Barry Eisenberg. Primal Calling. Vanguard, 2020.
Primal Calling is a different kind of novel. Nothing experimental—we’re not talking about James Joyce or William Conescu—this is a straightforward story that might appeal to both readers of Jane Eyre and readers of Tom Clancy. Quite a combination!
Primal Calling first and probably foremost is a story of family conflict and tension such as we find in the novels of the Brontë sisters or the plays of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill. Except even here the family conflict might be a tad milder.
Jack Davies is finishing his first year of college. He is attending a local community college though he could have gone elsewhere, but he feels he ought to remain home. He is the only child of his single mother who has a successful physical therapy practice. He and his mother have had a loving relationship.
Jack has been told that he did not really have a father. His mother, though a college student herself at the time, wanted a child and went to a sperm bank. Jack had no reason to doubt that story until he sees his original birth certificate a year ago. It names a Stewart Jacobson as his father. Jack then begins a year-long search to find this man who seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.
The only clue is that Mr. Jacobson’s address on the birth certificate is given as New England Institute of Technology, an obvious stand-in for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. M.I.T., er, N.E.I.T. has no record of a student by that name, but Jack keeps on looking.
The story begins in medias res, in the middle of the action, with college sophomore Jack being abducted for a few hours. It is a kind of kidnapping, except that he is returned to school unharmed. It really seems like he should not be looking for this man.
A young woman at N.E.I.T., actually a student herself working in the alumni office, keeps in touch with him. In her regular work, she came across a record of an unpaid dorm bill with Jacobson’s name on it. Even though there is no student or alumnus record of a person with that name, what was he then doing in a dorm?
Jack begins to wonder whether he can trust his mother or the people who abducted him and then let him go. He runs into some of them several times.
Without going into too much detail, the story then takes off in several directions. After a while, Cathy, the helpful N.E.I.T. student, becomes interested in Jack’s case. So do some agents working for an unnamed federal agency. The reader learns that it is the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, though it is unclear Jack ever realizes this.
What started out as an understandable story of a child trying to learn about his birth father, becomes a story of international intrigue. In contrast to Jack’s loving upbringing and his desire to understand his mother, another family has a fissure that seems irreparable. Rafiq from Lebanon has a son who has taken up with Islamist jihadis. The son does not trust his parents. His parents’ hearts are broken.
While most of the story does take place in New Jersey, there are episodes in Germany, Arabia, and a few other American states. As Jack’s search enlarges in scope, so does the intrigue.
There are several plots going on at once. But this is not a mashup, not Texts from Jane Eyre or Jane Eyre and Vampires. This is about a kid or young man trying to discover the truth about his family and running into strange obstacles.
Most readers understand that sometimes birth parents of adopted children do not want their identities shared. There might be a scandal involved, for example. But this is a little different from that. It seems all knowledge of Stewart Jacobson has somehow been expunged. In the language of 1984, he has become an unperson.
Primal Calling is well written and quite intense. At times I did not want to put it down. At other times I had to put it down just to absorb what had just happened in the story. One curious aspect of the story is that, except perhaps for the jihadi son who has a minor role in the story, none of the characters are really bad guys. There is a lot of misunderstanding and some rough treatment, but we understand why everyone does what they do, even the terrorist. So while the family intrigue might remind us of Emily or Charlotte Brontë, the characters are more like those of their Universalist sister, Anne.
However, that does not mean that there is not a lot of conflict—both external and internal. It just means that there is potential for even weird and deceitful situations to turn out all right. The reader should enjoy the ride, whether he or she is looking for Catherine Earnshaw or Jack Ryan. Primal Calling has something for both.