Human Warnings

This is the earliest apparent theme, as Dunia and Ibn Rushd make their prophecies for their descendants in the first chapter, foreshadowing what is to come. Dunia announces that she has chosen to call herself ‘the world’ because “’a world will flow from [her] and those who flow from [her] will spread across the world’” (5). Ibn Rushd believes they will carry his curse which is to “’feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what’s coming before others sense it…they will probably think too much too soon, and hear too much too early, including things that are not permitted’” (6). And thus the novel follows their various descendants and their legacy.

Mr Geronimo is told of a family...