Customer Reviews

The Graveyard Game (Company)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was both fortunate and cursed if you will, by the occasion of borrowing a galley copy of this book. The latter for I shall have to wait another 18 months or so before reading the possible fifth book in the 'Novels of the Company' series. (Provided I cannot again get chance at a preview). The former for it is an excellent ride of a book, carrying me on a Mr. Toads wild ride at times around the world.

The best thing I could say about this book I think would be to tell you that I intend to purchase this book immediately. And, I've already read it once!

I'm also a fan of Asimov's Science Fiction and Amazing Stories, both of which have printed related novellas and short stories which really add extra flavor to this book series. I constantly found myself connecting the dots as they say, which added to the experience.

Mind you the story stands on its own, but I implore you to read the whole lot! Ms. Baker is a consumate story teller, I found myself really THERE with Joseph and Lewis. If you pick up this book I guarantee you will never look at two locals in California the same again, Catalina Island and Ghiradelli Square. I defy you not to laugh out loud at the antics of Joseph and Lewis in San Francisco in the late 1900's. I found myself saying "Of course he would! I would!"

I cannot type more for fear of spoiling my favorite parts for the rest of you.

Read this book! If for no other reason than so you may wait with me for the next wonderful installment!

-wayne

I have to admit that my review is going to be a bit skewed because I was definitely expecting things that this book did not deliver. I don't necessarily think it's Kage Baker's fault. She really didn't lead me on or anything. But really, I was expecting to find out exactly where Mendoza was, to find out what happens after 2355 (when the big silence falls), and to understand what the heck was going on. I don't really feel like I got any of those things from this book, but I did get a very entertaining and fun story.

The most important thing for you to know before you buy this book is that you should do some pre-reading. Although the story does stand on it's own, it will make a heck of a lot more sense if you've read Baker's earlier Company books. BUT in addition to reading the books (Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, and Mendoza in Hollywood), you'll understand a lot more of what is going on if you read Baker's short stories featuring several characters important to the story. The only place that I know of to get these stories is online at fictionwise.com. It's a set of 6 stories that explain where the heck these characters came from and what they are doing.

If there is any shortfall in this book, it is in the details missing from the story but present in the short stories. Since I had read the short stories already, this didn't bother me. But if you haven't read the short stories, I personally think you will spend a lot of time scratching your head and going "what the heck?", "huh?", and "who is THAT?!?".

When last we saw everyone's favorite Company operative Mendoza, she was having a major breakdown and killing a bunch of mortals. Then she disappeared. Graveyard Game (which has oddly few graveyards) is about her friends Joseph and Lewis searching for her. Joseph was the operative who originally recruited Mendoza and it seems like he feels a lot of personal guilt for what has happened to her. Lewis has a bit of a crush on Mendoza and he's also fascinated or possibly obsessed by her love affair with "the tall Englishman" (Edward).

This book is radically different than the early Company novels because all of those novels start in the past. This novel starts around the current time and moves forward from there. One of Baker's major strengths in earlier novels is that she is great at writing historical fiction. She puts in all sorts of neat details and goes to the extra effort to make her history believable. In earlier novels, I could always understand the perspective of the cyborgs with their technological sophistication reacting to backwards mortals. However, in the Graveyard Game, Baker does a relatively good job of showing people in the future. I had a harder time understanding the world she was creating, though.

Overall, as with all of the earlier company novels, a fun read and definitely worthwhile.

Kage Baker churns out another of her fantastic novels starring a group of immortal time-traveling cyborgs. 'The Graveyard Game' picks up where 'Mendoza in Hollywood' left off. Mendoza, having violated Company directives, is exiled to Back Way Back, many many thousands of years in the past. 'The Graveyard Game' relates the quest of two cyborgs, Facilitator Joseph (a main character from Books 1 & 2) and Literature Specialist Lewis, to find Mendoza and discover the ugly truth behind The Company's secrets.

