Disposable Lit Reviews

William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1996
463 pp.
ISBN 0-688-14863-8
Buy it from
Amazon.com or
eBay or Half.com

The 1990’s saw an interesting spurt of novels dealing with our hominid progenitors, usually in the form of some tribe of primitive humans discovered in a far-flung corner of the world. Granted, such tales are nothing new; ape-men were common to pulp magazines back in the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs. But the recent novels had certain similariies that almost branded them as a distinct subgenre, even though there’s little evidence that they were written in conscious imitation of each other. I can only guess that the near-simultaneous inspiration for these books came from the state of anthropology itself, as the decade marked a series of continuous discoveries in the history of human evolution. Our ancestors became much more real, and much easier to imagine.

Unfortunately, with so many novels coming out at once, they tended to retread the same ground repeatedly. This novel, though perhaps less a conscious pot-boiler than some others, is no different.

Obviously, we have a hero, in this case young anthopologist Ken Lauder, working in Kenya with his Masai friend Ngili. Together, they casually begin an aerial exploration of an area south of the Mau escarpment, where they discover an almost perfect australopithecine fossil. They also discover by accident, through comparing some fossil plants with the local fauna, that the ecology of the area apparently hasn’t changed appreciably in two million years. they don’t manage to make the obvious leap, though, until Ken discovers primitive footprints — showing an extended big toe, but obviously bipedal — in fresh earth.

Naturally, if there’s a hero, there must be a villain, and if it’s to be a big novel, several villains. The main one here is Cecil Anderson, silver-haired celebrity anthropologist, who has built his career on his charm and the work of others. Ken and Ngili try desperately to keep their find out of his snatching hands, but Cecil knows how to smell out a career opportunity. Several other locals are on the Heavy List, including a crab-legged poacher named Mobido who’s paid to kill Ken while he’s alone in the savannah. He almost succeeds, leaving Ken injured and without supplies or water; Ken almost dies before he’s found by the maker of the footprints — a gracile australopithecine youth the Ken dubs “Long-Toes.”

As well as interpersonal politics, these novels always seem to be set against a backdrop of national or international politics, and again, this is no exception. (Granted, most of the world outside of NATO is always embroiled in some kind of coup or revolution most of the time, so it would be pretty hard to find a backwater for hominids to be hiding in with a stable political backdrop.) Ngili’s father is an official in the Kenyan government, and one of the few non-corrupt powerholders, which is how Ken manages not to be sent out of the country as soon as tensions begin to rise, thanks to agitators plotting a coup. And naturally, several of the people involved in such machinations are hiding a secret relating to the mangati, the ancient name for the primitive tribe of Masai legend who were driven out of their lands.

It goes without saying that there has to be romance. Here, Ken discovers to his surprise that he’s deeply attracted to Ngili’s sister Yinka, and she to him, after years of cross-cultural banter. They have one physical encounter before he leaves and gets himself lost in the wilds, leaving her to join her brother in anxious worry for his return. Thankfully, this keeps the romantic subplot from dominating the main story.

And finally, there has to be a deep, almost spiritual angle to the book. Somehow, in our harried and overcommunicative world, we have developed the need to see aboriginals as possessing the purer spirituality that we seek — sort of a “noble savage” paradigm for the New Age. While we don’t get nearly the didacticism here of, say, The Celestine Prophecies, Ken and Long-Toes spend enough time alone in the savannah for him to discover some primal truths about himself, and humanity, and such.

I mentioned above that several novels of this ilk are conscious potboilers, books of the sort that do their majority of sales at supermarket checkout counters and airport kiosks. Mercifully, Almost Adam avoids the rote writing found in most of that market; it’s readily apparent that Popescu has done his homework, and he seems almost eager to show off his research.

The main problem here, aside from so much competition in the “discovering our ancestors” subgenre, is the stiff prose in which Popescu writes. A defector from Romania, Popescu is not a native English speaker, and as impressive as his command of the language is, it still doesn’t flow as it would from a native. Combined with the massive amounts of exposition sandwiched into the narrative (most of which is necessary, granted, and all of which is interesting in its own right), the once-removed feeling of the prose puts the style one full level down from, say, the workmanlike output of a Michael Crichton. And at 463 pages, that gets a little old.

If you’ve got a taste for anthropology, you may well enjoy this book. If you’re looking for a quick adventure read, steer clear.

Nathan Shumate