The Earth's Children series is a collection of (so far) five novels that follow the life of Ayla, a Cro-magnon woman living during the most recent ice age (probably around 30,000 years ago) in what is now, as close as I can tell, eastern Europe. Cro-magnons differed from us only slightly. They were generally quite a bit taller, and were more rubustly built, especially in their skulls. No doubt, if one happened to walk down the street, you would notice him, but probably wouldn't think him remarkable for much more than his height.
I started reading this series of books when they first started coming out in 1980. At that time, I only got as far as part-way through the third book. For some reason, I recently decided I wanted to read them again, so I went out and bought the whole series in paperback. I'm just about finished the third book (The Mammoth Hunters) and look forward to the next two. Unfortunately, the author is still working on the sixth book of the series.
What I like most about these stories is the way the main character Ayla, and to lesser extents, the characters around her, represent all humans of their era, which spanned tens of thousands of years. Ayla discovers how to make fire with flint. She learns how to tame and domesticate animals, and to ride horses and use them for pack animals. She develops her own (biologically correct) ideas about how babies are made. She is even able to see into the future, albeit with the help of some very dangerous plant-based hallucinogens, and envisions a day when the earth is covered with flat surfaces, non-natural formations, and quickly moving objects. Ayla is the link between the Neanderthals who raised her as an orphan found in the wilderness, and us, modern humans.
Auel's research and understanding of the era allows the reader to feel she is spying on another time, a time with which we seem to have lost all connection, but a time that is still startlingly familiar. We can see, through Auels' postulations on culture, spirituality and the physical demands of the time, the things that make us like them and where many of our current practices may have been born. Do you feel a little bit ashamed about staring into the windows of houses as you walk along the street? Perhaps that's a vestige of the way ancient peoples avoided looking into the living areas of other families when several families would live in small, undivided communal dwellings. Rape was just as abhorrent to Cro-magnons as it is to us, Auel postulates.
It was also a time when the earth provided everything needed for existence, and ingenius methods were devised to use every last fragment of the bounty that could be collected from the land or hunted from among its teeming wildlife. Harsh though their environment was, they seemed mostly happy and content and, so far in the series at least, war was unknown.
Along with some brilliant world-building, Auel also knows how to spin a ripping good yarn, and this is as intense and compelling a love story as I have ever read, not to mention a great and far-sweeping adventure. Ayla, an ancient homo-sapiens raised by a Neanderthal clan, falls in love with Jondalar, a man of her own kind but as different from her in culture as he could possibly be. Their cultural, linguistic and spiritual differences create situations between them that have the reader biting her lip and growling with frustration over the situations, which seem silly and easily-solved by us, but which keep Ayla and Jondalar constantly at odds in spite of their deep and mutual love for one another. It's enough to make you want to throw the book across the room at times, but you don't because Auel has her way of leading you along by the nose, thinking some little thing will fall into place and Ayla and Jondalar will see what silly gits they've been.
There is not much to criticize in these books. There are too-frequent and too-detailed passages describing the natural environment in which the characters move and live. You feel as if you're reading a text-book at these moments. I would much rather she stuck to the less intrusive and more easily absorbed descriptions that naturally flow with any scene-writing, rather than yanking you out of the storytelling and plopping you down in front of a documentary during the books' natural segues.
And I hate to say it, but her sex scenes are not much better. The first time Ayla and Jondalar made love, long-anticipated and masterfully built-up to, was gloriously written and enjoyable to read. But all subsequent sex scenes are about as interesting and sexy as the natural history documentaries she subjects the reader to from time to time. They are too long and too minutely detailed to make for good erotic reading. While she does manage to get some heat going, she dispels it with too much step-by-step description. Tab A into Slot B, and then he did this and then she moaned and squirmed, and then they reached a perfect mutual orgasm and of course there is never any mess or goo afterwards, even though they never change the sleeping furs.
Then again...who wants to read about mess and goo anyway.
As with any TV show in which you know the main character will prevail in spite of the mortal peril she appears to face in a particular episode, I know that Ayla and Jondalar will eventually work through their frustrating differences and carry on to their next great adventure together. I even have a good idea what that adventure will be, and that they will probably prevail again. But Auel's storytelling is so adept that I will continue to read and be delighted with the tale, just like my ancient ancestors would sit around a fire and raptly listen to a story they've heard dozens of times before.
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