Anything I read by Jack London I liked a lot and this novel was no exception although it wasn’t about sea adventures or wild dogs as is usually expected of him. I found Before Adam to be original, beautifully written and highly imaginative, which I think the author must have been inspired by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species published in 1859 as this book was first serialized in 1906 and 1907 in Everybody's Magazine. I read its Kindle version.

The book begins with the dreams of its main character, a 20th-century man. In his dreams, he becomes a hominid who lived during the Mid-Pleistocene era. The modern man tells the readers the story of this hominid he calls Big Tooth, of the difficulty of survival in that time period, of grave dangers, love, hate, family, and friendship, but without melodrama.

Big Tooth’s best friend is Lop-Ear and Swift One is his love interest, later his partner. In the beginning, these people live in caves together with their tribe, the narrator calls the Folk. The Folk has a bigger hominid, Red Eye, among them who cruelly lords over them. Red Eye is Big Tooth’s mortal enemy. In addition, there are other hominid groups, like tree-dwelling Tree People who are Big Tooth’s original clan and much more advanced, goal-driven, but violent Fire People that easily take over the caves and kill or eat the cave-dwellers and they may have a crude form of language that the other groups lack. All hominids must also be mindful of the dangers of the savage nature and wild animals like the Saber-Tooth Tiger, wild-dog packs, boars, and snakes.

It is in this environment that Big Tooth lives and has his adventures. To find out what those adventures are, this story is well worth reading it.

Jack London, in the first several pages of the book, tells the readers in detail a theory of genetic inheritance, in which he claims the earliest human experiences are imprinted inside our genes, and he generously improvises details of the lives of early proto-humanoids. One thing I’ve appreciated is that he didn’t push on those early characters our humanly assets or vices.

Plus, the descriptions of the settings and the characters are excellent, and even though, the reader knows it is coming from the writer’s imagination, s/he tends to believe that they are real. Also, that the narrator puts this story together from his disjointed dreams excuses the holes left-out in the plot's construction.

admiring the dimensions of Jack London's imagination.

how the author put the hominids in groups. It was easy to figure out that today's people probably descended from the Fire People.

see if there were other Jack London books that I didn't read yet.

pulled into a much earlier time, unimaginable and savage.

is John Griffith Chaney or Jack London (1876-1916). Among his fictional work are: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Pearls of Parlay, Love of Life, The Heathen.

Even though the book was written more than a century ago, I really liked it with its concrete imagery and the author's brave look at his subject and his fearless narration, which didn't fall into the pitfall of giving those prehistoric characters the attributes of our present species.

There was another similar book published in 1980 (and a movie that I recall), The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel, which narrated a story of the pre-human times. That book, however, gave its tribal people characteristics, ranks, and jobs of what is very similar to human societies.
The stark naturalistic vision of Jack London's pre-historic world made Before Adam more believable for me.

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Created Apr 13, 2018 at 6:38pm • Submit your own review...