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A review by wellworn_soles
The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
2.0
A friend gave this to me, telling me it was one of her favorite pieces of fiction. Of course, with that kind of fanfare, I was pretty excited; and who wouldn't? The back cover plot synopsis intrigued me: one of my degrees in linguistic anthropology, so the concept of a Cro-Magnon girl forced to live her life with homo neanderthalensis seemed like a fun world to dive into. I'm a sucker for prehistory fiction when done well.
Unfortunately, I don't really feel like this book is done well. Jean M. Auel, for all the "research" she apparently did, did not research how best to actually communicate a story. There's some interesting information on botany and biome; the natural world is opened to us through her writing, and Ayla (our titular character) studies as a medicine woman, so we learn with her about the plants and their function in this ancient society. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I was about it, so I won't level criticism to heavily there. However, Auel's pacing is abysmal, and much of the plot seems unnecessary. There is so much time devoted to a recycling of Ayla doing something in secret, getting found out, getting chided, and moving on, that I got to a point where I began siding with her primary rival, Broud, who was arguing that she was spoiled and being flagrantly disobedient. While I didn't agree with the patriarchal and rigid society she lived in, within its framework I felt she acted petulant and imperious.
Auel doesn't trust her readers to be able to make basic inferences based off of things like characterization or dialogue. A character, for example, may try to encourage someone because they know that other character feels worthless, and then Auel will intercede with her omniscient narrator voice and tell us directly, like we're children, that the character was being encouraging because the other character felt worthless. In general, Auel's omniscient 3rd-person narrator was jarring and unnecessary. There was never a time in the book where I felt like I needed her to further explain motivations beyond what could be inferred, and in the end it just felt insulting. Furthermore, these segments of 3rd person narration often came at the expense of the pacing, becoming long-winded accounts of the "themes" Auel is trying to shove down the readers throat. She doesn't trust anyone to understand her ideas without her spelling them for us, and it was frankly pretty condescending.
For all the research Auel did for this book, I'm a little disappointed. Her botany and toolmaking understanding were good, yes, but this book is so clearly fantasy that I don't like the association she puts with her work, as if it is somehow scientific. Her website routinely mentions digs and discoveries about prehistoric peoples, further corroborating the implicit concept that her world is deeply rooted in reality. And that frankly isn't the case. Her ideas for a heavily restricted social setup have already been largely discredited, as were some basic ideas she had (blonde hair and blue eyes, for example, did not exist at this point in human evolution; neanderthalensis seems to have been able to produce vocalized language). This wouldn't bother me so much except that the author routinely acts as if scientific evidence supports her fiction in some way, and she isn't good at making sure others understand the limits of her research and the beginnings of the fiction in her story.
Plot points and central ideas converge to make quite a few plot holes as the book goes on. For example, the metaphysical elements of the neanderthals memories are highly mystical, and don't even make sense within her world. It doesn't make sense for Uba, for example, to not know everything a medicine woman could know simply by Iza listing off different plants, or one of the other medicine women doing so, based on this concept of genetic memory. One moment Auel says they can't make abstractions nor be forward-thinking, and on another Broud is plotting revenge against Ayla for 2 years - something that is entirely future oriented. I understand its difficult to write characters who don't have the same capabilities as your average human, but if you can't uphold it within your universe, don't create it. Another is the fact that the main character Ayla can't fathom her new clans' language for months after coming to live with them because it is almost exclusively nonverbal. There's a part in the book where Auel says she simply couldn't follow the gesticulation of the clan. How? Every human I've met uses nonverbal cues to at least modify and accentuate points when speaking. At 5, Ayla would definitely be able to understand that and should not have had any problems here.
Ayla herself is confusing, oscillating between brow-furrowing displays of silliness and impossible genius. Within a few years she invents double-missile slings, the brasserie, and pieces together the relationship between sex and pregnancy in a culture that does not have that concept. Any one of these would be fine on their own, but all of them together quickly make Ayla unbelievable. She does nothing wrong (by way of the audience's value system), and makes veritable quantum leaps in technology and biology with the flick of her wrist. This lands really sour when put in her surroundings. Ayla, blonde, blue-eyed, and apparently a knockout, is in every way superior to her dark-skinned, dark-eyed, uninventive adoptive clan. I wouldn't dream of calling Auel racist based simply off of this - too many of the neanderthals are portrayed sympathetically for that to be her intent - but it was a misstep, and its very cringey when added to the obvious self-insert that is Ayla.
Overall, the concept of this novel is interesting, as are some of the ideas. I conceptually enjoyed the idea of the genetic memory, and I think its cool that a book written in 1980 seems to have egalitarianism as one of its underlying ideas for what makes humanity successful. But the storytelling execution of this book is just bad, and it's characters and plot points can be repetitive, impossible, and frankly embarrassing. I don't have a problem with some things others mentioned, like the rape, which I felt (while graphic) in no way tries to pretend that it was anything other than horrific, and given the society it makes sense. But purely from a storytelling perspective, this book hardly held my interest until about the last hundred pages.
