Noema: A Review

I have never read a novel with a narrator quite like “Maya” in Dael Akkerman’s Noema (2022, tRaum Books). Who is she? The mystery of this question drives the tale — but, as she declares at the start, she can only answer it by telling you her story. As it happens, she is right.

This mystery works itself out in the context of a Mesolithic community struggling with food scarcity. The novel immerses us in a world of which many of us may have only dim and stereotypical notions as being primitive or unsophisticated; in fact, we are presented here with a meticulous portrayal of life in a federation of villages with intricate interreliances and complex lifeways and codes of law governing how the villages relate to each other, keeping society stable. The effect is to humanise Mesolithic people and culture, an aspect of the novel which makes it interesting in its own right, even apart from its characters, plot, and themes. Maya’s people exist in harmony with the natural world, but in a prior time this harmony was stronger and nature was better understood. Now, they need more than ever to understand in order to survive.

To Maya’s people, as to us, climatic change poses an existential threat. In the face of an advancing age of cold, the yields of hunting, fishing, and foraging decrease year by year, generation by generation. Scarcity and looming famine trigger bloodshed, showing how (as in Rachel A…