Primal [Paperback]

I could not put this book down. It is not a page-turner in the sense of a beach-book read for an easy few hours. It is anything but easy. It is edgy, tense and gives a pricture of what the human psyche is all about beneath the trappings and norms and expectations of modern society. The book reveals how easily our carefully constructed society with all its cultural and sexual strata can so easily collapse like a pack of cards when there is no-one to judge, see or punish you for acting on one's instincts and base urges rather than conforming to "accepted" and "civilised" behaviour. These students find themselves stranded outside civilisation and the book offers a chilling insight into what lies potentially within us all. A gripping read and highly recommended.

I read this book in one sitting. The insight into our sexuality was fascinating and it's the kind of book which raises lots of questions whilst you read it. I really enjoyed it and found the slightly detached scientific approach an effective way of narrating all the extremely intimate events which happened.
Would recommend.

The story is set up as a piece of metafiction, with the author prefacing the novel with a lengthy prologue detailing how a bunch of students and their supervisors were rescued from a tropical paradise over a year after they had gone missing. Originally they were to have spent only one month on the island.

A media circus ensues, deals start to get made -

- and then all involve announce their withdrawal from the public eye, stating only that a book shall be commissioned giving a full account of their ordeal.

Our author is enlisted with such a task... only he's not buying it. He's not buying the fact that 3 months into their isolation - when it became unavoidably clear rescue wasn't coming, despite the fact that their scheduled return home was long overdue - all lived harmoniously for the next 10 months before their eventual rescue came. Not buying it, because the various stories of the survivors existence during those first 3 months paints a picture of fear, violence, frayed nerves and loves made and betrayed. But the party line remains adamant: they 'got their heads straight'. They 'knuckled down' and got on with the business of survival.

Sure, the author's thinking: next you'll be telling me you all got down with Jesus.

Something happened during those final 10 months - lots of things - only no ones telling. The author has been assigned to one of the survivors, Ysan, to collaborate on the group's official survival story. But even extracting the 'party-line' of those first 3 months proves trying, though eventually the author manages to get to the truth -

- but not of those final 10 months.

During the author's long and wearying course of trying to get the full story from Ysan they become close, and during her unguarded moments and erratic mood swings Ysan gives tantalising hints as to what really went down during those 10 months.

And then she clams up, and cuts all ties with the author.

The first half of the novel, "Ysan's Story", is a straightforward narrative of what happened on the island during those first 3 months, the author building up a superb portrait of the young students and their supervisors. Each character is distinctive, but not a cliché; all are excellently rounded out.

For the remaining ten months the author could have chosen the same structure. Which would have been fine: the novel would still have been good. However, by doing it the way he has - as a piece of metafiction where the author is himself a character trying to piece together an exposé of what truly went down - the author has raised the novel above the norm.

Consisting of letters, emails and even descriptions of drawings rendered by one of the students during their stay on the island, the author patches together a fascinating story of men and women forced to live a basic life of survival while stripped of everything: their clothes, shelter, food, society, morals, reason, accountability -

- everything.

The group's leader, Professor Raúl, has this conversation with one of his students, Ysan, near the beginning of the novel, where they are discussing a breeding experiment involving chimps: taking young zoo chimpanzees and placing them in a jungle environment.

(Ysan) "But isn't it better to watch wild chimps, in their natural habitat?"
(Raúl) "Not necessarily. You see, in their natural habitat, animals carry an awful lot of baggage: family, territory, history, culture. Stuff like that. Clouds everything. Can't see a thing. But strip it all away, take them back to the beginning, give them a blank page, then you can see them properly, for what they are."

Was the group's isolation, then, an accident? (after all, why did it take 13 months to find and rescue them...).

Near the end of the novel the author uncovers this snippet from a TV interview Professor Raúl did many years before:

"If you really want to know what humans are made of, just try returning them to the wild. Make them live naked amongst apes. You won't like what you see, but maybe then you'll understand. Modern society is just a way of hiding us from our true selves. That's now fragile it is."

PRIMAL, then, is what the interminable TV series "Lost" should have been, but now never will: a fascinating examination of what human nature really is.

More, by structuring the second half of the novel the way in which he has, the author is also able to explore the whole Big Brother/cult of the celebrity side of our society as he observes the behaviour of the survivors under the glare of the media spotlight, of which he is a part as he attempts to coerce them into revealing what really happened on the island. The author himself even becomes - briefly - romantically involved with one of the survivors, which itself opens up a whole can of worms and makes the reader question just now much more 'objective' his exposé is as compared to that of the survivor group's official PR line.

Terrific stuff, and heads and shoulders above what most people come to expect from a publisher's 'horror line', and as such a fitting addition to Virgin Books very high quality line of literary, intelligent works of edgy fiction.

Highly recommended.