Good Plot, Bad Author: Jean M. Auel
When I was about eighteen and riding high on a wave of Tolkien epic fantasy type books, my Grampy lent me his copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear. I really enjoyed it, but never got very far with the sequel (The Valley of the Horses).
Last year I inherited a collection of my Grampy's books, which included the Earth's Children series. I happily reread the first book but from there they got progressively more and more tedious.
In practice, it's a good idea. In prehistoric times, an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl is adopted by a clan of Neanderthals who raise her, then, due to the new leader of the clan pretty much hating her, she is forced to go off alone. The first book is quite good. I liked reading about this imagined social structure for the Neanderthals, but from that point on it sort of went downhill.
Jean M. Auel obviously likes what she's writing about. The end of each book has details about what research she has carried out into the subject, and that's the problem. She gets so into her research that she seems to want to include everything in the book. Unfortunately, that leads to pages and pages of description about the terrain, the plant life, the animals, the way that the people there make soap...
It's okay in the first book, it's not too bad in the second book, but by the third book you've heard it all before. By the most recent book in the series, which features about a thousand pages of two characters walking across miles and miles of countryside. It got to the point where I was skipping whole paragraphs and then pages to find that the characters hadn't moved from when I started skimming.
You get the impression that the whole series could have been condensed to about two novels had the author not been so keen to share everything that she had learned with the reader.
I've also tagged this 'sex scene failure' because basically once Ayla meets Jondalar the whole thing becomes prehistoric porn every chapter or so.
Last year I inherited a collection of my Grampy's books, which included the Earth's Children series. I happily reread the first book but from there they got progressively more and more tedious.
In practice, it's a good idea. In prehistoric times, an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl is adopted by a clan of Neanderthals who raise her, then, due to the new leader of the clan pretty much hating her, she is forced to go off alone. The first book is quite good. I liked reading about this imagined social structure for the Neanderthals, but from that point on it sort of went downhill.
Jean M. Auel obviously likes what she's writing about. The end of each book has details about what research she has carried out into the subject, and that's the problem. She gets so into her research that she seems to want to include everything in the book. Unfortunately, that leads to pages and pages of description about the terrain, the plant life, the animals, the way that the people there make soap...
It's okay in the first book, it's not too bad in the second book, but by the third book you've heard it all before. By the most recent book in the series, which features about a thousand pages of two characters walking across miles and miles of countryside. It got to the point where I was skipping whole paragraphs and then pages to find that the characters hadn't moved from when I started skimming.
You get the impression that the whole series could have been condensed to about two novels had the author not been so keen to share everything that she had learned with the reader.
I've also tagged this 'sex scene failure' because basically once Ayla meets Jondalar the whole thing becomes prehistoric porn every chapter or so.