Kage Baker, Mendoza In Hollywood

So much for my hopes that each Company novel would have a different narrator! This is another outing for Mendoza, and the next appears to be Joseph, so maybe they just alternate.

It's not bad, but it's less involving than the first two books in the series, partly because, like The Fortunate Fall, it's based around the narrator's recounting recent events of love, loss, and lawbreaking to shadowy interrogating authorities, but the framing material is nowhere near as thematically or structurally necessary as in Carter's book (the prose is better there, too), serving here to set up the big cliffhanger where Mendoza's fate is in doubt (but not really, because: a) those immortals are really quite hard to get rid of, and b) she's the star).

The long period of isolation Mendoza managed to wrangle for herself in Sky Coyote is interrupted by assignment to a preservation mission in 1862 on the future site of Hollywood, a lawless and violent sort of place. She's put up at the local Company outpost, an inn/part-time whorehouse whose inhabitants have their own projects going on. And that's mostly what this novel is -- following the cyborgs around on their routines while minor things happen relating to capitalism, desire, and control.

Mendoza follows an anthropologist around while he preys on people's insecurities to sell them useless consumer goods (a cover for his data-gathering). Another anthropologist, Imarte (from Sky Coyote) is the inn's space hooker prostitute (Imarte, Inara -- close enough), getting her information by exploiting men at their most vulnerable. The resident ornithologist, Juan Bautista, a youth around Mendoza's age and maturity level circa In The Garden Of Iden and going through a similar disillusionment situation, develops attachments to the sample specimens he has collected (he likes them and treats them as pets), which of course leads to heartbreak when they start to interfere with his work; even the passions that Dr. Zeus' employees are selected for -- cultivated to have -- are unacceptable when expressed beyond the level the Company exploits for its agents to perform their duties at premium efficiency. The Company also exploits Porfirio, the inn's proprietor and Facilitator, for his emotional connections; he and his brother were taken for cyborging after the death of their parents, but the brother was ineligible for the process and left to live a normal life. Porfirio is permitted to keep tabs on his brother's descendants (otherwise Not Allowed) because he does "special" work (read: no-questions-asked black ops, murders, etc.) for Dr. Zeus. Just as in the previous books, all of the cyborgs are big film buffs, and here they spend time searching out the future sites of famous movie scenes and putting on film festivals, screening the likes of "Intolerance" and "Greed" (it's just the backdrop, at least you're not getting extended lectures about how the plots of the movies relate to what's going on).

Most of this serves to bury and disguise one tiny plot element until it becomes important. One of Imarte's clients is involved in a doomed British plot to take control of the west coast while the North and South are preoccupied with the war (she's understandably overjoyed at discovering a bit of secret history). After a series of mishaps, the client leaves some important documents at the inn, and the superspy who comes to retrieve them comes as a shock to Mendoza. He's Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, the spitting image of Nicholas Harpole (right down to the broken nose). A ruthless British secret agent (he's every bit the idealist zealot Nicholas was, but this time his obsession is with the glory of the Crown rather than God), he immediately falls for Mendoza, and she for him (not knowing what to think but sure she's not going to waste this second chance she's been given). Of course, we'd know how this would turn out even if the framing material didn't tell us outright. Mendoza runs away with Edward as he follows mysterious important possibly Company-related stuff going on at Catalina Island (once again, Nicholas/Edward is foreseeing the future leading to the rise of the Company; neither this nor his repeated meetings with Mendoza could be coincidences, which I hope she figures out soon), he's gunned down by Pinkertons, she goes berserk and slaughters everyone. Afterwards, she's picked up by the Company and interrogated. Punishment is forthcoming...

The major reason this installment in the series is not very strong: it's an installment in a series. It's adding cast members and laying pipe for future developments, and it's not really a complete or satisfying story in itself. We don't get to know Edward the way we got to know Nicholas (he's present for less than a quarter of the book in a section that's very rushed), and what we do see of him is kind of dickish and not as charming as we may be supposed to think [1]; he's only important for what he suggests about the future of the series (more and more important Nicholas iterations to come). There's an important scene where Mendoza is out of nowhere and for unclear reasons magically transported over a hundred years into the future and sees the very changed and paved-over Hollywood of the present that *should* be the chilling centerpiece of the story -- Laurel Canyon haunted by its inevitable future, the ascendancy of capitalism responsible for the urban growth and development that necessitates the Company's preservation missions in the first place but also leads to its existence -- but this is not a text rich in hauntological resonance, and the scene comes off as confusingly handled setup for future plot developments, with no real consequences in the novel itself. There's a disconnect between the Edward material and everything leading up to it, which feels like Baker decided to kill time with interesting character studies before moving things forward with the important dull predictable plotty stuff. She's not playing to her strengths here. I want to see where this goes.

[1] Though I grant that we could be blinded by Mendoza's perspective. If it's intentional and further storylines will address her need to look at the next version of the guy as an individual and not as a substitute for the man who's gone, I'll feel better about this.