As
noted in my introductory piece, "Chapter One," I will write about writing from time to
time. I’ve worked as a journalist
and a grant reader and writer, and I’ve written four historical novels, none
published. But in the course of
all my reading and writing, I developed ideas about the way
fiction, and particularly historical fiction, should work. What follows here is less a review than
a reflection on the nature of the understanding between writer and reader and
the ways in which this particular author disappoints.
Just
like, at the least counting, some 45 million other people, I’ve read most of
the Jean Auel Earth’s Children, or “Clan of the Cave Bears” series, and in the
last week, I finished the final volume, The Land of Painted Caves. And I’m really mad about it.
Being
mad about a novel is different from not liking it, or being bored by it. People get mad about a novel when they
feel cheated, which means, I think, that the author has violated the unwritten
but understood contract with the reader.
There’s
not much mystery as to the terms of that contract. The reader wants a good story, with characters that they may
or may not like, but absolutely believe in. Ideally, they want a book that’s written in an interesting
way and that means something to them in the longer term, giving them something
to think about, some insight into their lives (see Edward Mendelson’s The Things That Matter, a study of the phases of life through examination of
seven classic novels). A
historical novel should offer an additional little tasty treat: the exotica of its setting, and a few
fun facts about an era you may have been unfamiliar with.
We
know what the author wants from the reader, too: Appreciation.
Love. Sales!!! And a chance to tell their story. Jean Auel earned all those things
with her very first novel, but as she let the series drift on, she ceased to
deserve them.
The
first novel introduces Ayla, a little Cro-Magnon girl who loses her family in
an earthquake and is subsequently adopted by a clan of Neanderthals; apparently they did co-exist, and
according to recent DNA science, even interbred from time to time. That’s important because over the
course of the novel, Ayla grows up and eventually gives birth to a son. What drives the novel and creates constant conflict and interest is the difficulty she encounters trying to
accommodate herself to a culture in which she is a freak,
missing the “instinct” memories possessed by the Neanderthals and endowed,
instead, with an ability to think creatively and flexibly. She’s also tall and blonde and buff
from all her hard physical labor, but believes herself to be ugly and stupid
compared to the Neanderthals.
While the writing is never more
than workmanlike, it’s a good read.
The characters are engaging, with good people and bad among the
Neanderthals, and understanding and depth in their portrayal. There are generous – very generous –
descriptive passages on the terrain, weather patterns, food, drink, medicine,
plants, cultural rituals. You keep
reading because it’s interesting and the story’s a good one. There’s even a cliff-hanger ending when
Ayla’s expelled from the clan without the son she adores, and told to find her
own way and her own people. Auel
leaves the reader eager to find out what happens next.
Skip about 30 years to the sixth
and final book in the series, and you’ll find that while sales are still pretty
staggering, reviews are now tepid.
Critics cite things like the exhaustive and exhausting descriptive
passages and the repetitive nature of an awful lot of the information; they seem particularly exercised over
the fact that Auel tells us about 15 times how prehistoric people, literally,
boil water. Much of the book is a
kind of guided tour of cave paintings as Ayla trains to be a priestess, which
some may find interesting (not me!) but which can’t compensate, in a novel, for
lack of basic plot and character development.
I’m left wondering what
happened. Did Auel simply run out
of inventive steam? After all, over the last four books, her main characters
Ayla and her mate, Jondalar, have wandered all the way across the face of
Europe (in his case, twice) sampling many different Cro-Magnon cultures along
the way; married and had a
kid; and invented everything from animal husbandry to surgical
sutures. Maybe the reason the last
book is so dull is that there’s really not that much left to say.
But I’m also wondering if maybe
those magnificent sales actually got in her way. If you’re guaranteed to sell a gazillion books on the
strength of your earlier work, you don’t have to try as hard to please your
readers with a story that will really grab them. You can indulge your fascination with your research and drone
on about it as long as you like, confident that the audience will buy a ticket
to your show regardless of whether you put on a good one. That’s why I’m mad about this book. It’s as if Auel just doesn’t care about
her readers anymore.
And if you read the comments about
the book on Amazon, you see that there is a bit of a revolt going on – I’m not
alone in being bored and mad.
Along with disappointment over non-existent plot and cardboard
characters, a common thread is “I’m not going to buy this one – I’ll get it
from the library/bargain bin/tag sale, if I decide to read it.” There was also another
theme that really resonated with me:
a lot of people miss the Neanderthals, the characters from her first
book. It’s in that book that she
found her most interesting theme and conflicts. Why did she never come back to them, bringing Ayla full
circle, as I fully expected she would?
And how could Auel abandon Ayla’s longed-for and much loved son? There’s a playwriting dictum called
“Chekhov’s gun” which says that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it
has to go off by the third. I
think that kid is the equivalent:
you expect him to have a pivotal role at some point, and instead, he’s
never seen again. To be honest, I
read the final book primarily to see if Ayla would find out what had become of
him.
Why is any of this worth examining,
given that no one ever expected the Clan of the Cave Bear series to be one of
literature’s undying works?
I think it’s because good storytelling really matters, across all genres
and at all literary levels. There
may be a few geniuses who can get away without it, but they’re few and far
between, and often what they’re doing crosses some literary borderline, anyway. But for most of us, writers and
readers, story is bedrock, part of that contract between writer and reader I
mentioned above. It’s arrogant for
an author to write without taking the reader and their expectations into
consideration– even if part of the point is to confound those
expectations. At the end of
the day, it takes two to tell a story, one to tell and another to hear; and if the author stops caring about
the person who is listening, then they may as well have remained silent.
