June is almost over. Sorry for the neglect; bad things have been going on.

Kage Baker, The Graveyard Game

There's not much here but transitions, pushing pieces into place, and truckloads of information about the world of the Company series, much of it redundant for anyone who has followed the series to this point -- which makes that info pointless, since this novel doesn't stand alone at all. Baker treads water well enough to keep me interested for the time being, but this series is starting to remind me of Lost's slumpier moments -- you can only continue to pile up minor mysteries and new factions for so long before you need to start parceling out resolutions, especially when the flaws are also starting to multiply. This contains SPOILERS but not, to my mind, enjoyment-destroying ones; there is so little plot progression in this book that its pleasures are primarily in the telling, not the tale.

As of the close of Mendoza In Hollywood, Mario Mendoza is missing. Joseph and Lewis, on learning this, set out to discover what happened. Here's where the first problem comes in: perspective. You've got some first-person framing material with Joseph explaining to his "father," Budu, whom he has *finally* located and revived, everything that has happened in the course of the search [1]. The bulk of the novel is narrated in tight third-person, alternating between the perspectives of Joseph and Lewis. Then there are periodic, seemingly random, wholly unnecessary sojourns into the POV of minor characters (Mendoza's friend Nan, double agent Victor, leader of the good immortal faction Suleyman). Sometimes this is because neither of the leads is around but the scene is still necessary. Sometimes there's just no good reason at all (as with the caretaker Abdiel at the end). In either case, it feels disjointed and jarringly inconsistent. I wish Baker had picked a narrator and stuck with him; if this were Lewis' book, his background and motivations and feelings could be fleshed out enough to make me care about his eventual fate as much as I care about Mendoza's, and if this were Joseph's book, it might be made to refract and distort Sky Coyote the way Hollywood served as a counterpart to In The Garden Of Iden. As it stands, the structure doesn't do either character any favors.

We meet up with our heroes near the beginning of the 20th Century. It takes them about a hundred pages and a century just for them to track down Juan Bautista and Porfirio (from Hollywood) and find out what we already know about the circumstances surrounding Mendoza's disappearance (crome generating weirdness, reincarnated lover, ending in blood). Joseph learns that the deceased Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax bore a remarkable resemblance to the even-more-deceased Nicholas Harpole, and grows to hate him/them even more. Lewis, on the other hand, in addition to his unrequited love for Mendoza, develops sort of a crush on Edward (learning more about his super-spy background), and eventually writes some historical adventure stories (or maybe just one sprawling novel) starring him. This raises questions about why none of the other immortals seem to have any real creative impulse. A look into Edward's background reveals a connection to the Gentleman's Speculative Society, an organization whose ranks include powerful, famous, and influential figures of the period as well as Company cyborgs. The Society seems to have existed in other forms in the past, and, more importantly, seems to be the direct forerunner of Dr. Zeus, Inc. Does the Company have an interest in ensuring its own creation and rise to power? Well, of course it does, and it seems to have something to do with whatever secret, important stuff is going on at Catalina Island, though that remains a mystery for now.

Meanwhile, you'd think that Mendoza's disappearance would have been enough reason for Joseph to consider a look at the coordinates that Budu gave him way back in the flashbacks from Sky Coyote, but it takes until 2026 for him to finally check them out and discover, shockingly... exactly what every reader had already thought would be the case. The Enforcers and other assorted immortals have been forcibly "retired," placed in suspended animation in secret storage chambers all over the world.

And, in the final major thread, there's a trauma in Lewis' past connected with some strange autistic savant-ish little men who are tracking him and have weapons effective on cyborgs. This plotline feels especially sketchy, with no real beginning (other than vague intimations of the existence of these otherworldly men in some of the Black Projects, White Knights stories) and very little connection to anything else that's going on until a trap is sprung at the end.

Oh, that trap! A trap that's only effective because Lewis is excruciatingly gullible and dumb. He runs into the one guy he knows is 100 percent involved in the conspiracy? Right before they embark on their riskiest mission? A guy who just happens to bring up everything about the subject Lewis and Joseph have been looking into on their own, while they've been going to great lengths to cover their tracks? And then he doesn't mention this to Joseph? Argh. The entire book has been detailing a slow, careful search conducted under conditions of elaborate secrecy and security, with decades between minor events. Every conversation between immortals has been soaked in paranoia. Then our heroes simply charge ahead in the most careless way possible. If I can't tell whether the characters are supposed to have become overconfident or if they're just behaving inconsistently (and not taking the precautions they have taken before) because they have to end up where they end up, then the author has gotten a bit sloppy.

I know it sounds like I hate this, but it's really not actually bad. The prose is strong, the dialogue is sparkling, the buddy chemistry between Joseph and Lewis is crackling. There just isn't enough story to hang these virtues on, and that encourages me to nitpick until the author can come up with content worthy of her stylistic gifts. By the end of the book, Joseph is a free agent, thought dead by the Company. He blames Nicholas/Edward for what's happened to Mendoza and Lewis. He's out for vengeance against the Company for their sins and betrayals, and he's waking up other immortals with similar grievances. Finally, he's in a position for real drama and cool stuff to start happening. There are still four novels (and another story collection) in the Company series -- the halfway point. Now that the characters and their motivations seem to be in place, hopefully it should all be payoff from here.

[1] It also allows Baker to infodump in a clunky way; Budu, like the rest of the immortals, should already be familiar with the historical events that Joseph explains to him. What Budu would need to know is what has gone on behind the scenes -- what history didn't record. Furthermore, the details of the future history become less credible with more explanation; I can believe that people in 200 years might have very different eating habits, and even that they might trend toward vegetarianism and a horror of eating meat, but not so much that a popular epic fantasy trilogy about animal rights is responsible for the enacting of mandatory vegan laws.