Sunday, August 15, 2010

Primal by Robin Baker


So, every time I was straightening the fiction section at the bookstore, this book caught my eye. Could be the eye on the cover, the title of the book, the description on the back, whatever, I wanted to read it. It sounded as if it would be similar to the tv show Lost, but with more sex. So I knew I had to get it. First I checked to see if it would ever be a strip cover return, but no, it would always be a whole copy return. So I knew I'd have to buy it. With one larger paycheck from the bookstore this summer, I went ahead and picked it up. And even though I have almost 300 books sitting in my office still needing to be read, I picked it up as soon as I finished another book.


Anyway, back to the book itself. It is about a group of graduate students and a renowned scientist who go on a field trip to an isolated island in the Pacific. It turns out this island is home to a population of chimpanzees, that were brought as sort of an experiment to see what happens when they're taken from all the other social groups and made to figure things out on their own. And it seems when disaster strikes the people, the boat sinks, their leader disappears, assumed dead on the boat, and all their clothes also are gone in a crazy wind storm, well now, they are left on their own, to see what people do when away from society. And they do turn primal. And this book has LOTS of sex, and not good sex. When going back to nature, the men become uncivilized, as do some of the women.


However it was a bit hard to get into the story. It's not told as a story really at first, but as the author trying to figure out what had happened to the survivors. We do get a tiny part that is like a story, but then that ends, and we're back to the author trying to piece the happenings together through evidence brought back. And then the very end we're in the story again, as the author travels back with some of the survivors to this island to try to tie up some loose ends. Not sure I'd recommend this, don't know if I'd ever want to read it again, but it wasn't a bad story, just hard to read.