Customer Reviews

Eden

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A whole town in England disappears and is replaced by a prehistoric marsh. All through the world this is happening in various places. A great smoky-black translucent obelisk descends to earth (through which may be seen stars not visible from any place on earth) over a town or area and within minutes it grows cold, and people begin to disappear - their voices can be heard for a while then they too fade.
One woman medical doctor likes to help the Arabs in an area which (according to local legend) is close to the garden of Eden. She is caught in one of these manifestations with a boyfriend and another fellow traveler. They become isolated in what appears to be "the" garden of Eden and the fellow traveler begins to become a dictator. He finally gets Francis, the female doctor, to have sex with him and he continually beats up her weak boyfriend - she becomes a nymphomaniac. In the end, the boyfriend can't stand it and kills the dictator.
She and the boyfriend get back to England but she begins an affair with her shrink. In the meantime there is another "appearance" over the famous "Stonehenge" wherein the boyfriend disappears into the apparition. She and the shrink want to go back to the garden of Eden in Arabia to find out what is really going on.
When they get back, they experience some of the same manifestations as before, but no explanation is given this time either??? - instead they are somehow transformed into beings with powers to travel thru space and time - becoming like the angels?
There are many unrelated, bizarre phenomenon described in the book most of which remain a mystery and are never tied together - including the whole point of the book! There was too much emphasis on gratuitous sex which, while erotic once or twice, became simply boring much of the time.

What do you get when you combine absurdly loquacious writing, a lack of believable or sympathetic characters, and a moralistic theme?

A book that you SHOULD NOT READ. This book is worse than the movie Battlefield Earth. You would be better spending time drinking sour milk or eating 5 sticks of butter than reading this book.

The main character is a feminist nymphomaniac who is swept off with two men to "Eden", where she submits to being sexually used and humiliated by the more dominant man. "Eden" has been created by a black hole-like phenomenon that is plaguing other parts of the earth, making people and places disappear.

Several rape scenes and one brutal murder scene later, our main female character escapes along with the nicer man and flees back to regular earth. Throughout the middle of the novel, we are regaled with her inexplicable sexual urges while she seduces both the innocent, kind man who tried to rescue her and seduces her shrink. Along the way, we are regaled with her constant fantasizing for the men who have been using and abusing her. In sum, she is the most loathsome and unsympathetic main character I have ever encountered in a novel.

Possessed by some masochistic impulse, I read to the end of the novel to discover the source of the black hole-phenomenon. The phenomenon is never fully explained, although at the end the source seems to be attributed to some race of higher alien beings from another planet -- aliens that may or may not be gods. Nothing is explained in any coherent way that gives any type of closure, although we are forced to reread both the rape and murder scene again. Indeed, none of the book's mysteries are solved in any satisfactory way.

And to add insult to injury, the writing makes the book doubly tedious. The descriptions are lengthy and boring. The characters are prone to pages of trite and pointless self-reflection. And when the characters are not reflecting and reliving events from the novel that we've previously read, they are explaining those details to other characters in the story through pages of pointless dialogue.

Sadly, despite Genesis's excellent reviews, I will never pick that book up. I will never risk another novel by Harbinson.

Cursing: Little
Sex: VERY explicit and very frequent sex scenes, including a few rape scenes and a handful of scenes involving the debasing of a female through sex.
Violence: A murder involving the bashing in of a man's head is described in graphic detail.