Review 82: The Eden Paradox

The Eden Paradox by Barry Kirwan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is quite an achievement, but perhaps not in the sense that you would expect. Few writers, that I know of, would be able to pull off exactly what Mr. Kirwan has done here. He managed to write a book by himself, though it has all the hallmarks of being written by someone with a split personality. I am not sure of Mr. Kirwan's mental state, nor would it be appropriate to make assumptions, but I can come to no other conclusion. This book continues to sway between constant extremes which give the feeling that this book was written by both a 17-year-old boy with too many hormones raging through his pubescent body, a first-year literature student who doesn't know when to be brief and has no sense for completely inappropriate pacing, mood, and emotion, while at the same time having flashes of quality that can only be ascribed to an author with years of experience.

It makes for a jarring reading experience.

Let me give you some examples. The female characters are almost all pretty and need to be sexual. A woman cannot be an interesting character without it, at least not in this book. ''Tight assess'', ''voluptuous assets'' and various other descriptions that are only given to woman are abound in this novel. To my recollection, not a single man is described by a physical descriptor, which seems to be a right solely reserved for women.

Then there's the clanky dialogue, the wonky analogies, and the simply weird pacing. Let me give you a few direct quotes from the book itself:

''He surreptitiously pinched his left arm with his right hand.'' Brevity, my man, brevity! What the heck is this sentence? Just say he pinched himself. This sentence gives me the feeling that pinching oneself with anything else than your hand is a common occurrence. Also, why would you need to do this secretly?

''He moved his closed left fist over to her hand and opened it.'' Just say he gave her something! Again, what's with the unnecessary description?

But my personal favourite (and this one and the last two are just one from one single chapter, the book is stuffed with strange and clunky sentences like that), is this:

''And I was just getting to like you. Do you know how rare that is?'' Is this a funny quip after someone did something slightly silly? A light-hearted comment perhaps? Nope. These are the words from a character said to another WHO LITERALLY JUST DIED AFTER SAVING THEIR LIFE! Who the hell says that a corpse? In what weird-ass world does Mr. Kirwan live?

Talking about worlds, we come to the only good things about this book, the reason I actually finished this book, and that is the world-building. Mr. Kirwan builds an interesting story world, with a decently crafted backdrop, the bad guys are believable enough and the plot, in an overall sense, has enough going for it to be interesting. It's a shame that the author then has to ruin this all with overbearing exposition, ''tight asses'' over depth of character, and dialogue that takes me right out of the story and makes me roll my eyes so hard they nearly launch out of the back of my head (that last part of the sentence was inspired by this novel).

Oh, and who is this guy's editor? Brevity is key and this book is sorely lacking in it. With a splash of it, this book could have done with at least 50 pages less.

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