June Book Blogging: Me Jane. You WTF? (Public Post)

[author_by_night]

 I was inspired by this post to book blog. I probably won't be doing it exactly the way they had in mind, but I probably will talk about books I'm currently reading. After all, the original point of this blog was  mostly to blog about a particular book series. I'll probably mix and mash topics - current reads, old reads, want-to-reads, how certain books have impacted me, and general thoughts about books.

Today I'm going to talk about Earth's Children by Jean Auel, in particular the sixth book, Land of the Painted Caves. I may or may not do a longer post on the clusterfuck that was the originally strong series. There will be spoilers for Land of the What Just Happened? Painted Caves, and this post assumes you have at least some familiarity with the books (although I do include a basic recap/explanation for anyone whose memory needs a quick jog.) I'm also making this post public so I can share with my ecfans friends. :)


I discovered the series in 2000, when I was fifteen. I loved it. I was on vacation when I was reading COTCB, and I got hit with a weird 24 hour stomach bug. Yet I could not stop reading. I wanted to know what happened to Ayla. Ayla was strong as hell. I was sad to see her leave the Clan, but eager to see where life took her. I read Ayla's journey into the Valley, and Jondalar's parallel story. I read them meet The Mammoth Hunters, and, like most fans, rolled my eyes at the love triangle. I read the Plains of Passage. I realized there hadn't been an addition to the series in twelve damn years.

(I can hear GRRM fans laughing at me.)

I also found a fandom on ecfans.com and on a now-defunct forum that turned to more political topics. It was a small yet amazing fandom I could go on all day about. Book five came out; it was okay. Book six came out... you know how Game of Thrones fans felt about season 8? That's how most of us felt.

As a quick recap: The Clan, or Neanderthals, was an extremely patriarchal society. Interestingly, we learn that this wasn't always the case - Creb remembers a time when women also hunted. However, Clan women now no longer hunt, or really do much of anything, including deciding when to "Mate." (That's exactly what it sounds like. It's partly pinpointed on instinct, but women are also able to look away and pretend they didn't see "the signal", whiiich... calls the instinct theory into question.)  Anyway, Ayla is Homo Sapiens Sapiens/us, so nevertheless she persists. Unfortunately, she's still forced to leave in the end, leaving behind her son, who is part Clan.

Also, there's absolutely no concept of fatherhood, which is odd for a tribe that is so strong about sex. They don't know that men = babies. They think women "swallow spirits." 

Ayla finds the Homo Sapiens Sapiens/us (or "Others") and we learn all about them between books 2 and 6. Ayla keeps kicking ass, is a bit of a Mary Sue, yada yada. The Others are a very Matriarchal society, honoring The Mother (the Venus figure, basically - all Venus figurines in this universe are The Mother). They also don't know how babies are made. Ayla has figured it out, but only tells a few people, including her mate Jondalar.

In the case of the Others, not knowing the deal about babies allows them not only to be a very Matriarchal society, but open overall. The books were actually quite progressive for their time when it came to sexuality; one Shaman is implied to be transgender, and when Jondalar asks what gender the Shaman is, realizes it doesn't really matter. Sex is a large part of their culture. Basically in ECverse, the Others' world  was pretty much Burning Man meets Woodstock, as narrated by Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem.

Here's where the Margaret Atwood part comes in. Ayla reveals The Deal About Babies. (It's a really long and convoluted story I can't even explain, except to say it involves Jondalar screaming "HE'S MAKING MY BABY".) Much tl;dr short, we discover that this reveal is the dawn of sexism. Ayla has a dream where thousands of women point at her going "YOOOOU." The book ends with Jondalar thinking that things were going to change. (Yah.)

Fans debated furiously over what happened. Had Jean Auel even written the book? Had she ghost written? Was she just tired of her own story? I will say that beyond the ending, the book just wasn't... good. The focus was much more on cave paintings than it was on plot. I didn't really enjoy any of it. It definitely seemed that Jean Auel just got tired and threw in the towel.

