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A review by mikime
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
4.0
This is a novel about both the future and the past of humanity, in a way. The small group of people forming the "Family" were all originally born of the same couple of astronauts from Earth who crashed on the so-called Eden planet and decided to stay, while three other astronauts left on a not entirely reliable spaceship to try and go back to Earth, or at least call for help. Their story, the origin story of the people on Eden, is told and retold every year, and words and devices left by them are shown, repeated and revered as sacred and fundamental to the Family's survival, even though most of their meaning and functioning are lost. The Family follow the rules set by their original parents literally, in the hope of seeing some spaceship come back to pick them all up and take them back to Earth, where there is light from the sky and so many facilities and life is supposedly easy. Theirs is a dark world, an upside down, inside out world in a way, where all light and warmth come from the underground, the underwater, and from the inside of trees, flowers, and animals. The people lead a hunters&gatherers life mostly, and innocently and meekly follow the rules and the organisation in tribes with different schedules and living zones, but never too far from the original landing site, even as food resources are getting scarcer and scarcer ... until a restless kid, John, shockingly, decides to speak up and suggest a new course, a move from their valley, to at least explore and possibly settle in, a place beyond the dark and cold mountains around them..... He thus starts a series of events that will lead to the separation of a small group from Family and to a number of unheard of actions by some of the people, against all rules and reason. But they all also find out that Eden has a lot more to offer than they imagined, and a different truth about the past will emerge, changing everything for the people in Eden.
One of the most interesting things of this novel is the way the characters speak (and think), the way they adapted the language of their foreparents and changed it and sometimes just distorted its words for total lack of knowledge of what they refer to, what they really mean. It's really like children's speech, trying to talk of things beyond even their capacity of pronounciation, let alone understanding, thus reinforcing the idea of the people in Eden as innocent children.
One of the most interesting things of this novel is the way the characters speak (and think), the way they adapted the language of their foreparents and changed it and sometimes just distorted its words for total lack of knowledge of what they refer to, what they really mean. It's really like children's speech, trying to talk of things beyond even their capacity of pronounciation, let alone understanding, thus reinforcing the idea of the people in Eden as innocent children.