~ aka. The Evolution Man and The Evolution Man or How I Ate My Father. ~

Terry Pratchett describes this as “one of the funniest books of the last 500,000 years” – it’s difficult to categorise, although it feels like good science fiction and was one of the first novels Brian Aldiss chose to start the Penguin SF list. Lewis was working as The Economist‘s Commonwealth Affairs correspondent in Africa when he got the idea for The Evolution Man, partially from observing the dismantling of British colonial rule there and also from reflecting on the aeons of history that lay beneath the current political goings-on. It’s a single primitive Pleistocene hominid, Edward, whose family only recently came down from the trees, who seems to have figured out most of the essentials that make up civilised existence – fire, weapons, cooking, animal domestication, exogamy – making the Rift Valley the true cradle of early civilisation many thousands of years before Mesopotamia. I particularly like the way Lewis leads the reader towards each of Edward’s discoveries, usually being a consequence of the misuse of the previous discovery, so the novel therefore gets consistently more cohesive the further in you get, and once you get Edward’s prehistoric world-view as he tries to give his family the best opportunities in life, his tone of voice and manner become very palpable. I certainly liked Lewis’s sense of humour – whether a reader would still find it laugh-out-loud probably depends on their personal disposition because it’s certainly of the wry and knowing type (a bit like Edward himself) and cleverly situational, and you can sense Lewis’s smirk as he wrote it on almost every page. I found the thread of humour sometimes became buried beneath a little too much scene-setting, particularly early on, but a second reading would probably unearth a few more literate gags that I missed the first time around. Certainly a fun read from cover to cover, and one that hasn’t dated too badly at all.