Reviews

De Man van Levkas by Hammond Innes

paul_cornelius's review against another edition

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4.0

As he was to do later, in Solomons Seal, Hammond Innes, here, indulges his tendency to conduct the reader through a specialist's understanding of an arcane subject area they might have little exposure to. In Solomons Seal, it would be the often obscure world of philately, or stamp collecting. With Levkas Man, it was the much broader and much more challenging subject of anthropology and the study of early man.

Innes' story unfolds gradually, as does the mystery at the core of it. Set against the backdrop of the Aegean Sea, however, such a pace is fitting. Not only does the very atmosphere of the warm Mediterranean world seem appropriate to the slow moving structure of the plot, so does the mystery and search to solve it fit into the timeless world of ancient artifacts, smugglers, and the embattled race to find the record of early man's entry into the sea's islands. Meanwhile, as ever seems to be the case, all is threatened with the onslaught of yet another war in the Middle East. Not even the soothing landscapes of an older world can escape the threat of imminent destruction wielded by modern man, who is only following in the violent footsteps of his ancient forebearers.

Finally, a note about the protagonist, Paul Van der Voort. Something enjoyable about Innes is that he creates some very flawed heroes. And Paul Van der Voort is among his more flawed. That does nothing, however, than make his story all the more interesting and unpredictable. The details of life often get in the way of neat little resolutions in Innes' novels. So it happens, here. Rootless Paul is as much a mystery at the end as he was in the beginning. That doesn't mean the exploration of his character--and his relationship with his father--was anything less than complete. Just that people often retain something unknowable about them, often unknowable even to themselves.

smcleish's review against another edition

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4.0

Originally published on my blog here in September 2000.

An unusual thriller which manages to combine palaeontology with international politics, Levkas Man is one of the best novels Innes wrote, probably because it arose from an obsessive interest in the origins of the human race.

Paul Van der Voort returns to his adoptive father's house in Amsterdam to find it unexpectedly empty. He has always been a disappointment to Pieter Van der Voort, a distinguished investigator of human origins, and has ended up a merchant seaman. Just now, he has accidentally killed a man, and following his father to Greece seems to be a good idea.

Pieter is looking at caves on the island of Levkas to try to find evidence of early man, to support his theory that Greece was the way used into Europe by the continent's earliest human settlers. The problems he has stem from three sources: his own unhealthy obsession with his theory; rival academics seeking to take credit for his discoveries; and the Greek authorities, convinced by international tension related to Arab-Israeli conflict, their own inability to understand how anyone could be interested in prehistoric rather than classical archaeology, and Van der Voort's earlier work in Russia that he must be a Soviet spy.

This kind of paranoia may seem fairly ludicrous, but then this was right in the middle of the Cold War, in which Greece played an uneasy part. Another aspect of the book may seem equally ludicrous, but are absolutely true to life - the discussions of the propaganda value of discoveries of human origins. Archaeology has been used to bolster nationalistic ideas even before the Nazis, but what does it matter politically whether the earliest Europeans lived in Greece, Italy, or southwestern Russia?

Paul is drawn into the whole thing because everyone assume that he must have a closer relationship to his father than is actually the case. One of the main centres of interest in the novel is his character's development, as he learns more about both himself and Pieter.
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