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- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K How did you decide to have kids? Discuss the origins of your parenthood in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y No baby on board Crossing to safety Getting wise to "Babywise" A thigh of relief One step at a time BROWSE THE FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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BY POLLY SHULMAN | Once they've digested the astonishing answer to that apparently simple question "Where did I come from?" youngsters with a philosophical bent sooner or later are likely to push the question up a level. What about the first people: Who were they? Who made them? Did they have belly buttons? The traditional answers -- and the most satisfying ones -- take the form of stories. Yahweh sculpts Adam and Eve out of brand-new earth; the Iroquois creator goddess fell on a turtle and their offspring became the ancestors of people. Even the answers that scientists give have a familiar narrative ring to them: Once upon a time (depending on whom you ask), a tribe of apes either left the forest for the savanna, learning to walk upright and thus freeing up their hands to hold tools, or maybe learned to talk, gaining an advantage over their speechless cousins who couldn't get it together to plan hunts. Peter Dickinson's extraordinary new series of books for 9- to 11-year-olds, "The Kin," comes at the question of human origins from two directions. The books follow the fortunes of a group of early humans, Homo sapien children living 200,000 years ago in Africa, whose adventures give a vivid sense of what life may have been like for the first truly human apes. Into the children's story Dickinson weaves "Oldtales" -- powerful myths, beginning with the creation of "the First Good Place," which he put together out of Africa's natural history, Jung's collective unconscious and his own odd genius. "The first Oldtale is a paradise and a fall," explained Dickinson in a phone interview, speaking from his home in the English countryside. "I thought, well, I need some supernatural beings. They'll be animals, of course. I wanted my group to belong to a particular clan, so they have a totem animal, and there are other clans with other animals, and this means we can have a proper kin structure, with taboos about marrying the wrong lot, and things of that kind." In the first book, "Suth's Story," the Moonhawk Kin flee from attackers who have driven them out of their Good Places. Because they can't keep up, the weakest children are left behind. The resourceful hero, Suth, leads them to a new Good Place where another Kin lives, with the help of Noli, a girl who can speak with Moonhawk and the other Old Ones. In the second book, "Noli's Story," the little tribe must flee again, this time from an erupting volcano. In their travels, they encounter a group of odd people who seem halfway between people and animals: They have no language. Two more books are planned for 1999. Suth, Noli and their companions bring to life the resourcefulness with which our ancestors must have faced such terrors as lions, earthquakes, drought and unfriendly neighbors. Simple tools turn out not to be so simple, after all. It's vital, and not easy, to make a really good digging stick; it's a big deal when Suth loses the good cutting stone, or when the fire goes out. "My brief for writing 'The Kin' was to have fairly short books with lots of adventures in them," says Dickinson. "I did my best with that. Of course, all sorts of stuff cropped up, so that you get the beginnings of religion, and the nature of humanity, and what language is. I wanted to give a depth, a sense of time, a sense of belonging to a culture. Our most important thing as humans is to feel that we belong in a particular place. To me, this is almost a definition of happiness." Dickinson left his own First Good Place when he was 7. "I was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. I have vague memories of it: Baboons came to the playground of my kindergarten. My South African grandfather farmed sheep and ostriches. We used to go swim in the Zambezi, in a great cage let down into the river so that the hippopotami and crocodiles couldn't get at us. Though as the Zambezi is the main drain of South Africa, how we survived I don't know. But I haven't been back since I was 7." Although his family belonged to what he calls the "squirearchy," Dickinson grew up relatively poor. His father died shortly after the family moved to England, leaving Peter's mother with three little boys, a baby and little money. Peter went to Eton and Cambridge on scholarships, then got a job "writing articles and quite a lot of verse" for the London humor magazine Punch. He went on to write over a dozen books, mostly detective novels for adults -- intricate, conceptual thrillers a bit like Michael Crichton's, only more clever -- and science-fiction novels for teenagers. His books are much better known in Britain than they are in the United States. Dickinson has long been fascinated by our history as a species and by our relationship to other animals. In "The Poison Oracle," an adult detective story, the only witness to a murder is a chimpanzee who has been taught to communicate. In "A Bone From a Dry Sea," a book for teenagers, he explores the "aquatic ape" theory, "a very unrespectable theory that at some stage of human evolution, our ancestors were maritime apes. Not like whales, but much more like sea otters: shore creatures." Like "The Kin," "A Bone" flips back and forth between two running narratives: the story of a paleoarchaeologist's daughter accompanying her father on a dig, and the lives of the aquatic apes whose bones they're uncovering. In "Eva," another young adult book, the heroine's primatologist father has found a way to transport her from her dying body into the body of a chimp. In a strange, mournful twist on the traditional coming-of-age novel, Eva's destiny is at odds with her parents' plans for her. She has to learn to let go of her humanity and become entirely an ape. "The key difference between adults' books and kids' books," says Dickinson, "is really one of voice. You're not allowed to bore children." Paradoxically, the simplicity imposed on his children's books adds to their depth. In "The Kin," written for younger children than his other books, this simplicity is particularly effective. "Obviously, because this was the beginnings of language and I'm writing for children, I had to give them a very simple form of language. In 'Noli,' they speak only in the present tense, which I rather liked, but my editor thought it was confusing, so I gave them past tense as well. They have no subordinate clauses: no relative, no conditional clauses, things like that. It was a terrible mess trying to edit those things out. I kept finding relative clauses I'd missed. But I very much doubt whether that is what language was actually like. A lot of languages, including languages of so-called primitive people, have innumerable tenses and cases and suffixes and so on. I don't know whether language wouldn't have begun with perhaps a small vocabulary very heavily manipulated to give the varying meanings."
In general, Dickinson's choices are artistic, not scientific. "These
books are not to teach you historical facts about early man, they're
about what makes us human." We can't really know, of course -- but
Dickinson provides a splendid guess.
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