Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Earth’s Children is among the first series I ever started reading in English way back when I was like fifteen, sixteen. It’s a hefty series to pick up at that age in a foreign language, for sure, but in the years since, I’ve learned I’m not the only one who read this as a teenager.
And, like so many of my contemporaries, this series was also my first introduction into romantic fiction. Not that Clan of the Cave Bear is even remotely historical romance.
Because, and here I don’t know what the back office story on this is, but there isn’t even a hint of romance until the second book in the series. But the first book does contain, what basically qualifies as, sexual assault. Yeah, I know. It’s complicated.
So, in Clan of the Cave Bear we’re introduced to our magical genius protagonist. Ayla is a Cro-Magnon girl that ends up living with a tribe of Neanderthals. I say magical genius, because Ayla almost single-handedly launches humanity into a new, more technologically advanced era.
Yes, it’s unrealistic that she just happens to invent everything, but this is one of those instances where I’m happy to forgive the magical genius. I don’t hate Ayla for it.
Because as much as she is a character in the story, she’s much more than that. She’s also the vessel through which we explore the ancient history of humanity. And explore deeply we do, so don’t pick up this series if you can’t handle or don’t enjoy long, detailed descriptions of processing animal hides, gathering medicinal plants and flint-knapping. So much flint knapping.
This is one series where I think the use of the omniscient POV is incredibly effectively done.
As much as I complain that most writers don’t use first person POV to anywhere near its full potential, the same could be argued about omniscient narration.
The fact that it’s told in omniscient is a really good choice, I think. It makes it feel like you’re a fly on the wall of prehistoric history. It creates that sense of distance to these things that are from so long ago.
The POV has a certain innate othering to it that somehow brings the story closer, it’s a fascinating experience. Because at the same time the characters can feel like nothing more than plot devices used to explore the incredibly detailed world.
So, in the first book we meet Ayla as a child and follow her through adolescence. And, boy howdy, does a lot happen to her.
The beginning is still just as harrowing and painful as I remember. Maybe even more so because since becoming a mum I’ve become really sensitive to content where children get harmed. Before I was able to sit through pretty harrowing things and just accept it as “plot devices” but these days it just rends my heart.
There’s also sexual abuse in Clan of the Cave Bear, which results in a pregnancy. Within the narrative it isn’t viewed as assault or even abuse, but considering there’s no basis for it being historically accurate, and that the book was written by a modern author for a modern audience, I find it hard to classify it as anything other than abuse.
Note that the book does not have trigger warnings for this! My guess is because it predates the widespread use of trigger warnings, which are so common in romance today, and because it isn’t classed as a romance (which shouldn’t matter as it’s still a triggering subject even when you’re a reader with little to no triggers!).
You can tell the author clearly loves the subject and pours a lot of her knowledge and research into the books (she was famous for this). I don’t think she intends to show the Neanderthals in a bad light, but they do end up filling the role of villain.
I’ve complained before about the bias against Neanderthals in our modern portrayals of them, and this series definitely does suffer from that while still doing a lot of heavy lifting to present them in an empathetic light.
Auel puts an effort into not falling for the old caveman clichés, and whatever is left in the way Neanderthals are portrayed is partly fictional (the ancestral memories) as well as maybe representative of what was known in the research field at the time the books were published.
Today I feel like this is showing its age.
And that’s not a bad thing, it just… is.
Book 2 is all about the Cro-Magnon power couple.
The whole series is so very 80s, even though it’s Palaeolithic.
I haven’t read much around the books themselves, but read enough to find out that the author had hit a glass ceiling in a previous career, and those frustrations at patriarchal structures are really evident in these book (historical accuracy be damned).
The books are ripe with misogyny even as the world-building bangs on and on about doing a feminism. There are the occasional flash-forwards of the future that establish a clear line of how the world only gets worse as it’s plunged into ever more misogyny.
The shining light from Valley of the Horses onwards is our Cro-Magnon power couple, Ayla and Jondalar. After first losing her family and being raised by “savages, but they’re nice” Ayla, again, experiences abandonment.
But she’ll be okay, because her superpower is having a brain that can access creative problem solving. Yeah. That’s the argument.
The archaic and unintelligent Neanderthals are in clear juxtaposition with the modern and clever Cro-Magnon, who are being spearheaded into a new age of modern humanity by Ayla (and her boyfriend’s there too).
He’s specifically there to “heal” her past abuse with his own personal, considerably sized gift (yeah, uh-huh, THAT gift). A gift that has turned him into a first-time lover desired by most women in his tribe/culture’s ritualistic losing of the V-card.
Yeaahhh, this series has SO MANY issues.
But basically, after being abandoned (yet again), Ayla has to leave her Neanderthal adoptive family, who now have her young son in their custody. By leaving them, Ayla leaves their archaic ways and ideas behind and ventures off on her own. Living alone in a valley, she ends up befriending both a cave lion (her totem from the first book) and a horse. In her free time, she likes to birth the modern age of humanity, by inventing every invention ever.
Mm-hmm. There is an awareness in the book about how improbable it is for one person to be the source of the collective achievements of prehistoric peoples. The book’s telling you “it’s not that deep” because we’re using Ayla as a vehicle to explore all these inventions and advancements first-hand, but it still is all rolled into one person in this narrative, rather than, say, spread over several individuals or communities. There’s no reason Ayla couldn’t come across a lot of these things in the world rather than inventing them herself.
So, instead of these inventions and advancements developing organically and in community, over time, these books make a case for hyper-individualism. On the one hand she’s abused and alone and desperate, but she’s also a magical genius, so it’s okay. Even her trauma and PTSD are easily solved with some dick, which she reluctantly jumps on in order to stop her manss from abandoning her.
Look, I’m not defending these books. You can’t.
Taking in the whole picture, you can so easily make a case for Ayla experiencing child abuse and it then getting “fixed” by more abuse – albeit of a lesser degree – but emotional manipulation and being practically unable to control himself around her is… well, yeah. Not a pretty picture, even though it’s supposed to be endearing and titillating (the text will literally bang you over the head with how big his schlong is).
Once she gets healed by being “initiated the right way” all her PTSD just kind of evaporates, the past abuse is glossed over and becomes nothing more than an unpleasant memory.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth with their relationship, Ayla often behaving like the child she is, and Jondalar wondering if it’s his abilities as a lover or his physical appearance that is the problem. It’s not intentionally written angst in a slow burn sense (I don’t think), so it’s really more waffling than anything else.
If you’re brave enough to pick these up, know that the author’s love of the subject matter is evident, so be prepared to sit through hundreds of pages of flintknapping, fire making, hide scraping, plant gathering, and descriptions of objects that are so hyper-detailed you lose all sense of proportion and end up googling the damn thing just to be a little bit more clued in on what you’re really “looking at” (and I’m saying this as an aficionado of prehistoric history).
These days, this series isn’t something I’d easily pick up.
In fact, picking this whole series up wasn’t an easy thing because I know that it’s so heavy and involved. But I’ve read the whole thing once before, maybe I’ll make it to the end again?
To be the first to find out if I ever do (and to see what else I’m reading) join my free book club here.
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