Secrets like, what happened to the prehistoric Enforcers? What lies behind the mysterious date of 2355? And what happens to good cyborgs gone bad?

I love Baker's Company novels. They're well-written and easy to read. Baker creates enjoyable characters that stay within their parameters. They don't veer off into directions that leave the reader shrugging shoulders in exasperation. I enjoy the fact that Baker incorporates Cyborg characters from her other novels and short stories. It's fun to see how the various characters mature and grow over the centuries (especially watching Latif grow from a child to a cyborg).

Baker's novels are light easy reading. They won't challenge you, but they will intrigue you and more than likely keep you up past your bedtime. Recommended.

The 'Company' controls time, sending its immortal agents to capture and 'save' lost plants, books, artwork, and whatever else might have value in the future. Yet all of the company's power seems unable to prevent the spread of plagues that decimate the world's population and earthquakes that destroy much of the rest of the world. Or is it, perhaps, that the company is behind this destruction and lying even to its own agents?

Two immortals, Lewis and Joseph, share an obsession with a strangely vanished immortal, Mendoza. Immortals are not supposed to disappear--they are, after all, immortal and Joseph and Lewis have all the time in the world to find her. As they investigate, they discover that more and more of the immortals have vanished, are vanishing as the world counts down to the year when all future communications ends.

Just by looking, Lewis and Joseph create powerful enemies, yet they seem compelled to continue, to take risks that their thousands of years of life must tell them are dangerous. Their obsession continues to tug them on, however.

Kage Baker does a wonderful job describing a future that is bleak largely because of people trying to do good--and an organization of incredible power but riddled with factions seeking their own, conflicting, goals. The concept drives the novel even when some of the individual characters are not fully motivated.

I found THE GRAVEYARD GAME to be both page-turning and thought provoking--a powerful combination.

Every one of Kage Baker's Company books are great, either alone or taken as a series. This one, though, is the finest and most complicated yet. It's darker, but not bleak - a mature, complex story, very satisfying in itself and yet definately whetting the reader's appetite for more, more, MORE!

The New York Times said that if John Le Carre wrote science fiction, it would read like the Graveyard Game. I think it's better than that: Le Carre lacks the intimate connection with the fate of the characters that Baker does so well and so easily. She clearly cares about her heroes, even when putting them through horrific adventures and fates - and because she does, so do you.

As always, her evocation of place and time is flawless. It's even more interesting this time, since so much of the Graveyard Game takes place in the actual future. It's not a particularly NICE future, but it's awfully believable. And as usual, even her darker visions are leavened with genuine humor and stalwart heroism. Joseph and Lewis shine.

They also entertain richly. There are scenes that are fall-off-your-chair funny (you'll never be able to keep a straight face in an ice cream parlor again) and absolutely gripping action takes, like the fate of the famed Lost Ninth Legion of the Romans. Ms. Baker continues to add romance to her story, so sadly lacking in most science fiction, but this time it's definately guy-stuff romance: toughness. Heroes. Action, adventure and chivalry, determined fights for lost causes.

This is great story telling. I recommend it highly, and can hardly wait for the next one!

Baker's "The Company" series takes a definate darker turn as the year 2355 comes closer and some its all too-human cyborg operatives start finding evidence that the promised luxury retirement after all their millenia of work saving the history and treasures of mankind, may be retirement of the very dead type.I won't give it away here, but it may not be just "The Company" and mortals that will be against them in 2355. The hunt gets curiouser and curiouser("Alice" style)as cyborgs Lewis and Joseph, in search of the missing cyborgs Mendoza and Badu discover hidden crypts full of missing operatives in regenerative fluid, presumably held for a future wake-up call, but no Mendoza or Badu. Along the way, they find out a lot more about Arthur Bell-Fairfax, Mendoza's dead 19th-century lover and his involvement with "The Company", and evidence that "The Company" goes way, way back and is not just the supercorporation of the 24th century. The names involved may suprise you! We also meet up with some of the other immortal operatives that appeared in the earlier books in the series, although Baker writes them in with enough backstory, one doesn't have to have read the three previous books(although you are missing a lot if you haven't). A continued running gag is Lewis and Joseph's never-ending search for cyborgs' drug of choice(chocolate)with the passing years as mortals outlaw coffee, caffeine, chocolate, wine, milk products, meat and poultry as immoral and/or cruel to animals.

