Has Jean Auel (Clan of the Cave Bear) lost it as an author?

Cafe Society
1

I hate myself for saying this, and I would be the last person to beat up on an old lady whose writing has given me such pleasure in the past, but does anyone else feel that Jean M. Auel has lost it, especially with her last two novels (The Shelters of Stone and the The Land of Painted Caves)?

I fell in love with Auel’s writing in 1980 with Clan of the Cave Bear. Her second, third and fourth novels in the series were at least all right. I was ready to tolerate endless descriptions of flint knapping because the rest of the story was interesting.

But with the fifth and now sixth novels in the series, I am starting to wonder if Auel (who is 75 after all) has lost it. I have read the fifth (The Shelters of Stone) and I am halfway through the sixth (The Land of Painted Caves). The only reason I am still slogging through this (mercifully) last novel is because of a perverse desire to say I have read all six books, as well as a vague hope that the story will get more interesting around the end.

First there is the grammatical structure. I was taught in school that run-on sentences confuse the reader. So what are we to make of sentences such as:

*“Dulana had offered to watch Jonayla, Ayla suspected she missed her children.” *(sic) (Painted Caves, paperback, pg. 353, penultimate para.)

Is this now considered a proper sentence? I was taught that two related but separate ideas should be broken into two sentences, or joined by a conjunction. Or even recast as “When Dulana had offered to watch Jonayla, Ayla suspected the woman missed her children.”

This is not an isolated example. Both of Auel’s last two novels are full of run-on sentences that I keep rereading to understand.

Then there are unsupported pronouns. Note that the following sentence occurs at the beginning of a paragraph on page 348:

“A communal meal was being prepared. The visitors brought their own contribution to it, and helped them prepare it.”

Them? Who are they? It is true that the previous paragraph mentions that the visitors have been received by the people of another cave, so one can infer that “them” refers to their hosts. If so, on first reference in a new pargraph, the words “their hosts” should have been used.

Also, am I the only one who gets tired of figuring out who’s who with all of these allegedly Cro-Magnon names Auel invents? There is Joharran who is Jondalar’s older brother, not to be confused with Joconan who is Marthona’s first mate, not to be confused with Jondecam, Levela’s mate, nephew of Kimeran, yadda, yadda.

And how many times do we need to be told that Wolf, the domesticated wild animal that Ayla raised from a pup, is very friendly and protective with children because wolves in a pack are very protective of the pups?
The first time Ayla introduced her tame wolf to the frightened cave dwellers, it was charming. After 20 or more times, it starts to get boring.

Often, there are comments and events that have nothing to do with advancing the plot. Ayla does something in one paragraph, and the author explains why she did it. In the next she meets someone who asks her why she did it and she explains it all over again!

I get the feeling that Auel’s editors and publishers cut her a lot of slack on her last two novels, because she is famous and has sold millions of books. If her first book had been written like her last two, I doubt if it would have seen the light of day.

Am I being too hard on Jean Auel? Your comments?

2

I thought the first book was pretty good, but gave up after the third when it became obvious it was quickly becoming a bodice ripper (or whatever the caveman equivalent of a bodice is). IMHO she had one good book in her and has been milking it since.

(of course, if caveman romance novels are your thing, more power to you, but I don’t think it was really what most of the audience she gained from her first novel was looking for in the sequels).

3

I think, if anything, you’re being too generous. Auel should have stopped at about the third book. Yeah, if people keep clamoring for sequels, I imagine that it’s very hard to resist, but now her reputation as an author is pretty much ruined.

4

Sorry, I can’t agree that the main fault of the five sequels was that they were bodice rippers. The first time Ayla and Jondalar had sex (I believe it was in the Valley of Horses) was pretty graphic, I will admit, but then it sort of had to be, because Ayla was discovering real, rewarding sex after being raped and butalized. But Auel’s last two novels do not by any means go overboard on romance and/or sex scenes.

I just think they are boring and badly written.

5

Did she ever have it?

Clan of the Cave Bear was, to put it mildly, a trashy romance novel set in prehistoric times. While it had some research behind it, the speculation was so over the top as to make that research an embarrassment more than anything else.

For this genre of fiction, I much preferred the novel Reindeer Moon, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

6

I agree, but it doesn’t really matter. I am one of those people who whined and nagged untill she came out of a well earned retirement and wrote part five and six. By now Ayla (and her older alter ego, The First Zelandoni), has become too much of a Mary Sue to be believable anymore.

But like I said, that really doesn’t matter anymore. I love all the fascinatng background info she weaves in throughout the novels. The fifht and sixt novel more then delivered at that point. And I am speaking as one who went to visit Les Eysies in the south of France and made a pelgrimage along most of the caves in the book. Here I am posing proudly in front of the entrance to the Ninth Cave of the Zelandoni. Here’s a pic on the inside.The overhang used to cover a much bigger area, but it broke off three thousand years ago, and the broken rest of the overhang is now the wall on the right of the picture. The scale of the overhang is visible in the samll purveyors’ house that is built underneath it. You can see me talking to the guide (that particular cave doesn’t draw many visitors) and you can see the carefully layered excavations on the right where about twenty thousand years of debris of people living there are piled up. To give any idea of how long twenty thousand years is: the climate has changed three times in that period, from near glacial to “balmy south of france” and back and forth again three times. And all the time, people lived there or camped there. That makes it about the oldest city in the world. I know I felt deep awe when I stood there on that hallowed ground.

(Tips: here’s the world renowned Prehistoric Museum, also partly built in an Abri (rock overhang) and the Font de Gaume (Doni’s Deep cave) and Lascaux Two (the replica of the cave Ayla discovers in part five that would be painted by Jonokol)

(I’m fascinated by caves, there are a lot of them, easy acessible, near my hometown, like this one. (That’s my husband and kid for scale) But those are just a couple of centuries old).

7

I read them a long time ago, but doesn’t the first half of the second book have Jondalar basically being God’s gift to woman across half of paleolitihic Europe before he meets with Ayla, who is the first woman he meets who is…ahem…large enough to accommodate him.

It wasn’t really the graphicness of the sex scenes that I thought was kind of eye-rolling, just that it seemed every woman Jondalar ran into was begging him to take their virginity. And then when he runs into Alya, their romance is so idealized, that it, well, made me think more of romance novels then of the prequel.

8

The errors cited in the OP are so egregious that one has to ask where the hell the editor was.

9

I must admit that the second book (Valley of Horses) was a bit of an eye roller. We are constantly bombarded by how Jondalar is sooo handsome, and sooo tall and sooo well hung. And he is constantly bemoaning his inability to meet the “right” woman. “Where oh where would that woman be” moans poor Jondolar. :rolleyes: Then every few paragraphs, we are brought back to poor, lonely Ayla, beautiful as a Vogue model in spite of living alone in a cave and eating whatever she can get her hands on. But Ayla is lonely to meet one of her Cro-Magnon kind. Gee, I wonder who. . . . .:rolleyes:

You know, now that I think of it, I would say that the first one, Clan of the Cave Bear, was good, and the third one, the Mammoth Hunters, was not bad. But I have to admit the other four books are crap.

10

I think you’re right on Valteron. Her first book was great but the rest got progressively worse. It’s too bad they couldn’t find somebody to help her write because the premise is good but the execution is laughable. Dang it.

11

Another point I wonder about is the (let’s not say implied racism, let’s just say unfounded assumption) in Auel’s novels that Neanderthals would have been dark-haired, dark-skinned and brown-eyed, wheras the modern and advanced Cro-Magnons would have been all blue-eyed and mostly blond. There is no evidence of either assumption, is there?

Given that Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe, they might well have been fair for the same reason the modern white race evolved in Europe. In a cold climate with long, dark winters, fair skin allows for better vitamin D absorption and dark skin is unnecessary in a climate where the sun’s rays cause relatively little skin cancer and sunburn. And a general decrease in melanin content in the body causes a person to have blue eyes, which is a positive advantage for people who hunt in a snowy climate. Blue-eyed people are far less subject to snow blindness than brown-eyed people. A prehistoric hunter who becomes snow-blind on a hunting trip is very nearly condemned to death.

It is far more likely that BOTH the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals were fair-skinned, blond and blue-eyed, for the same reasons.The presence of dark-haired, brown-eyed Caucasians in Europe could easily be explained by later migrations of darker modern humans from the south, long after the Neanderthals had become extinct. Or for that matter, it can even be explained by dark-haired Huns and other asiatics raping their way across Europe and the crumbling Roman Empire.

12

I gotta go with John. I tried Clan, as she lived in the next town over and I like to support local authors, but threw it against a wall three pages in.

13

The actual mammoth hunt in The Mammoth Hunters was probably the last “worth reading” moment in the series, and that was basically the last harvest after a long drought.

Another vote for Clan of the Cave Bear was a really good historical-fantasy novel. I’m not a paleontologist and have no idea as to its accuracy, but it seemed believable (with a couple of supernatural elements thrown in for seasoning, but I’m talking mainly about the “Neanderthal World Order”. Every subsequent one became more like it was written for lovesick 9th graders, then after Mammoth Hunters, lovesick 7th graders. I couldn’t read the last one; for one thing I’d forgotten most of what had happened in the last one because it had been so long, and for another reading the first few pages of it in the bookstore reminded me of every reason I’d given up on the series.

