Flowing rivers, gorgeous trees, bountiful crops, birds and animals to spare: Jim Crace’s latest novel is set in a lower-case, scrupulously mapped version of the Garden of Eden. There, some time after the expulsion of Adam and Eve, peace of a stilted kind reigns: the few dozen human inhabitants know they can “breathe forever without cares”, but there’s a catch – they must obey the angels. These angels have been created in the form of birds, not so much because of their beauty as for their surveillance skills. “A creature that can penetrate the sky can serve his lord and his masters anywhere.”
From an aerial perspective, the garden is a perfect circle, intricately manicured, a praise song to a higher power. On the ground, things look rather different. “Order is the order of the day.” The gardeners, who are diligent and mostly unvoiced, bake bread, clean latrines, collect vegetables and timber, plough the fields. They eat and pray together. At night they sleep in the same dormitory. The atmosphere is frugal rather than fecund: during fasting periods they’re not even allowed to swallow their spit. Ominously, the narrator describes this form of communal living as “sublime uniformity”.