However, I'm not sure that's why she gave the series the ending that she did. I think all along, Ayla was meant to be something of an Eve figure. Following Abrahamic tradition, it's knowledge that has a part in dooming women. Ayla's knowledge leads to a vulnerability that apparently will cause women to be repressed for thousands of years. The first book itself hints that Clan women were once independent, allowed to lead their lives as they wished; it was only later that they were oppressed. I think this somewhat foreshadowed that society can and will backslide. In the case of the Clan, it was concern for children that caused women to have to submit to men. In the case of the Others, it's the realization that it takes two to make a baby. Men want control over who is making their baby. Sex becomes more and more regulated. Truth be told, it's actually a deeply ironic and clever twist: Ayla broke barriers, yet she also becomes those barriers. The strong female character we followed becomes her own downfall.

I think there are two problems. The first problem is that while it's a great (if tragic) twist of irony, it's also a frustrating one as a reader. Not all endings have to be happy, but the truth is that a lot of women had come to look up to Ayla, and even see themselves in her. So to re-invent her as the source for our problems was a huge blow, even if calling her the source of our problems is also unfair. (It's not really Ayla's fault that men took a simple biological fact and turned it into a reason to oppress women.)  We obviously all knew society would become sexist, we just didn't expect Ayla to have a hand in it - even inadvertently. To become a victim of her own truth.

The other problem is Jean Auel's writing. I think that as the series went on, she did get tired of it. Thus, while the twist at its original conception might have been a gentler blow, and made a lot of sense it was thrown into a mess of generally bad writing. I think Jean Auel knew what she was doing when she first got the idea. I'm not so sure she really knew what she was doing when she finally published the book.

Moreover, even before LOPC, Ayla was written as an almost flawless person. The fact that she's a Mary Sue is a huge in-joke among fans. Her only flaw is that she can't sing. That's it. Maybe if Ayla had had more flaws, the tragic ending would have seemed more like a story of a tragic hero, rather than a cautionary tale against Sex Ed. True, Jondalar's outburst is due to Ayla cheating on him out of revenge, but even this isn't written very realistically. It's not established as part of Ayla's character (thankfully). It's just a random moment of hurt that goes too far. 

In conclusion, my issue with LOPC isn't just that it ends with Ayla "inventing sexism." It's that the writing of this deep blow is so poor, there's no way for it to land well. The fans who followed Ayla from the forest where a Cave Lioness attacked her to Lascaux deserved a stronger story. 

Ayla deserved a stronger story.

Comments

[lunabee34]

I also hated the Ayla invents the patriarchy ending. I mean, if Auel is going for a this is what plausibly happened in the Neolithic era story, then patriarchy comes from somewhere, but I did not need it in my female survivalist fantasy reading. LOL

The other thing I disliked about the ending is that the previous books seemed to heavily imply that Ayla would reunite with Durc (through visions mostly if I remember correctly), maybe even in an antagonistic way; when Auel was writing, the prevailing theory was that Neanderthals died out because they were wiped out by homo sapiens, so I really expected that to appear in the final book with her kids on either side of a conflict.

[author_by_night]

I think with better writing she may have pulled it off, but it might have still been too upsetting.

Jean Auel actually said from the get go that Ayla would never see Durc again (that it was her tragedy), but would hear from him. It is implied in a dream Ayla has that the brothers wouldn't "kill" each other as her first dream suggested, but that Durc was the future of the Clan.

[lunabee34]

That explains it. I never read any word of God stuff, just the books themselves.

Well regardless whether she meant it to happen or not, I think the books would have been stronger if Ayla had met Durc again.

[rachelmanija]

WHAAAAAAT? WTF!

Did Durc ever come back?

[author_by_night]

He never comes back, but we learn he's what is left of the Clan - the future of the Clan. Implying that his descendants will carry them.

[orangerful]

My ex loved this series but I haven't read it. Too bad it sounds like it goes a little astray in these later novels. Their size makes them a big commitment!

Hm...not sure I could blog a book every time I read one AND do my selfie-a-day thing. You all will get sick of my clogging up the flist pretty quick!

[author_by_night]

Oh, they're a huge commitment! Definitely good for vacations (the kind where you're relaxing, not the kind where you're running around) or sick days.

[pauraque]

I read the first four books sometime in the 12 years when there were only four, and enjoyed them. Ayla is such a Mary Sue, but I forgave that because 1) unlike most Mary Sues, Ayla is actually likeable, and 2) Auel is so delightfully unabashed and 100% all-in with her Sue-ing that you kinda have to give her props just for sheer audacity. I mean, when you have your main character singlehandedly inventing everything from bras to calendars to horseback riding, there's really no way you can defend it from a realistic standpoint, so at that point you have to either forget about realism and just go with it, or put the books down.

I heard the last two books were bad, including the detail about Ayla "inventing sexism" (well, she invented everything else, so why not?) so I never read them. It's too bad the series didn't get a better ending. It does sound like Auel had some ambitious ideas for the last book but her reach exceeded her grasp.

[author_by_night]

I mean, when you have your main character singlehandedly inventing everything from bras to calendars to horseback riding, there's really no way you can defend it from a realistic standpoint, so at that point you have to either forget about realism and just go with it, or put the books down.

Pretty much! Really, the audacity of it all just added some charm, if unintentionally.

but her reach exceeded her grasp.

I think that's exactly it. Also, making Ayla so perfect might have been the twist's downfall. If she'd been written more like Jondalar, generally well-intentioned but with many tragic hero traits, then it might be more understandable how that twist came to be. Instead she's basically just perfect, yet... inventing sexism isn't exactly the pinnacle of perfection, you know? And beyond that, Jean Auel had been writing so long, she probably just got tired. You can't land a blow like that when you're half-asleep or focused on other things. She was very passionate about cave paintings, so honestly, might have been better off just focusing on a simpler new story centered around that. Maybe even some sort of continuation where descendants saw the caves, mulled over their ancestors, and even the sexism that came about could have been addressed, adding a sadder note but making it a little less brutal? I dunno. Maybe have one of Ayla's descendants resisting the way the Zelandoni had become.

[pauraque]

It almost sounds as if the concept was supposed to be that Ayla was so brilliant and so far ahead of her time that her own genius was her downfall, because her contemporaries weren't prepared to handle the implications of her advanced ideas. So not exactly a tragic hero, but more of an ice age Galileo.

I suspect a twist like that would have been hard to pull off after six books, even if the author had been firing on all cylinders. Maybe if you covered the story of the accidental birth of patriarchy in one book it could work. But after such a long time (both in page count and in years) of readers getting invested in these characters and their society, it seems maybe too late to pull the rug out from under them and expect the reaction be anything but a giant WTF?

[author_by_night]

Interesting.

And yeah, there's the fact that the ending may have just been alienating from the get go, even if the writing had been stellar. It's not as though this hasn't happened before, where creators stick to the same ending and write it all very well, but the ending is just so off base from the story the readers (or viewers) had followed or thought they were following. I never watched LOST, but it seems to me it was similar, where fans followed devotedly for years, only for the final twist to really upset them, for it to have seemingly turned over everything they'd been following for years. You're going to upset your fans with certain kinds of twists if they come at the very end.

[silverusagi]

Well, that sucks. I can see why that would be such a disappointment if you were heavily invested in the books. Yeah, Ayla is a Mary Sue, but that was part of what made her fun to read. And now she destroys the cool prehistoric society as we knew it, so yeeeeeeeah.

Did Durc ever turn up again in the books, even if Ayla didn't see him? Back when I read them, I sort of thought there would be more conflict in the later books between the Clan and the Others, some sort of serious 'shit goes down' fights over territory. Did anything like that happen, or was it just Ayla and Jodnolar getting to his homeland?

[author_by_night]

Durc is implied to be the "future" of the Clan, I guess in the sense that his descendants will carry Neanderthal DNA, etc. The "shit goes down fights" was more of a metaphor for lines diverging and Neanderthals dying out while the Others thrived.