Eden by Jim Crace: A strange, unsettling vision of paradise

“So Ebon quickly breaks another rule. The second sin is always easier.” For infinity, Ebon, an orchard hand in Jim Crace’s new novel Eden, has lived his life on repeat: tending the gardens of paradise, harvesting the fruits as the seasons change, sleeping in a dormitory with his fellow workers, never getting sick or old, following the rules set down by God, all the while showing deference to the angels, masters of the garden.

But from the beginning of this intriguing fabular novel, change is coming. In the opening scene the garden hands are summoned to view a dead bird, an uncommon sight in a place where violence and death are largely non-existent. The summons is a warning from above, following the escape from Eden by a free-spirited hand known as Tabi. The rest of the book unfolds through a deft omniscient narrative that follows three characters as they attempt to track her down.

Each of the trio represents the stratified society of Eden: at the bottom, Tabi’s “brother” Ebon, then nasty Alum, a “go-between” who snitches on his fellow hands to the angels, and the blue-feathered, ethereal Jamin, “the lowest of the high”, an angel with a wounded wing. Crace is concerned with power and authority, how such things are corrupted and corruptible, even in so-called paradise.

Fabular novels make for good sociopolitical commentary: Kafka’s surreal allegories; Yann Martel’s Life of Pi; or, most pertinently in this instance, George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In Eden the angels stand in for the pigs. They get the best of everything the garden has to offer, while the hands carry out the work. Like all good autocracies, the hierarchy is absolute — “An angel matters more than any labourer” — and the rules for the lower classes are simple: “They’ll breathe forever without cares, they’ll be provided for, they’ll have no fears — if only they obey.”

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Although it’s “ordained” that angels cannot hate, the actions of their leader Jazib tell a different story. He is full of scorn for the hands, including the go-between Alum, who in turn scorns his peers, using fear and intimidation to keep them in line: “Everyone is careful of what they say and what they do. For fear of being caught by him. For fear of being in his debt.” As he sets off on Tabi’s trail, he’s like a heavenly Ridgway, the slave hunter in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, treating people like livestock that can be captured and returned. In Crace’s powerful prose, “She’s in his nostrils now, his memory. He has her like a hound has quarry before the hunt begins”.

Eden is a strange, unsettling vision of paradise. Tabi’s break for the border, which is to say for the world as we know it, is eminently understandable: “Time ... well, time erodes, especially when there is no end to it.” The world-building in Eden is impressive. Crace riffs on familiar tropes, from forbidden fruits to pearly gates to the giving of alms, while making the drudgery of paradise clear.

The tricky part for a writer is how to make such a repetitive, drama-free world interesting. Crace favours description over action for the first half of the book. Not much happens beyond the three protagonists running into dead ends in their search for Tabi. The latter is arguably the most interesting character, yet mostly offstage. When she does appear in early sections, the narrative takes flight. A scene that shows her grooming Jamin is brilliantly realistic. Her arrival in later sections also enlivens proceedings. The pace picks up considerably in the final third as more characters escape the garden for Earth and, in the process, invite the world and its people into paradise. The hands are powerless to defend themselves: “They have no idea how to oppose a stranger who can use his feet and fists like that.”

Crace is the author of more than a dozen books, including Continent, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize; Quarantine, shortlisted for the Booker; and Harvest, which was shortlisted for the Booker and won the International Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Acclaimed for his stylish writing, Crace does not disappoint in his new book. The rhythmic, limpid prose, the easy cadence, seem particularly well suited to depictions of paradise. It is a version of Eden that is utterly believable, with characters whose individual plights speak to a larger truth: the sham of power and authority, that man-made construct, never more obvious than in this heavenly setting: “It is only Tabi who has the nerve — or is it foolishness — to mutter, just a little too out loud, that the angels are deceiving them. Just fairytales to frighten fools like us.”