SARANOFF'S ROMANCE

A man travels through time to a primeval paradise in this earnest utopian fable.

An archaeological team excavating an ancient village in Russia unearths a bizarre anomaly–a 2800- year-old manuscript written in American-inflected English. It’s the memoir of Erik, a clinic manager, who wakes from a car crash to find himself in a mountain forest in Siberia, circa 800 B.C. Erik, who had been languishing in empty consumerism, feels instantly reinvigorated and “shout[s] in delight…with the joy of being alive.” His joy increases on meeting the Narod people, a “good looking folk” in sensible wool tunics who welcome him with hearty stew, heady mead and rich, dark bread. Quickly learning the language and proving an adept axe man on the woodcutting detail, Erik fits right into their preternaturally tolerant and nonmaterialistic village. Kindness, generosity and good prevail, and everyone has enough. Believing that there is “no right or wrong way to live, except [to] do no harm, care for each other, and be responsible for your own happiness,” the Narod frown on violence and smile on casual public nudity and same-sex liaisons. (These last tendencies unite in the lanky, oft-unclothed frame of Sigurd, a younger man who becomes Erik’s lover.) Instead of gory Hollywood spectacle, the Narod have harvest festivals and winter nights in which “folk sat on the benches by the fire and told stories and sang old songs.” The author’s utopian formula boils down to the notion that greed, hatred, cities and modernity are bad while sharing, love, villages and primitivism are good. Unfortunately, this unoriginal vision isn’t very compelling. The Narod–loosely based on the tribes who would someday settle Finland (and, one imagines, Woodstock)–live in cheerful, enlightened contentment, but their “perfect harmony” is pretty boring to read about. It’s only when Scythian horsemen, with their deplorable lust for gold and slaves and their jealous knife fights, finally show up to spoil the Narod paradise that Bragg shows us interesting human beings.

A utopia that could use some drama.