#157 Spirit and science: The Shadow Hunter (1982) by Pat Murphy

A clash of the deep past and the near future

Featured in episode 107, Pat Murphy's 1986 novel The Falling Woman was one of my favourite reads of 2024. This episode covers her debut novel, The Shadow Hunter, originally published in 1982. While fairly obscure, it is every bit as good as The Falling Woman, and arguably deserves to be seen as a classic of the early 1980s.

In this story of clashing worlds, a time machine is used to drag a young Neanderthal boy hundreds of thousands of years into his future. His arrival into a ecologically and spiritually degraded world is used by Murphy to explore the costs and perils of technological, cultural, and commercial progress. By colonising the moon and the asteroid belt, and building vast gleaming cities, how does humankind impoverish itself?

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Transcript

A clash of the deep past and the near future

In the deep past, before the ascendancy of homo sapiens, a nameless young boy sets out on a rite of passage. He hunts a formidable bear - a dangerous quest which if successful will secure for him the bear’s powerful spirit, access to adulthood, and a name of his own. When the boy reaches the great creature, ready to do battle, both are enveloped in a strange, shimmering mist. The young Neanderthal believes they have crossed into the spirit world - but boy and beast have been transported hundreds of thousands of years into their future.

The Shadow Hunter is the debut novel by the American writer Pat Murphy. It was “obscurely published” in 1982 by Popular Library in the US, at that time winding down ahead of a three-year hiatus in new releases. In 1988, it was belatedly published in the UK by the then-recently established company Headline. This publication history did not help The Shadow Hunter receive the praise it deserves. This is a heartfelt, skilful novel of a clash between cultures, set in a vestige of nature in an over-exploited world.

Pleistocene park

Transported in time, the boy arrives in a high-tech facility financed by the ambitious mogul Roy Morgan. A kind of proto-techbro, Morgan spends his immense wealth on a number of linked schemes. It is his time machine which plucked the boy from the past, albeit by accident - his true target was the bear. Morgan’s principal focus is the vaguely named Project. He has purchased a large tract of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, and has turned it into a closed emulation of the Pleistocene period. 

The boy is named “Sam” by the kind Amanda, one of two troubled women that Morgan has in his employ. She is able to see into the deep past, and her opposite number is the cold Cynthia, who claims to have foreknowledge of the future. Sam learns English, and makes the Project his home despite his powerful sense of dislocation from his people, his time, and his true natural environment. As he grows up in this unique displacement, he befriends the son of an asteroid mining tycoon, becomes entangled with a legal case in a futuristic city, meets a documentary crew, and reckons with his profound isolation while staying true to his way of life.

Civilisation and its disadvantages

With The Shadow Hunter, Murphy takes an outlandish concept - which with its depiction of unlikely mental powers blends fantasy into its science fiction - and gives it a profound effect. This is a beautifully written book, particularly impressive for a first novel. Everything the reader learns about Murphy’s future society is filtered through Sam’s perspective. He sees little that appeals to him in the vast cities and sleek vehicles of modernity. He sees all too clearly what humankind has lost by driving most of Earth’s creatures into extinction. He clings to a world of spirit in which his new friends do not believe, but which shapes his deep connection to the fabrication of the pre-human world which Morgan’s wealth has bought. 

The Shadow Hunter suggests that the relentless pursuit of commercial gain, scientific discovery, and technological progress have cut people off from something vital. This could be a better coexistence with nature, a deeper spiritual awareness, a simpler way of life, or some combination of all three. But it could be significant that Sam is technically pre-human; perhaps homo sapiens, with its evolutionary advantages, was somehow fated never to preserve the kind of life that Sam clings to. 

The Shadow Hunter has a number of links with Murphy’s later and better-known novel, The Falling Woman (1986). Both books are, in their own ways, about a collision between past and present. Elizabeth Butler, protagonist of The Falling Woman, sees people from the deep past that others cannot perceive. Amanda and Cynthia are similarly both gifted and cursed in this way, isolated from mainstream society in large part due to their inexplicable visions. Sam has visions of his own, encounters with a spirit world which the people of the future are incapable of noticing. Notably this does not alienate him in the same way; in a sense the spirit world is more real than the cold, impersonal cities of the future, let alone the colonised moon and asteroid belt.

While The Shadow Hunter is more concerned with its themes and mood than plot, tension does mount as Sam ages and the people around him shift and change. From time to time, Murphy drops hints about an even more incredible project that Morgan has in mind. This is used to moving effect, as Murphy works up to a bold and exciting slingshot ending. 

The notion of a Neanderthal boy being brought forwards in time is a fanciful one, and the abilities of Amanda and Cynthia cannot readily be rationalised in science fictional terms. But for Murphy, these are all means to a powerful end. The Shadow Hunter is an affecting examination of what progress has meant for human beings, what we may have lost through our evolution and scientific advancement, and how vital it is that we coexist properly with our world. A superb effort, The Shadow Hunter is a lost classic of the early 1980s, which is ripe for rediscovery.