This continuing story works on two levels: pure science fiction and a parable about the baby-boom generation(the cyborgs) clash with the present generations' press for their own immortality by doing whatever's right to live longer and be PC in everything, delivered in Baker's tongue-in-cheek, laugh outload, dark-humored style. As I finished the last chapter, I pulled out the three previous books and will re-read them, looking for clues to predict book five. This is Harry Potter for grown-ups!

There's something wonderful about watching an author's style evolve. In her earlier novels of the Company, Kage Baker was clearly having fun, but at times (notably in Sky Coyote), she seemed to sacrifice character development for cheap humor. In her fourth novel, The Graveyard Game, she has proven to be capable of fully integrating the tragedy of her erstwhile heroine, Mendoza, with solid, complex character development.

The Company is a shadowy organization (officially called Dr. Zeus) that has mastered time travel and immortality, and the cyborgs they've created as a part of their immortality process are the stars of the series. Mendoza, the heroine of the first and third novels, is this novel's macguffin. Her arrest at the end of Mendoza in Hollywood is unknown to all but a few Company operatives, and when, in the year 1996, Facilitator Joseph (who rescued Mendoza when she was a child, and views himself as her father), and Literature Specialist Lewis (who has been in love with Mendoza for centuries) find out about the arrest, they set out to discover what happened to her.

Of course, since the Company monitors its agents remotely, and since few know what has happened, their quest spans hundreds of years, and starts to uncover the vast conspiracy that was only hinted at in Sky Coyote. Joseph already knew something was amiss -- the Enforcers, a group of Company operatives from the old days, when violence was a more common tool of the Company, have all vanished. Joseph's own "father," Badu, is among the missing, and he left an encrypted clue about his fate with Joseph (from which the book gets its title).

Lewis, meanwhile, is uncovering even more unsettling news about Mendoza's fate, and that of her second human lover, Edmund Bell-Fairfax. Events that had previously been thought to be coincidences now appear to have been contrived by the Company. And the Company itself seems to have dark origins that were only hinted at previously. As Lewis and Joseph delve further into the conspiracy, and as the 24th century (and the official creation of the Company) approaches, the book takes our heroes down a paranoia-laden path, as they find reasons to distrust both their human masters at the Company and even some of their fellow cyborgs.

Although Baker takes us through three centuries of conspiracies and tragedy (especially as we discover the fates of Mendoza's colleagues from the previous novel), she paces The Graveyard Game wonderfully, fleshing out Lewis and Joseph as genuinely interesting characters, providing some wonderfully humanizing (and humorous) moments along the way, including a delightful scene in which our heroes go on a chocolate bender -- chocolate having the same effect on them as alcohol on mortals. Lewis's love of Mendoza (and his obsession with Bell-Fairfax), and Joseph's anguish at losing both his father and his daughter, add a depth to their quest for the truth about who they are, and who they work for. This makes the tragic denouement all the more poignant.

Baker's writing style has come a long way over the course of four novels. She has moved from writing fun romps to writing some of the best character-driven science-fiction out there. With The Graveyard Game, she has proven that she deserves to be placed on the same shelf as such writers as Connie Willis, John Barnes and Nancy Kress. It would be a delight to see her shortlisted (and even winning) a World Fantasy Award in the near future.

Baker's Company novels are getting darker and darker, and more and more addictive. Something truly awful is going to happen, and I can hardly wait to find out what it is! The Graveyard Game advances the plot, telling us a lot about Lewis' lonely life and Joseph's curiosity--and leaves us on the edge of our chairs. This novel would not stand alone--I doubt if it would make much sense without having read at least the previous one. Most recommended--to read them all, in order.

First let me say that one needs to read the novels of this series in order - this one in particular will make no sense otherwise. This is the fourth novel, but there is also a collection of short stories Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers that one may wish to read first.

This apparently begins a shift in recounting the history of The Company. Previous novels centered around a group of Immortals sent to one or a limited number of places to conduct their research projects and rescue operations. The details of character, time and place are loving developed in Baker's brilliant prose, wild and witty imaginings, humor and serious speculation.

This work was disappointing to me - in the first place, it is not terribly successful as a novel, seeming to be rather one volume of a multi-volume work that leaves all sorts of dangling ends, despite being framed by Joseph's speculations and search for Budu. I wonder how long this is going to go on? Looking ahead at the next couple of books, the story doesn't appear to wrap up any time soon. I have finally given up on reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (currently up to the 11th of what I understood to be projected as 5 parts.) Frankly, I don't want to get into reading another apparently endless serial work, especially if the installments, unsatisfying in themselves, are going to be published at wide intervals. It simply becomes too frustrating trying to remember all the minor characters and incidents over a protracted period of time, all the while hoping that the author doesn't die before pulling all this together. I think I'll wait until Baker finishes, if she ever does, and maybe then read the entire work.

Although there are some wonderful sections in this novel, worthy of Baker at her best, on the whole, I found it a little dull. The story is told in relatively brief episodes stretching over almost 300 years, eliminating the loving evocation of time and place in earlier books. There are long monologues and expositions of the history that we are missing. One of the most basic rules of good novel writing is show, don't tell. I am almost as bored as Joseph by Lewis' obsession with Edward, even though I can read the forshadowing and see that this will be important. Lewis's attempts to write a novel starring Edward would be much more amusing if the book wasn't already so patchy.

Since I'm not as caught up in this novel, I have both the attention and a greater inclination to pick at the inconsistencies. Let me make a distinction here: the plotline is fueled by inconsistencies that the characters notice and are attempting to resolve. I am referring to things that don't make a great deal of sense, but which these super-brilliant characters don't seem to notice.

Foremost would be anything to do with the Enforcers. Supposedly, the rise of human culture was retarded for 10,000 years by the Great Goat Cult, a violent early religion that massacred all unbelievers, killing half the population of Europe and Asia. The Company originally was waiting for the movement to exhaust itself naturally, but finally decided to intervene by selectively breeding a heroic warrior race (the Enforcers), to destroy the cult, by now spread out over much of the earth, with stone age weapons.

Now, why would the Company go to all that trouble when they could just have sent a couple of security technicians with automatic rifles to nip the cult in the bud? The Company is sitting in the 24th century with the capability of time travel - the opportunity to act in the past doesn't pass them by. From their vantage point, they can see the entire history of the cult and they know that it will last for thousands of years. All of the "waiting" to decide what to do would be in the 24th century, not prehistory.

There is still a great deal of wit and wisdom in these stories that the reader can enjoy in spite of the problems, but the author's universe is losing the integrity that separates science fiction from fiction with fantastic touches.

First book in the series: In the Garden of Iden (The Company)

After three novels set in the past and detailing the typical operations of Company operatives, Kage Baker's series jumps into the future with The Graveyard Game. Joseph and Lewis, brought together by their concern over the fate of Botanist Mendoza, begin an investigation into her disappearance that will last centuries, lead them all over the world, and reveal some of Dr. Zeus's deepest secrets. Some questions are answered. Others remain. New problems emerge. And the Silence grows closer.

Baker really ups the ante in this installment. It is here that the Company novels become a continuous series rather than a broad milieu. Plot threads from the three previous books are tied together, and the shape of the future begins to emerge. The tradeoff here is that there's less time for character exploration and development. The (sometimes excessively) leisurely-paced historical narratives are gone, replaced by a future of political correctness gone mad and the great nations of the world gone to the dogs. The strength of this vision, and the developing complexity of the plot, are The Graveyard Game's major assets. 4 stars, or 8/10.