Rahul Badami

When I first read the title of Rahul Badami’s "I Am God: World’s Oldest Story," I assumed the novel was about a Jesus character claiming to be the incarnation of a monotheistic “God.” I’m glad to say it isn’t.

The story is set in Africa 150,000 years ago among humans as intelligent and compassionate as those of us alive today. As a writer of prehistoric fiction myself, I was pleased to see that.

At 29, Ayot is an elder in his tribe. Upon the death of the present chief—who, like his predecessors, is called “God”—the tribe learns that he picked Ayot to succeed him. Ayot appears to be an unlikely choice since he often differed with the old God. He also doesn’t think he’s worthy enough to be the new God.

In any event, before he can exercise the authority given to him, he must complete, within a 30-day moon cycle, three Tasks of God. A rival elder suggests that one of the tasks should be the Vision of God, which by itself would be difficult if not impossible to complete within the period allowed. Ayot nevertheless accepts the challenge, and the page-turning begins.

Up to this point, Badami hasn’t depicted the tribe’s God as possessing supernatural powers. I wondered, though, whether that would change. I won’t give the answer to the question here because it would be a spoiler. The nature of a God’s power—and Ayot’s quest to discover it—is what this delightful story is all about.

Badami rightly describes his novel as “the prehistoric action adventures of Ayot.” It is also deeply thoughtful. I highly recommend "I Am God" to readers such as myself who like their fiction with traditional plots, sympathetic protagonists, and narratives questioning what it means to be a human in our world.

I believe "I Am God" well deserves the five stars I’m giving it despite the inclusion of what might seem to other readers and writers of American English to be an unacceptable number of grammatical errors. For examples, Badami often employs “used to,” the past perfect tense of verbs, and exclamation points where I wouldn’t.

They startled me at first. On the other hand, they didn’t cause confusion or require perusing passages more than once to understand what the author was saying. I soon found myself reading the text as I would a dialect I didn’t often encounter. I would encourage other readers as picky as I am to read "I Am God" in that manner. If they do, they won’t forgo a beautiful story.… (mehr)