then leads them to examine bigger issues in the history of this imagined world. When Horza ends up on a kind of pirate spaceship, the Clear Air Turbulence, he has to fight to the death for his right to continue living, as the captain informs him "I've no place on this ship for somebody who hasn't the taste for a little murder now and again." But unlike the space pirates on Firefly, these pirates don't have a complicated ethical take on their place in the universe, and they're not the best shots in it, either. There's a lot of turnover in crew, and they do leave crew members behind in life or death situations. At one point when Horza is left for dead and crash-lands on a desert island, he is captured by a group of cannibals and almost eaten alive by their leader after having seen it demonstrated:
"Fwi-Song was lifted and carried on the litter to just in front of the young man; he bared the blade-teeth, then leaned forward and with a quick, nodding motion, bit off one of Twenty-seventh's toes.
Horza looked away.
In the next half-hour or so of leisurely paced eating, the enormous prophet nibbled at various bits of Twenty-seventh's body, attacking the extremities and the few remaining fat deposits with his various sets of teeth. The young man gained fresh breath with each new site of butchery."
As a changer, Horza is armed with poison in parts of his body, so when it's his turn to be eaten, the eater gets his just desserts. And still, every time Horza wins a battle, he considers whether his ends justify his means, which is a kind of existential crisis for him as a member of a race engineered for pursuing warfare: "killing the immortal, changing to preserve, warring for peace...and embracing utterly what we claimed to have renounced completely, for our own good reasons."
The cruelty, the death, even the extinction of Horza's entire species are examples in this novel, of what war is, and what can be its effects on everyone and everything. It's space opera because it's big, and it's loud and beautiful, and you'll need a hankie by the end.
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