igenlode | Surprises from the library (Reply)

Two contrasting books that I picked off the shelves in passing because I recognised the authors' names:

"The Land of Painted Caves", Jean Auel: I had no idea that the last in this series had finally come out - it's been a long time since 1981 and the success of "Clan of the Cave Bear"... Sadly, like the "Harry Potter" books and the Pern novels, it has been a story of diminishing returns in a series that largely depended on describing the minutiae of everyday life in another world. The previous volume, "Shelters of Stone", was a big disappointment even after its predecessor, which failed to live up to the earlier books -- possibly a blessing in disguise as I wasn't expecting too much from this one in consequence.

It really is pretty bad. The author kindly includes a snippet from the start of "Clan of the Cave Bear" as an epilogue, giving me the chance to see whether her writing had really got that much worse over the last 30 years: to be honest, the flat-footed prose is detectable right back at the start if you look at it too closely. The difference is that, by coincidence, I actually came across a copy of "Clan of the Cave Bear" recently and opened it at random: I found myself reading on eagerly to find out what happened next, and absorbing the snippets of prehistoric lore as vivid background detail. It's full of action and discovery, with characters you care about and a setting that is both alien and enthralling. By contrast, "The Land of Painted Caves" is extremely tedious.

It suffers from being at the tail-end of a series in that there are now far too many characters in existence -- with yet more being fleetingly created and then abandoned in the course of this installment! -- but the chief problem is that none of them are distinctive or even interesting any longer. I really found it hard to keep track of who was who, and this despite the enormous amount of recapitulation that goes on. To compensate for there being virtually no plot, large chunks of the book consist of re-hashes of past events -- far in excess of anything necessary to make this a 'stand-alone' novel.

Further large sections of the door-step-sized novel are taken up with literal descriptions of cave paintings. These serve no purpose to speak of in the book, and after the first cave exploration become repetitious in the extreme; they are depicted as being already ancient by the time that the heroine gets to see them, so instead of this being part of her life she is simply taken round them like a tourist and told that nobody really knows what they are or what they are for. Much as, one imagines, the author herself was told in the course of a similar cave tour n -- the whole thing has a very modern feel rather than taking us into an imagined past. (Contrast this with Auel's lively extrapolations from some fairly scanty evidence in her first novel: this one reeks of undigested research, rather than the original set-up of an imagined setting for an actual story.)

Reviews on Amazon more or less sum it up: it's a tired book that fails to tie up the myriad loose ends of the series, and is hard work to get through, with far too much repetition not only from earlier books but between chapters. I actually found myself sympathising with the 'villains' (well, nothing new there?) -- but their stories too are left unfinished. It's a novel that badly needed an editor at a much earlier stage of writing, both to excise vast hunks and to point out the strands that are left dangling; all in all, it feels like a giant rehash of previous work with the characters reduced to two dimensions.
(I was going to write in contrast about my happy experience with Mary Renault's "The Friendly Young Ladies", but since the browser subsequently crashed and lost everything I had written, I'm afraid my effusions will have to go as read: suffice it to say that this is technically a very much better book despite being an apprentice work, and a much easier read!)