Paradises Lost (The Passage Through Time, 1)
This is the first volume of an ambitious proposed eight-volume history of the world in novel form “as if Yuval Noah Harari had met Alexandre Dumas,” the Publisher’s Note informs us. The author is a Franco-Belgian who includes plays and movies among his credits.
Our narrator, Noam, begins by being “reborn” in a cave in the present-day Levant. This storyline views our world from a foreign point of view, that of a specialist in the Neolithic whose knowledge becomes useful to a group of survivalists. This band plans to take over a dying world and outlive the coming Armageddon. Noam knows his stuff because in supernatural ways that may be made clearer in the next volumes, he lives forever, as do others from his origins in the dawn of time.
The main story in this volume takes us back in time to Noam’s origins, “Adam and Eve” and the Flood – when the Black Sea, in a world-altering geological event, tidal-waved into the Mediterranean. Footnotes in Noam’s millennial-spanning voice give us the Harari perspective, including a well-articulated dissection of what it means to be an individual separate from the primeval horde, so to speak. Although they can’t make me believe that this world of individuals developed everything from the ark to metallurgy, it still is worth the ride.
