Clan of the Cave Bear Book Literary Reviews
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
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November 28, 1985
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THE MAMMOTH HUNTERS. By Jean M. Auel. 645 pages. Crown. $nineteen.95. IT is easy enough to ridicule Jean M. Auel's new novel, ''The Mammoth Hunters,'' the third installment in the author's phenomenally successful ''Earth's Children'' series starring Ayla, the super cavern woman of the ice age.
At the very to the lowest degree, the thrill of the story is wearing a little thin. In Mrs. Auel's first book, ''The Clan of the Cave Bear,'' Ayla survived earthquake, rape and the rejection of the Neanderthals who had raised her. In the next book, ''The Valley of the Horses,'' she tamed animals, mastered the slingshot, started fires with flint and iron pyrite, and nursed back to wellness the handsome Jondalar of the Zelandonii. Just in ''The Mammoth Hunters'' - also as I can think after having finished it more an hr ago - she more often than not kills a mammoth and has some steamy sex with both Jondalar and a dark-skinned ivory carver named Ranec, who also loves her.
Indeed, the 600-folio plot of ''The Mammoth Hunters'' is and so flimsy that the air keeps leaking out and poor Mrs. Auel has to keep rushing for her bike pump - or whatever they used in the Pleistocene Epoch - to inflate it again. This she does by repeating over and over again a scene that 1 would be more than likely to encounter in a teen-historic period romance mag. In it Ayla and Jondalar yearn for each other just can't limited their longing because they are both too proud. So Ayla and Jondalar drift apart, and Ayla becomes engaged to ''the dark carver,'' as Mrs. Auel coyly refers to Ranec once or twice.
Meanwhile, Ayla and Jondalar get to know the members of the mammoth-hunting earthlodge, almost of whom take names that sound the same either forward or backward -Talut, Mamut, Danug, Frebec - and have little in the fashion of character to distinguish them from each other. Ayla also tames a wolf, invents the needle and ponders her theory that pregnancies are caused past men. Jondalar eats his heart out. And Mrs. Auel explains. She explains curing and dyeing leather, gathering herbs, fashioning musical instruments out of the bones of mammoths, the role of the helpmate price and the practice of conspicuous consumption.
Sometimes her explanations precede the demonstrations she makes of her points; at other times they follow. Here she is holding forth on Jondalar's inability to express himself after we have seen information technology in action for a mere 577 pages: ''Jondalar was a physical man. He understood concepts such every bit love, compassion, anger, with an empathy that was based on his own feelings, even though he could non limited them well.''
Really, I prefer Mrs. Auel'south dialogue: ''Speaking of the mammoth hunt,'' one ancient says to Ayla: ''Nosotros should exist getting back. They are planning it this afternoon.'' Or: ''Anybody suffers disappointments in life,'' someone else tells Ayla ''with a level gaze.'' Tristran Tsara would take liked this dialogue too. In that location is something distinctly dadaist about reading talk from ''Footling Women'' in the setting of the ice age.
Still, for all the absurdity of Mrs. Auel's arts and crafts as a novelist, one must somehow account for the record size of her latest book's first hardcover printing - one million copies - and for its having leaped in the past week to the top of the fiction best seller lists. It would be easy enough to mumble that prehistoric fiction seems regularly to have seized the public imagination throughout the past century or so. Works by H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and William Golding come to mind. Thoughts of the shock of Darwinism and the timing of human civilization'southward emergence tumble after.
And then of course Mrs. Auel is probably the get-go to have created a female cave star, although Ayla is not necessarily a prehistoric feminist. ''I don't want to be special,'' she cries out at 1 point. ''I just want to be a woman, and find a mate, and take children, similar every other woman.'' (On the other hand, I can't guarantee that a certain irony isn't intended here.) Just so petty happens in ''The Mammoth Hunters'' that information technology seems ridiculous to burden information technology with idea. It can't exist a case of a sugarcoated pill: The plot is stupid, and you tin can acquire more well-nigh prehistory from a children'south book. We're talking ''Aisle Oop'' here, and maybe therein lies the hopeful explanation. We're getting literate enough to read comic books without illustrations.
Or perhaps the message isn't so encouraging. Mrs. Auel seems vigorously democratic. Her surface message is that despite the differing degrees to which her diverse ''clans'' are advanced across the stage of animality, all humanity is 1 in its origins, and too there's nothing so bad nearly beingness an animal. Nonetheless information technology is her blond, bluish-eyed beauties who terminate upward riding off with each other. The denigration of the Mediterranean Ranec is perhaps the closest thing to subtlety in her unabridged story.
But fifty-fifty to analyze ''The Mammoth Hunters'' this closely is to requite it too much credit. What Mrs. Auel has ultimately achieved is a kind of creationist joke. She is proverb that fifty-fifty 30,000 years ago, the human fauna was a middle-American from Hemingway country. ''Ayla, I was certain he had you!'' says Jondalar after a behemoth nearly nails Mrs. Auel'south heroine. ''The look on his confront was more worried. 'Y'all should have waited until I came . . . or someone came to assist yous. Are yous certain yous're all right?' ''
''Aye, I am, but I'1000 very glad you two were around,'' she said, then smiled. ''Hunting mammoth can be exciting.''
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/28/books/books-of-the-times-187346.html
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