´It´s time to end the Anthropocene, the age of humans´.
I rarely follow book series because in my bookish experience, they are rarely equal. It may take a couple of mediocre installment until the real geam of the book is revealed and I don´t have that much time anyway.
The Arkane series by J.F.Penn is my exception. I can´t wait for the next book as from a volume to another, there are always extraordinary adventures in the world of religious fanaticism taking place. It explores the worlds beyond our everyeday life, where religion truths are split into thousands of thruths, offered as take-aways for the daily apocalypse. With every book, there are old secrets and rituals revealed and the race against the machine of the Arkane Institute representatives to stop the world from collapse.
In Tree of Life, the 11th book from the series, Morgan Sierra and Jack Timber are tracing an attempt to recreate/localize the Garden of Eden. The daughter of a mining industrialist who wants to restore the Earth meets a fanatic Christian order who owns a seed that can recreate the Garden in different parts of the world.
The story has complex layers and the plot is spreading in different directions, creating suspense while creating a space for the intellectual and philosophical discussions. ´While Morgan certainly understood the devastation that humans did on the face of the Earth, they also achieved wonderful things in conjunction with nature´. The Garden of Eden is a dream and searching for it on Earth, beyond the simple biblical meaning, was a current concern among the religious orders of the Middle Ages (J.F.Penn offers at the end of the book a vast bibliography of sources she consulted in writing this book, among which Jean Delumeau´s History of Paradise, an excellent reference in this respect). But it might be that the dream is not always replicating a reality, any kind of reality.
In the book, the Garden, which is found this time on the highest peak of Sahand Mountain, in Iran, close to the borders with Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan ´was no manicured lawn with pruned trees and tamed flower beds as depicted in every artistic rendering of Adam and Eve in Paradise. This was an underground rainforest, an abundance of color and growth, teeming with life. This was Nature unbound´.
Tree of Life is skillfully balancing the ideas with the thriller action and there is so many discussions and ideas to think about, from the natural longing of humanity for perfection and peace in the middle of the nature, to the eco-terrorism and religious fanaticism based on obscures references which obliterate, willingly or not, the specific contexts and nuances.
For me this is probably one of the favorite from the series, but I cannot be sure to settle too soon, at least until the next book is coming out.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Disclaimer: Book offered by the author in exchange for an honest review
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