Island of the Same Name

To begin with, if you have never heard of the Baha'i faith, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that the quirky, innovative religion featured in Dr. Sheppherd's novel is not fictional. In fact it boasts several million members, scattered across many far-flung areas of the world. The novel describes the rise of this subculture and extrapolates its progress until the point where Baha'i principles become the dominant reality of the future (as Baha'is believe it inevitably must). Of these, the most obvious is an affirmation of the unity of humanity across all differences of race, sex, culture, or economic position.The action of the novel takes place in four different time-periods--the distant past, the recent past, the near future, and a somewhat distant future several centuries from now. These are linked partly through genealogy (the Holden family), partly through shared interests and perspectives (the Baha'is, anthropology), and partly through the device of a series of time capsules. Apparently the set of time capsules buried by the author's stand-in (Professor Holden) contains notebooks which, uniquely for our era, make use of certain methodological perspectives which will come to be widely accepted in the future. These amount to the hermeneutic rejection of objectivity as an attainable ideal, with much attention given to the situation of the author and the rejection of gender- and ethno-centric perspectives. While these are certainly well within the spirit of Baha'i mores, one wonders how Holden's work came to be the only surviving representative of this thriving methodology. In fact one is left with the suspicion that Dr. Sheppherd was happy to have the opportunity to share his professional views, in almost bewildering detail.By novelistic standards, the book is quite detailed in other areas as well. For example, we learn the complete future list of European Union countries (sorry, Turkey), as well as the membership of several similar transnational groupings. This may be a weakness, but it is also a large part of the book's charm--the author's personal expertise combines with his religious background to produce a credible and extremely well-articulated positive vision for the human race. Even the fact that two chapters were missing from my copy did not detract from this impressive achievement. I eagerly await the sequel which is apparently in production.