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A review by asphodelia
The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel
1.0
My review for Amazon.co.uk:
Like many fans of the `Earth's Children' series, I was really looking forward to `Land of the Painted Caves'. The previous instalment, `Shelters of Stone', had disappointed me with its endless repetition and poorly sketched characters, but I was sure that Jean M Auel wasn't going to fall into that trap again. I was wrong.
`Land of The Painted Caves' is almost 700 pages long and yet for the first 450-odd pages, nothing happens. Instead, we get endless descriptions of caves. Yes, I understand that the book is called `Land of the Painted Caves' but it is after all a novel. It's just not compelling enough to read description of caves - however pretty the paintings are - for several pages at a time; it's rather tedious. If it was a non-fiction book about caves there would be photographs to look at, at least. I don't know if it's just me but personally I find it very very hard to conjure up images of a cave just going by an extremely verbose description.
Plot-wise, the only major event (which I won't describe here to avoid spoiling your reading) is totally implausible for the character involved; I can't believe that the author would build a character across several books and then have them do something totally unlike them given their background story. You need to make readers believe the characters, or all suspension of disbelief will evaporate. Surely that's one of the main rules of novel writing?
Repetition is, alas, rife once again, just like in `Shelters'. Everything is explained over and over again - Ayla's background, Ayla's accent, even Ayla's medicine bag (which was given to her by Iza, as we are repeatedly told) is described on multiple occasions. It's almost as if Auel assumes that her readers not only have not read the prior 5 novels (unlikely: who would pick up a saga by the last instalment), but indeed that they suffer from regular amnesia between chapters, so she `treats' them to a reminder of pretty much everything within the space of a few pages. Why? Why does she do that? Where is her editor? There is no way this kind of sloppiness would make it past an editor's slush pile, but of course by novel no. 6 Auel is the publishing company's cash cow so who cares about patronising her readers and giving them a bunch of pages which should have been cut down by at least a third.
And what about stuffing the novel with several copy-and-paste appearances of `The Mother's Song'! It reminded me of when I was at university and in order to plump up the dreaded word count in my essays I'd paste in quotes from other texts. It's cheating, and it's boring.
In terms of `closure' (this is to be the last book in the series), there isn't any so don't expect any fireworks at the end. We don't even get a shred of an encounter with a member of Clan, which I found extremely disappointing.
The only thing I can say that made me appreciate this book a bit more is the fact that the final cave described in the book is the famous Chauvet Cave in the South of France. By sheer coincidence, the film `Cave of the Forgotten Dreams - 3D' by Werner Herzog had just been released at my local independent cinema and I was lucky enough to go and see it the day before I came across that chapter in the book. It brought everything to life and as well as being an amazing film (go and see it!), it took the dullness away from yet another cave description.
I'm still glad that I read the book - I love the `Clan' universe and I already miss it. But I find it terribly sad that the `final chapter' of Ayla's story turned out to be such a poor effort. Jean M. Auel has really let us down.
Like many fans of the `Earth's Children' series, I was really looking forward to `Land of the Painted Caves'. The previous instalment, `Shelters of Stone', had disappointed me with its endless repetition and poorly sketched characters, but I was sure that Jean M Auel wasn't going to fall into that trap again. I was wrong.
`Land of The Painted Caves' is almost 700 pages long and yet for the first 450-odd pages, nothing happens. Instead, we get endless descriptions of caves. Yes, I understand that the book is called `Land of the Painted Caves' but it is after all a novel. It's just not compelling enough to read description of caves - however pretty the paintings are - for several pages at a time; it's rather tedious. If it was a non-fiction book about caves there would be photographs to look at, at least. I don't know if it's just me but personally I find it very very hard to conjure up images of a cave just going by an extremely verbose description.
Plot-wise, the only major event (which I won't describe here to avoid spoiling your reading) is totally implausible for the character involved; I can't believe that the author would build a character across several books and then have them do something totally unlike them given their background story. You need to make readers believe the characters, or all suspension of disbelief will evaporate. Surely that's one of the main rules of novel writing?
Repetition is, alas, rife once again, just like in `Shelters'. Everything is explained over and over again - Ayla's background, Ayla's accent, even Ayla's medicine bag (which was given to her by Iza, as we are repeatedly told) is described on multiple occasions. It's almost as if Auel assumes that her readers not only have not read the prior 5 novels (unlikely: who would pick up a saga by the last instalment), but indeed that they suffer from regular amnesia between chapters, so she `treats' them to a reminder of pretty much everything within the space of a few pages. Why? Why does she do that? Where is her editor? There is no way this kind of sloppiness would make it past an editor's slush pile, but of course by novel no. 6 Auel is the publishing company's cash cow so who cares about patronising her readers and giving them a bunch of pages which should have been cut down by at least a third.
And what about stuffing the novel with several copy-and-paste appearances of `The Mother's Song'! It reminded me of when I was at university and in order to plump up the dreaded word count in my essays I'd paste in quotes from other texts. It's cheating, and it's boring.
In terms of `closure' (this is to be the last book in the series), there isn't any so don't expect any fireworks at the end. We don't even get a shred of an encounter with a member of Clan, which I found extremely disappointing.
The only thing I can say that made me appreciate this book a bit more is the fact that the final cave described in the book is the famous Chauvet Cave in the South of France. By sheer coincidence, the film `Cave of the Forgotten Dreams - 3D' by Werner Herzog had just been released at my local independent cinema and I was lucky enough to go and see it the day before I came across that chapter in the book. It brought everything to life and as well as being an amazing film (go and see it!), it took the dullness away from yet another cave description.
I'm still glad that I read the book - I love the `Clan' universe and I already miss it. But I find it terribly sad that the `final chapter' of Ayla's story turned out to be such a poor effort. Jean M. Auel has really let us down.