Wilbur Smith
Gli eredi dell'Eden

Compelling story with protagonist Mark Anders, too young for the war that involved him, in which he uses his talent with the precision rifle.

Mark gives what he can, including his blood, then returns home, and the life he knew is no longer there. Prematurely finding himself an adult, he still needs friends, and he finds them in former comrades-in-arms, starting with those who shared the trenches with him, up to General Sean COURTNEY, an overwhelming, influential, massive, and protective figure.

When the supports that sustained him end up aligned against each other in the bitter internal struggle for the political balances of the post-war period, Mark will have to choose, and that choice will necessarily entail betrayal.

I write about this book to highlight some atypical features compared to the standard (much extolled as well as criticized) of Wilbur SMITH. The protagonist is not a superhero, handsome and infallible. He's an ordinary guy, with some talents and many weaknesses. He is indecisive, awkward, especially with women, and endures events rather than riding them. In the long run, he will emerge and capture the reader's sympathies, but in a much more ordinary, light, acceptable way to most.

But even Wilbur's fans will find something to quench their hunger for adventurous plots: there's Africa, ever-present, an Oscar-worthy co-star, with its wickedness and sometimes mysterious wonders that inhabit it. There is blood, there is sex, and there is the now-epic figure of the glorious SEAN, the patriarch of a family of great men, a war hero, an entrepreneur, with a gruff character. Those who have followed him from when, 50 years earlier, he had set out without a penny to his name to conquer Africa, will be quite shaken when they realize that...

In "Eredi dell'Eden," the COURTNEYs are merely guests in the book, not the protagonists.

But Wilbur does not miss the chance to twist the reader's guts by superbly orchestrating the generational clashes between the members of a powerful and politically aligned family. The clash between Sean and Dirk, father and son, lays bare all the rot into which a man can fall if driven by greed and the thirst for power; the reader, horrified by some passages, cannot help but open their hands and realize that this rot is plausible, that this rot "happens," and that Wilbur renders it with disarming coldness.

A difficult, raw book, at times made heavy by avoidable descriptions of the fauna. Excellent for enthusiasts, who like me will be unable to stop reading anyway, good for skeptics who, in light of the skill of the socio-political descriptions, and the differences from the standards I mentioned, may overcome the old adage that "those who write about blood and sex just to sell," may indeed possess true talent guiding their fingers on the keyboard.