Waiting for Eden: A Novel
By: Elliot Ackerman / Narrated By: MacLeod Andrews
Length: 3 hrs and 27 mins
Was indeed expecting the Brutality… was NOT expecting the heart-shattering Beauty… simply Gorgeous
We were allowed to see ANYthing we wanted to when we were kids. I bring this up cuz, tho’ Vietnam had been on the TV endlessly, my sister and I were beyond blown away when we happened upon “Johnny Got His Gun.” The reality of what those young men went through, how they came back, the miracles of modern medicine. It left us sucker-punched, and we were just kids, but boy how it marked us. Brilliant movie.
So I was kind of expecting a Modern Take on that story with Waiting for Eden which opens with the dead narrator watching his comrade in arms and good friend in bed, a burnt torso with vastly decreased brain function. This man, this modern miracle whom the doctors always discuss in muted tones, always ending with a: Just a matter of time… is Eden. Eden was once a buff Marine, but now he’s only so much ravaged flesh, and all wait for him to die, to end it all. His brother and sister have made their wishes known, but Eden’s wife Mary silently shrugs them off. They leave to have a memorial service for the man who will never be again, but Mary holds vigil on the sofa in Eden’s room, for years.
She was 2-months away from giving birth when his remaining 70-lbs. of torso came back from the war, and soon she has left her toddler daughter with her mother as she waits and waits and waits, expecting to add a +1 to the combined deaths of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan for the day. It just doesn’t happen.
Waiting for Eden takes us beyond the pressure plate that did this to him, that killed everyone around him, and instead focuses on the oh so human realities for loved ones in the military. Mary’s story is known, her fears, her failings, her love, her frustration, her complete and utter agony as we see consequences for choices she’s made in utter desperation. The blast that got Eden is not from a first deployment; he signed up for a second tour. HIS choices have consequences, and author Elliot Ackerman, himself a veteran of five tours in both wars, takes us into Eden’s reality within, where he sees dimly, but feels acutely the horrors of a cockroach in his room, on his body, ready to annihilate him; he hears through the walls, as he is helpless in a bed where he seeps and decays, the steady roar of cockroaches swirling, getting ready to swarm.
And he wants it to End. But his brain, which can still tell him that he suffers, canNOT tell others what his dearest wishes are. He’s trapped, and Ackerman brilliantly depicts his tortured efforts, the hope that maybe, somehow, Mary or whomever, will hear him, will know that this stump of a man is still There, still with a shred of Dignity and wishing for just a touch of Control.
MacLeod Andrews takes what is a brilliant novel, and he makes it absolutely Heart Stopping. The nameless narrator, Eden’s best friend, is numb from grief, from what transpired before the deployment, from being helpless and stuck in a gray place, waiting for his buddy to join him to whatever is next After This, chronicling each day that Mary waits on that sofa. We hear his story, his memories, and Andrews takes a ponderous story, heavy with the wretchedness of human experience for the few, and he just hammers the anguish straight into your soul. At no point did I wish to listen at anything but proper x1 speed because, from the first paragraph, tho’ Andrews speaks slowly, his voice is so incredibly emotionally resonant.
Ackerman builds brick by heavy brick, this story of three people all the way to a point where I was gasping with unshed tears, feeling the coming of heavy hammer blows of pain… and then he takes the story entirely elsewhere. I couldn’t believe he did NOT take advantage of just how much he built.
-But then- MacLeod Andrews delivers the final sentences, in a voice heavy with tears, of absolute, well jeez, nope can’t spoil it. Just know that Ackerman, before the Epigraph that gives the Listener a chance to sob and absorb it all, does something absolutely unimaginable. That finish danged near killed me, right when I thought I was going to Boo! him for SUCH a BuildUp: Oh how gorgeous, oh how devastatingly beautiful.
Long review for a short audiobook you can finish at one sitting. But for this beauty? Brevity just is NOT in me. Ackerman’s Few Words left me with so very much in my mind, in my heart, in my soul. And MacLeod Andrews? Sir, you made me sob openly…
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