4 ideas
The novel is divided into chapters titled 'The time of' a person, a dog, a coffee grinder, a mycelium, or God, so time appears as many private durations running side by side rather than one shared historical clock. The same years are experienced as different lengths, rhythms, and meanings depending on whose time you stand in, and a human war can register as only a small disturbance in a plant's or an object's time.
Primeval is described as lying at the centre of the universe, its borders guarded by four archangels, so the whole cosmos is experienced from one small enclosed place. This framing shows how people make their local world total and self-sufficient, until twentieth-century history crosses the guarded borders as outside forces such as armies, occupations, and the state that do not respect local meaning.
Squire Popielski, the local landowner, is given a mysterious board game with a book of instructions describing eight worlds nested inside one another, and he becomes consumed by working through it. While war and then communism strip away his manor and his social order, he withdraws further into the Game's cosmology. The episode is a concrete case of a person seeking the structure of reality in a closed symbolic system while the actual world collapses around them.
God in the novel has his own 'time': he changes, has no fixed form, and does not simply stand outside creation, controlling it. This is presented as a way of accounting for suffering. The world's cruelty and randomness are not a hidden plan but the condition of a creator who is himself unfinished, and who is present in the flux of things rather than above them.