Appearances are Deceiving
Almost everything in this book is not really what it seems. The protagonist/narrator is an undercover operative infiltrating an activist group who is so very not what she seems that she has the man she is sleeping with only because it’s job believing she is his fiancé. She is now working for private interests because her last assignment as an FBI agent before being fired was undercover infiltration that led to charges of entrapment of a different male admirer. The other central character is a man who has turned his back on society and lives in a cave denouncing technology who maintains contact with his many followers through the technological achievement of e-mail. This theme is directly confronted by the narrator when a character insists that no matter how people change or what façade they may adopt there is always a pure identity at the core that remains consistent, “It is a hard, white salt.”
Written History is not always Historical Fact
The facts that the narrator presents about herself are tailored to meet her needs. There are people who believe they can relate her biography to others but the truth is that this history which is believed is entirely false. A major chunk of the novel is concerned with one man’s obsession with the idea that Neanderthals were not the drooling morons they are presented as in history but were in fact superior to Home Sapiens. The story of the very creation of human beings would, if this theory proved true, have to be completely reconsidered because historical fact departs so radically from written history. The novel is punctuated with minor examples which explore this theme including the main character creating an entire lifestyle for an expansive group of similar women on the basis of just one undeniable fact: a pair of panties worn by some woman is found abandoned in an isolated setting.
Evolution is Re-Creation
The narrator has to recreate herself each time she goes undercover to infiltrate a group. The enigmatic leader of the group she’s infiltrated for this case has completely recreated himself into someone that is almost the complete opposite of the persona that initially brought him fame. Evolution is dependent not on creation but re-creation. The initial creation will not survive without the ability to adapt and change. An undercover agent cannot maintain the same identity she created for one group when she has to infiltrate another. One theory about humanity is that Homo Sapiens infiltrated the Neanderthal genetic pool or the other way around. The question becomes if either species had not eventually come into contact with each other would the evolutionary necessity of re-creating itself to meet the needs of survival have happened the way it did or at all. The book’s champion of Neanderthals as superior to Homo Sapiens is expressing concern that humans will like not be able to re-create themselves for long-term survival because of their increasing dependence on technology to solve problems for them.
