Paleolithic era

Prehistory in the novel is both a remote period and a philosophical thought experiment: before the human self took shape, existence was imagined as an undivided universal spirit. That vision of unity is set against the later burden of individuality, mortality, and memory, which deep time can contextualize but not erase.

Before the Separate Self

In a conversation about naming prehistoric beings, José rejects the idea that the discussion concerns the names of species, orders, or families. He describes prehistory as preceding the emergence of Maya, the supposed extra brain convolutions, and the mind’s illusion that there is an “I” and a “you.” In that earlier condition, the universal spirit remained whole and undivided, and everything was Brahman.

When Frank asks whether dinosaurs were Brahman but blinded by Maya, José confirms that this is precisely his point. Prehistoric life is thus not presented only as a succession of extinct forms; it becomes an imagined state before consciousness divided the world into individual selves. The exchange allows a biological past to carry a metaphysical meaning, while leaving that meaning in the form of dialogue rather than establishing it as scientific fact.

Deep Time and the Individual

José develops the idea by asking Frank to imagine being on Earth a hundred million years ago. The extra convolutions, he argues, would have produced the false impression that all the reptiles were separate individuals, with the largest appearing to be immense, self-regarding beasts. Frank answers that he has a keen eye for individuality, leaving José to make the distinction between that perception and the label of “beasts.”

The thought experiment then turns on extinction and transformation. The reptiles that once might have seemed like distinct, powerful creatures are now fused into a vast reservoir of oil, represented by Shell and Texaco and the price of fuel. The joke compresses an immense change in scale: what once lived as animals is encountered in the present as a commercial resource. Prehistory therefore unsettles the assumption that an individual’s apparent separateness or importance will endure.

Myth, Memory, and Historical Time

The novel places its speculation about deep time beside stories whose own historical status remains uncertain. José presents the account of El Planeta’s journey in 1842 as oral tradition, not documented history. He notes that the story has many versions within the Maya family, that he has found no written record of the Andalusian tradition, and that a separate Swiss tradition is also said to exist. His account is a combination of variants, restricted to points on which they agree.

The instability of these stories does not make every detail equally unverifiable. José says police confirmed that a man named Manuel was beaten to death in Triana during the relevant period, lending historical support to the tale’s account of a fatal fight, though not necessarily to its surrounding legend. Ana knew the family stories about El Planeta, Manuel el Solitario, and her great-uncle, but was sometimes irritated by the “gypsy stories” in which she had grown up. Her certainty about the jester Comodín rested instead on having heard his bells while chasing him through the Alcázar gardens.

José also identifies a specific claim that could be checked against chronology: the stories say that the bell-bearing dwarf showed a lifelike portrait at Cádiz as the brig Ana departed, and that the young Antonio, Ana’s ancestor, was among those who saw it. What could be established, José says, was that the portrait was already in Seville in 1790, years before Goya painted his maja desnuda. The novel thus distinguishes family transmission, reported experience, police confirmation, and chronological evidence rather than treating oral legend as a single, settled historical record.

Mortality, Grief, and the Limits of Perspective

The philosophical reach of prehistory is set against Frank’s own childhood discovery of a dead roe deer in a forest in Vestfold. He was too ashamed to tell his parents what he had seen; the discovery that he, too, was a mortal animal remained with him as a physical-seeming burden. The encounter helped direct his interest toward nature and immense spans of time, but it also tied that intellectual perspective to a personal fear of disappearing.

Frank tries to enlarge his identity by seeing his short life as a small part of the greater adventure of life and the universe. Yet he admits that this discipline has not brought peace: each morning returns him to the immediate fact of being a particular self, conscious here and now. The novel’s prehistoric image of undivided existence consequently stands in tension with the lived persistence of individual consciousness.

That tension recurs in Frank and Vera’s memories of Sonia. Walking through Salamanca, they speak of their daughter amid a city layered with centuries of human history; Frank understands their remembering as a way of giving Sonia’s memory a living sphere of consequence. Their shared past does not dissolve their loss or make reconciliation simple. Frank later recognizes that they had finally reconciled, but that Vera left because living beneath one roof had become unbearable while they each carried the same grief.

After Sheila’s death, the narrator likewise continues to converse with her, sometimes unsure whether he is speaking aloud or only thinking. Her characteristic turns of phrase make her seem present in his language. Against the imagined unity of prehistory, these scenes show how particular selves persist through embodied memories, relationships, and speech—and how neither cosmic scale nor the passage of time makes those attachments painless.