I am an English-speaking fan of
Marc Levy. Before reading "
La premiere nuit", I had read three of his books (not counting "
Le premier jour"): "Et se c'etait vrai", "
La prochaine fois", and "Toutes les choses qu'on ne s'est pas dites". I have read these in the original French and, while I do not catch all of the contemporary slang, I think I grasp the main points, and even the fine points of the plots. In each of these novels, a fantastical, science-fiction like premise is presented and developed into a plot with surprising and usually satisfying consequences. ("
Et si c'etait vrai" was made into a film, "Just Like Heaven", directed by
Steven Spielberg.)
Marc Levy likes to set his novels in places that I am familiar with, such as San Francisco, New York and London (I live in New York and spent three years in the Bay Area, and my wife grew up in London). So much for my background.
So I began reading "
Le premier jour" and "
La premiere nuit" with high expectations. The "tease" at the beginning says that this book (paraphrasing what I remember of the French; I left the book in France) "will change everything you thought you knew about the origin of the earth and the human species". Certainly the characters are appealing: a young astrophysicist who falls in love with a young archaeologist (there has to be a love interest), and they have the appropriate expertise and motivation to explore the origins of the earth and the human race. That being said, the books (I include the "nuit" with the "jour", since the "nuit" is an almost indispensable sequel to the "jour") are a bit of a disappointment. First, they are too long, over a thousand pages for the two of them, in the "pocket books" format. The other books cited above are only two hundred to three hundred pages in length, and the payoff is much more impressive at the end: you get "more bang for your buck".
The basic outline of the story is that the archaelogist, Keira, is given an amulet that, when exposed to intense light, projects a partial map of the heavens. But the map, as analyzed by Adrian, the astrophysicist, reresents the heavens as seen millions of years ago. The two protagonists spend the rest of the thousand pages trying to retrieve the companion amulets that, together, will project a complete map. Their quest takes them on a kind of "wild goose chase" that covers many locales: China, Africa, Siberia. At each stage they are pursued by agents of an international cabal that wants to prevent them from discovering "the secret". One is reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's generic description of mystery/thriller stories: the characters are after something, a jewel, a treasure map, a secret weapon, and
Hitchcock refers to it, generically, as "the MacGuffin". So it is a race to see who gets the MacGuffin first, the good guys or the bad guys. Only in this case we are not quite sure what the MacGuffin is. So much the better for the mystery.
The "denouement" of the story reveals the answer, or a tentative answer to the question of our human origins, as posed on the back cover of the book. The proposed answer, which I will not devulge here so as not to spoil the ending for those who are reading the book, is actually not too different from what one will find on various "New Age" websites. So as not to derail the belief systems of conventional religions, the protagonists are advised not to publicize their findings.
Overall, the books make for pleasant reading, even if one gets a bit weary of the wild goose chase. To get more pieces of the puzzle, the characters have to keep travelling to farflung corners of the globe, in the course of which they encounter many natural dangers as well as attempted attacks from the cabal. I recommend the books, even if they do not quite measure up to the standards of Marc Levy's other novels.