And again, it really started out good.

14

I enjoyed Clan of the Cave Bear. I thought the depiction of what Neanderthal culture could have been like was interesting, since it was at least partially based on what was (thought to be) known about Neanderthals at the time, although mixed with lots of speculation. I read it long enough ago that I don’t recall if I thought it was particularly badly written or not.

I started reading The Valley of Horses, but I gave up part way through. I think it was after one of Jondelar’s trysts, which seemed to owe more to Cosmopolitan than to what is known about sexual attitudes in primitive cultures. I was also started to get exasperated by Ayla’s invention, on her own, of thousands of years of cultural innovations, including some that were completely anachronistic like horse domestication.

15

A thread I started last year on this very subject.

16

It’s sort of interesting that since the book was released the expert opinion on whether Neanderthals and CroMagnons could mate, which is pretty much central to the first book, has turned against her, then back again, and split. While there have always been people in the Could and Couldn’t camps and still are, the general consensus ca. 1980 was “Could”, then in the late '80s with more DNA analysis of remains it became “Couldn’t”, then with remains found in Iberia that appeared to be hybrid (still debated whether they are) it switched back to “Could”, so the official answer seems to be “Mabye, maybe not”. (Recent article.)

I had wondered if this debate was a reason Auel took so long before books- basically, she didn’t want Ayla’s oldest child to be a character if science proved conclusively such a child could not have existed. Apparently not though. I’ve never really read why she took so long between books; true there was a good bit of research for the early ones, but the later ones not so much and the writing was dross so it surely wasn’t the prose.

17

Since Jean Auel is not going to produce a seventh book, maybe we should do it for her. I invite you all to contribute. Here is my offering.

Ayla stared into the fire, a thought she had often had when she was living alone in the valley of the horses just before she met Jondalar and moved in with the Mamutoi as she petted Wolf came into her mind.

“Jondalar” she said, “I just had a thought I often had when I was living alone in the valley of the horses just before I met you and we moved in with the Mamutoi .”

Jondalar put down his flint knapping which was a trade by which flint tools were produced, the sharp cutting edges being made possible by the nature of the hard, sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz categorized as a variety of chert that occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones, and said “Yes Ayla, what did you think?”

“It seems to me that fire is a very polluting and wasteful way to get energy. What if we were to cause a a subatomic particle (such as a proton, or high energy electron) from outside an atom to collide with the nucleus of that atom, thus releasing enormous amounts of energy.”

“It might work” said Jondalar, standing up and using the ingenious system of ropes and pulleys Ayla had invented to raise his enormous manhood organ from the floor. “I could ask Jocular and Gimnasium and Calculator and Jugular to help me build a simple reactor tomorrow and we could try it out the next day.”

“I will ask the spirit world to bless your project,” said the corpulent Zelandoni who was First Among Those Who Served the Mother, as she demolished another bag of potato chips, deep-fried bread and three chocolate Sundaes, all of which Ayla had invented the day before."

Anyhow, I now have writer’s block. You take over.

18

She obviously based Creb on the crippled skeleton discovered in the Shanidar cave, but the “mystical shared memories” was just too much for me. Limited vocal ability was scientific consensus at the time, but the sign language was certainly not. Doing it doggies style while Ayla preferred missionary position was too :rolleyes: for me, too.

19

It’s been years since I read Clan of the Cave Bear, but I did read it several times as an adolescent and it’s my recollection that there’s no romance in it at all. The heroine Ayla is repeatedly raped by the clan chief’s son, but there’s none of the “and then she started to enjoy it” stuff that’s sometimes known to happen in romance novels. It’s clear that this is a very bad experience for her and that the guy is doing it only because he hates her and wants to hurt her. Ayla is consider too ugly and butch for any man she knows to be seriously interested in her, and IIRC she never even has a crush on any of the Neanderthal men.

The romance element doesn’t appear until the second book, Valley of the Horses. Since I was 13 or 14 when I read this I appreciated having some explicit sex scenes, but even at that age I realized the book wasn’t actually very good. I mean, it’s one thing to give your romantic leading man a huge schlong, it’s another thing to make this a key plot point.

I hoped Mammoth Hunters would be better, but something happens early in the book that was so stupid that I stopped then, took it back to the library, and never opened an Auel book again.

20

On the plus side, that made me laugh out loud. On the down side, it’s still better written than Eragon.