The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

Prehistoric fiction at a glacial pace

The Clan of the Cave Bear, published in 1980, is the first of a half dozen books in Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, which has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. The story is set 30,000 years ago on the Crimean peninsula in what is now the Ukraine. Following a devastating earthquake, a young girl finds herself orphaned and alone. Luckily she is found by a neighboring tribe who save her life, but this newfound family is reluctant to accept her as one of their own. The girl, named Ayla, is a Cro-Magnon, a founding member of the Homo sapiens species. The titular Clan, on the other hand, is made up of Neanderthals who find the skinny blonde girl ugly and strange.

Early on, the narrative develops a pattern that is repetitively carried through for the remainder of the book: The Clan is a very civilized organization with many complicated social rules and religious laws. These regulations delineate very strict gender roles. Ayla, acting as a precocious feminist, frequently breaks the rules and is threatened with punishment, including death sentences. She always gets off on some technicality or loophole, however, and becomes an exception to the rule, thus negating much of the effort Auel put into conceiving the Clan’s societal codes in the first place. One can understand why Auel, writing for a twentieth-century audience, would want to write a story with a strong female protagonist, but the author so often projects today’s values onto prehistoric society that the events often seem to defy reality. The tameness of this prehistoric world is unbelievable, and largely to Ayla’s advantage. To her credit, Auel does relent from the gratuitous girl power long enough to draw a reasonably credible picture of what sexual relations and parenthood might have been like during the Pleistocene.

Although Auel’s straightforward prose style, lacking in ostentation, is commendable at first, once she outlines the scientific parameters of the world she’s depicting the rest of the text reads like a young adult novel. Teenaged readers would not have the attention span to get through the book, however, because the plot proceeds at a glacial pace with way too much description and not enough action. What little could be called “action” is soap opera melodrama that doesn’t really take advantage of the possibilities of the book’s unique setting. A prehistoric science fiction novel should not be this boring. Occasionally plot elements also add the insult of ridiculousness to the injury of boredom.

It’s obvious that Auel did a fair amount of research before writing this novel, but it still feels like there’s an awful lot of speculation amid the science. Much attention is given to details regarding the food and cooking of the Neanderthals, as well as the medicinal plants utilized by their medicine women. The religious views of the Clan, however, come across as very New Agey, as if written by someone with an interest in late-twentieth century Wicca. In Auel’s world, because the Neanderthals are a more primitive, animalistic species than us, they rely more heavily on instinct than cognition. Auel pushes this into the realm of pseudoscience, however, when she endows her characters with ancestral memories. One scene of a religious ceremony seems directly lifted from Frank Herbert’s Dune, particularly when the characters experience devolutionary flashbacks and prescient visions similar to those of Dune’s hero Muad’Dib. The era of early man is rife with narrative possibilities (Jack London proved this in 1907 with his novel Before Adam), but Auel feels the need to ladle on the mysticism in an attempt to keep the reader interested, when in fact the result is just the opposite.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and leave me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R39LCM5WOH7F5E/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm