lan of the Cave Bear is Jean M. Auel's long-lived, much-loved, pre-history of modern man series. She wrote the first 4 books without too much delay, but then took 12 years to turn out book #5, leading to enormous presales and great fan anticipation. This made it all the sadder when the book finally came out, and was hated by almost everyone who had been so eagerly awaiting it.

I'd utilize my categorized rating system here, except that I didn't make it through more than 30 pages, and only got that far by skimming a great deal.

The following discussion was written August 5, 2003, after I read the first chapter and paused in shock at how bad it was. I never read any more.r's G

As Malaya discussed in her blog last week, the latest Jean Aeul novel in her Children of the Earth series is called Shelters of Stone. And as Malaya discussed, it was a 12-year wait for it for loyal fans of the series (mostly fans of the first two books, which were very good, and not the 3rd and 4th, which sucked). A dozen year wait that turned very ugly, since the book is a train wreck.

It's not like people just don't like how the story went, or how it was written, or like the author killed off a favorite character.  People actively hate it, on many levels.

I had read the first two novels in the series many years ago, I'm talking decades.  Like in the 80's.  And thought they were pretty good, but nothing exceptional.  Mostly memorable for me for the very graphic sex that happened a lot; I can remember practically every girl in my junior high school carrying around a copy of Valley of the Horses for about 3 years straight, and I've always been pretty sure that it was for the very hot and very lovingly-detailed sex it contained.

Or perhaps that was all the 13 y/o Flux got out of the story, which is basically a historical fiction soap opera.  I've seen how much one's personality affects what you get out of a book a lot recently, when discussing favorite books and series of my youth with Malaya.  I'm four years older than her, but we both read a lot of the same books and saw the same movies in our formative years, and it's funny to me how differently we remember things. Stuff that I remember for the action and violence and sex she'll remember for the romance or relationships.  And when she talks about it I can vaguely recall the elements she's talking about, but they are almost never anything I noticed at the time, or if I noticed them they meant nothing to me.  It's almost like we read different versions of the same stories, but it wasn't the stories that were different -- it was the brains that were processing them.

As for Shelters of Stone, I heard Malaya groaning at it while she tried to read it and skimmed frantically ahead.  I read numerous of the painfully-upset fan reviews on Amazon.com.  And I believed all of them, and didn't have any hope that the novel would actually be any good, but at the same time, I had trouble believing it was really that bad. So I gave it a try.

The book begins with about a 10 page acknowledgements section, which I strongly-recommend you skip entirely.  I tried to read it, curious about her scientific thanks to all of the doctors and archeologists who helped her build up the information about early man that she uses in the stories.  She is very thankful and sincere, but also very boring and far too detailed and thorough.  The effort is entirely on presenting the information the author wants to present, with no consideration as to whether or not the reader needs all that info, nor on how to make the info that must be delivered interesting.  This is a theme that continues through the 900 pages of the book.

The very first page of the actual story was enough to almost make me give up.

True, I'm far more picky about the actual prose and word-arrangement and writing quality/style than 99% of readers, but I think almost anyone with an ear for writing or an eye for quality would have problems with the very low writing quality she exhibits, and right on page one.  Perhaps every page in a book can't be scintillating prose, but come on, page one? That's the one page that simply must be good and well-polished, since that's the first thing most readers see, and it needs to start off with a bang, as well as be involving and welcoming.  Page one of Shelters of Stone is none of these.

It starts off like the middle of a chapter, or even a paragraph, with no introduction or hook, and the writing used on that page is as bad as any in the book.  I'm not going to count it now, but as I read it I noted that at least 95% of the sentences were the simplest "subject - verb" arrangement possible.  Okay, I'll go look for a minute.

In order:

• People were
• No one made
• The young woman
• She watched
• She had
• It's not just that
• The tall man
• He was
• He turned
• He seems
• She nodded
• In addition
• She was
• Ayla held
• She considered
• That throng

Okay, it's even worse than "subject - verb". It's like there was a sale on "pronoun - verb" and Jean M. Auel was buying.

This isn't technically incorrect or anything, it's just a very low level of writing, and grates on the ear with the perpetual sameness of it all.  Varying sentence structure and layout to keep things flowing and sounding fresh to the reader isn't the first lesson in a creative writing class; it's simply common sense.  I would find it impossible to issue something like this; even when I'm writing something in the very roughest rough draft I consciously vary my sentence structure, if I for some reason find myself falling into such a simple rut of repetition. It bothers me to hear it in my head as I write it; much less thinking about how lame it will look to a reader.

Anyway, I got past page one, eventually, and tried to move on.  I've read poorly-written stories in the past, and I can look past the bad writing if the story is interesting, the characters fascinate me, the world they inhabit is fun, there is good action and/or sex, and so on.  I hoped I'd get into the story of SoS, and be able to ignore the unedited prose.

But once I got past the repetitious sentence structure and amateurish word arrangement, it just became boring.  Starting just a couple of pages in is the first huge block of long, boring, formal introductions.  I suppose that some people really care enough about the story to read the whole,

"Joharran, this is Ayla of the Mamutoi, Member of the Lion Camp, Daughter of the Mammoth Hearth, Chosen by the Spirit of the Cave Lion, and Protected by the Cave Bear."

"In the name of the Doni, the Great Earth Mother, I welcome you, Alaya of the Mamutoi, Dauther of the Mammoth hearth," he said.

stuff.

I can't stand those sorts of things myself, in real life or in novels, and I just glaze over at the first hint of long titles and names.  It's fine once in a while, and probably necessary the first time a character is introduced, but literally the entire page 6 is this, with four-paragraph introduction to the concept of formal introductions that I can't seriously believe any intelligent reader couldn't have figured out for themselves.  And according to Malaya and countless other reviewers, this sort of thing goes on for the entire novel.  Just page after page of long, long, long, boring cut and paste formal introductions.  No one has any idea why Aeul didn't just start saying, "Ayla gave a formal introduction to...", rather than writing out the whole thing once again.

Maybe the author just figured out how to use a word processing program (remember, it's been 12 years since the last book in the series) and she was literally so enamored of the ease with which she could paste in paragraphs that she never stopped to realize how boring they would be for readers to plow through every single time.

Just death.  Death.  As Malaya likes to say.

Once you get past the whole formal introductions stuff, you start to get to the thing that I'm currently hung up on.  It's another sort of "how not to write a book" example, though in this case it's a good example of how not to write any sort of fiction, be it short story, novella, or novel.

What Auel does is want to give out a bunch of information quickly, and wants to describe subtle emotional states, but she lacks the skill or tact or patience to do that through the writing, so instead of working it in over time she just plops it down in a huge chunk, mostly through the thoughts of a character.  So someone will say something, and then the next three paragraphs describe their thought processes in the most ridiculously detailed way.  And every character does this.

If just one or two did it, you could buy that okay, that's a super thoughtful character and they really analyze their own thoughts, as well as seeing into the actions of others.  But when everyone does it, up to and possibly including the animals, it just becomes a bad author crutch.

There's a scene on about page 20 where Jon talks to his old lover Zol who is now sort of the queen of the tribe, and then his new lover Ayla walks in.

In a nutshell:

• Zol realizes from a glance at Jon while Jon is speaking about Ayla that Jon is really and truly madly in love with her, and this is a bad thing to Zol since it means that Ayla can actually hurt Jon since he's vulnerable to her.
• Jon realizes this from looking into Zol's eyes, and realizes that he must convince her that Ayla is deserving of his true love since he wants Zol and Ayla to get along and also since Zol is a powerful woman in the tribe.
• Ayla then walks in and sees them together talking and instantly realizes that Zol is a powerful woman who is somewhat suspicious of her and worried about Jon, and Ayla further realizes that Zol must not only be a past love and lover of Jon, but one who was his first lover and teacher, and therefore Ayla knows she must make a good impression, but she also realizes that Zol is super smart and able to see into people so Ayla knows that she must be honest and insightful and not just smile fakely.
• Fortunately Ayla, at a glance, realizes the entire back history of Zol and Jon, and she immediately thanks Zol for teaching Jon so well in sexual and love matters and for letting him go free even though she loved him since that enabled Ayla to meet Jon years later and fall in love with him.
• And as Ayla says this Zol realizes how insightful Ayla and that she sees the whole situation and not just part of it, and that therefore Ayla is worthy of Jon's love.

Of course the book takes like six pages to get all this tortuous detail out, and presents it with almost as little subtlety as I just did.  It's just plopped down on the page and you are supposed to read it and accept the nearly telepathic mental connections as near-godlike perception of these people, and go on from there.

Now obviously this is a very complicated relationship and the characters have enough depth that you need to know all of this about them, and that's a good thing, but the way it's just 2x4 exposition'ed down on the table is unacceptable.  This would be sent back for a total rewrite by any editor working today, and only allowed in if the rest of the novel was so good or long that reworking this minor thing into the complicated scene that it would require to present competently was just out of the question.

And this is anything but an isolated event.  Virtually every conversation or character interaction is like this, with one or both characters always sending up a few paragraphs of psych journal-worthy insight or analysis, either of themselves or the person they have just met.  It's informative, but absurd, and reads nothing like real life. And the problem with that is that you are immediately taken out of the book, since you can't help but realize you are reading as you wonder, "Who the hell thinks like this character is thinking?"  You have to constantly make conscious decisions to ignore some dreadful writing, or some awful authorial mistake in how information and dialogue is presented, if you're to continue with the novel.

I'm only on page 30 and I've had to stop in disgust 4 or 5 times already.  I can't imagine I'll get more than 100 or so pages in, and then possibly skip to the ending just to see if there is anything interesting there.

By all reports Aeul just refuses to allow an editor to fix up her writing for her, and I guess that's a perk that comes with success, but it's really killed her writing quality. And it's not like an editor just fiddles around to improve your wording, they insist upon major changes so your bloated and redundant 900 page disappointment of a 5th novel becomes a streamlined 600 page bore.  No editor can create an interesting plot for you, and there is no real plot or conflict at all in Shelters of Stone, but an editor can at least trim some of the fat from the meat of the novel, and help readers keep moving.

When hundreds of devoted fans take the time to write about how greatly-disappointed they were with your latest work, a book most of them waited 12 years for, it's a pretty clear sign that you've issued a disaster of a novel.   And I feel sorry for them.

It does give me motivation to write my own novels though, and resolve to never start sucking this hard in the middle of a series, thus letting down all of my long-time fans, not to mention killing off my career.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.