Unfortunately, I don't really feel like this book is done well. Jean M. Auel, for all the "research" she apparently did, did not research how best to actually communicate a story. There's some interesting information on botany and biome; the natural world is opened to us through her writing, and Ayla (our titular character) studies as a medicine woman, so we learn with her about the plants and their function in this ancient society. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I was about it, so I won't level criticism to heavily there. However, Auel's pacing is abysmal, and much of the plot seems unnecessary. There is so much time devoted to a recycling of Ayla doing something in secret, getting found out, getting chided, and moving on, that I got to a point where I began siding with her primary rival, Broud, who was arguing that she was spoiled and being flagrantly disobedient. While I didn't agree with the patriarchal and rigid society she lived in, within its framework I felt she acted petulant and imperious.
Auel doesn't trust her readers to be able to make basic inferences based off of things like characterization or dialogue. A character, for example, may try to encourage someone because they know that other character feels worthless, and then Auel will intercede with her omniscient narrator voice and tell us directly, like we're children, that the character was being encouraging because the other character felt worthless. In general, Auel's omniscient 3rd-person narrator was jarring and unnecessary. There was never a time in the book where I felt like I needed her to further explain motivations beyond what could be inferred, and in the end it just felt insulting. Furthermore, these segments of 3rd person narration often came at the expense of the pacing, becoming long-winded accounts of the "themes" Auel is trying to shove down the readers throat. She doesn't trust anyone to understand her ideas without her spelling them for us, and it was frankly pretty condescending.
For all the research Auel did for this book, I'm a little disappointed. Her botany and toolmaking understanding were good, yes, but this book is so clearly fantasy that I don't like the association she puts with her work, as if it is somehow scientific. Her website routinely mentions digs and discoveries about prehistoric peoples, further corroborating the implicit concept that her world is deeply rooted in reality. And that frankly isn't the case. Her ideas for a heavily restricted social setup have already been largely discredited, as were some basic ideas she had (blonde hair and blue eyes, for example, did not exist at this point in human evolution; neanderthalensis seems to have been able to produce vocalized language). This wouldn't bother me so much except that the author routinely acts as if scientific evidence supports her fiction in some way, and she isn't good at making sure others understand the limits of her research and the beginnings of the fiction in her story.
Plot points and central ideas converge to make quite a few plot holes as the book goes on. For example, the metaphysical elements of the neanderthals memories are highly mystical, and don't even make sense within her world. It doesn't make sense for Uba, for example, to not know everything a medicine woman could know simply by Iza listing off different plants, or one of the other medicine women doing so, based on this concept of genetic memory. One moment Auel says they can't make abstractions nor be forward-thinking, and on another Broud is plotting revenge against Ayla for 2 years - something that is entirely future oriented. I understand its difficult to write characters who don't have the same capabilities as your average human, but if you can't uphold it within your universe, don't create it. Another is the fact that the main character Ayla can't fathom her new clans' language for months after coming to live with them because it is almost exclusively nonverbal. There's a part in the book where Auel says she simply couldn't follow the gesticulation of the clan. How? Every human I've met uses nonverbal cues to at least modify and accentuate points when speaking. At 5, Ayla would definitely be able to understand that and should not have had any problems here.
Ayla herself is confusing, oscillating between brow-furrowing displays of silliness and impossible genius. Within a few years she invents double-missile slings, the brasserie, and pieces together the relationship between sex and pregnancy in a culture that does not have that concept. Any one of these would be fine on their own, but all of them together quickly make Ayla unbelievable. She does nothing wrong (by way of the audience's value system), and makes veritable quantum leaps in technology and biology with the flick of her wrist. This lands really sour when put in her surroundings. Ayla, blonde, blue-eyed, and apparently a knockout, is in every way superior to her dark-skinned, dark-eyed, uninventive adoptive clan. I wouldn't dream of calling Auel racist based simply off of this - too many of the neanderthals are portrayed sympathetically for that to be her intent - but it was a misstep, and its very cringey when added to the obvious self-insert that is Ayla.
Overall, the concept of this novel is interesting, as are some of the ideas. I conceptually enjoyed the idea of the genetic memory, and I think its cool that a book written in 1980 seems to have egalitarianism as one of its underlying ideas for what makes humanity successful. But the storytelling execution of this book is just bad, and it's characters and plot points can be repetitive, impossible, and frankly embarrassing. I don't have a problem with some things others mentioned, like the rape, which I felt (while graphic) in no way tries to pretend that it was anything other than horrific, and given the society it makes sense. But purely from a storytelling perspective, this book hardly held my interest until about the last hundred pages.