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In The Garden Of Iden (The First Novel of The Company) by Kage Baker
01/04/2006 . Source: Pauline Morgan 
pub: TOR/Forge. 329 page enlarged paperback. Price: $14.95 (US), $19.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-31457-6. Buy In The Garden Of Iden in the USA - or Buy In The Garden Of Iden in the UK  check out website: www.tor.com
There is a whole sub-genre of Science Fiction that deals with the historical past. Most novels of this type are alternative histories in which some event happens differently and gives us a different present. Others involve time travel with people either trying to change the past for a better future or to make sure that a particular event does happen. They create the danger of the time paradox. Sometimes the time travel is by machine, making the story Science Fiction. Other times there is no rational means for the journey making the story fantasy. Historical fiction is another literary genre. The best tries to recapture the atmosphere and tensions of past events. It has a lot in common with the fantasy novels that deal in the intrigue and ambitions of kings.
Kage Baker has tried to marry together time travel from the future and the historical past. To a great extent, she has done a good job and laid down some ground rules. The time travellers can only go backwards in time, they cannot bring anything to their own time with them and cannot change history. Although it is not discussed, this must mean that time travellers were present and influencing history long before the technology to build time mechanisms was in place. The Company, as it is referred to, has nevertheless found a way to profit from the invention. Though they claim to be philanthropic, many of their schemes are fiscally sound. To save people having to go and live in the past from the highly developed 24th century, The Company has also developed immortality. They take children born in the past - the process works best on them - who might otherwise die. They change their bodies and minds so that they are loyal to the Company, introduce them to a life of technological luxury and educate them. They are then sent back in to their own world as agents of The Company.
Mendoza is one such child. She is spirited away from the clutches of the Spanish Inquisition at the age of about five and brought up in The Company's base in Australia. She is trained as a botanist and sent to England in the entourage of Philip of Spain for his marriage to Mary Tudor. Mendoza and her fellow operatives part from the rest of the Spanish party in Southampton and travel (by underground) to Kent. The garden of Sir Walter Iden contains many rare plants due to become extinct. Mendoza has to take samples. Later in time, the plants will be rediscovered growing in isolated places, giving the people of the future a greater bio-diversity and access to potential medicines.
The Company seems to have built a complex, high-tech system infiltrating the past - including radio commentaries that only the operatives can hear, the rapid transit system beneath the Downs and the teaching facilities in the Antipodes. In the historic past, up until the Industrial Revolution, it would have been relatively easy to hide and misdirect the attention of those who might stumble on the set-up. In our present, it would be far more difficult. The suggestion is that the immortal operatives are a scarce and expensive resource. Sooner or later, 20th Century science would find them out. What seems to have been a potentially good idea has possibly grown from the feasible to verge on the unlikely.
The biggest problem, though, is the lack of passion. This could be explained as a stylistic decision. The story is narrated by Mendoza, probably from a distance of centuries. She is relating her first excursion into the field as a Company agent and she falls in love with a mortal. This is a seventeen year-old with the raging hormones of adolescence but the dispassionate tone is almost clinical. The text does not catch fire. There is no feeling of what makes this particular mortal so special. The fact that Mendoza behaves with all the morals of an alley cat does not make her any more endearing. It is also surprising that she is allowed to get away with it. Granted, Mendoza has had modern liberal sexual mores distilled into her but she was born into a repressed Catholic country and had been dumped back into a society which has forcibly been changed from Henry Tudor's protestant expediency to the severe Catholicism of his daughter, Mary. Iden Hall may be relatively isolated in Kent but England, even then, was not big enough for such permissiveness to pass without social sanctions.
I am sure that Baker has done her historical research but the fact that The Company agents have fore-knowledge of events to come on the political scene dilutes the tension. The idea that they are immortal also means that they expect to survive whatever the odds. It dilutes the sense of danger.
The basic idea behind the novel is sound but the execution of it blander than it could be. This is the first in a series of novels about The Company and, I believe, this author's first published novel. It possible that the shortcomings of 'In The Garden Of Iden' have been ironed out in later volumes.
Pauline Morgan
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