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The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children, #2)

Jean M. Auel

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Mar 02, 2008 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, books-barb-owns

This second installment of Auel's massive prehistoric saga has many of the same strengths and weaknesses, IMO, as the series opener The Clan of the Cave Bear; my review of that one (www.goodreads.com/review/show/15569300 ), similarly, has content that's relevant here, and might be worth reading first. The books are definitely intended to be read in order; I'm assuming that most people reading this review have read the first book, and both this review and the pretty accurate Goodreads description This second installment of Auel's massive prehistoric saga has many of the same strengths and weaknesses, IMO, as the series opener The Clan of the Cave Bear; my review of that one (www.goodreads.com/review/show/15569300 ), similarly, has content that's relevant here, and might be worth reading first. The books are definitely intended to be read in order; I'm assuming that most people reading this review have read the first book, and both this review and the pretty accurate Goodreads description may/will have spoilers vis a vis the first one.

Ayla remains the strong, intelligent, capable, and good-hearted young woman readers fell in love with in the first book. Here, however, Auel takes her out of the Clan (Neanderthal) context, and puts her on her own on the steppes of the Ice Age Ukraine. (This edition has a helpful map.) That means her major challenge is physical survival without any help, using the skills she's previously learned or observed. If you like tales of man (or in this case woman) vs. nature, this theme is handled very well. An alternating plot strand follows two young Cro-Magnon men, Jondalar and Thonolan, brothers from what is today France, traveling eastward on their Journey, a kind of cultural rite of passage similar to the walk-about of the Australian aborigines. When we first meet them, they're in the Danube area. (view spoiler) Once they leave the habitations of other Cro-Magnon tribes behind (and that's not relatively far into the book, considering that it's pretty thick), there aren't any other human characters in the novel; so Auel doesn't have as large a cast of characters here to develop with her usual vivid brush (though a few of the Sharamudoi people are vividly drawn). We're also not much in the realm of large group interactions; our cross-cultural interactions are basically between the Clan-raised Ayla and Jondalar, who's prejudiced (like the rest of his people) against the "Flatheads." The exploration of that theme isn't less strong here; it's just put on a one-on-one basis.

As always, Auel's research is solid (and as usual, sometimes too much on display). One aspect of Cro-Magnon archaeology that she puts to use is the fact that in sites all across Ice Age Europe, from the Urals to the Atlantic, we find essentially identical figurines of a stylized pregnant female with the sexual features emphasized. From this basis, Auel infers a continent-wide shared cult of the Mother goddess, in which sex (in or out of marriage) is seen as a sacramental act that honors her. The inference, as far as it goes, is plausible; but all fertility cults actually known to anthropology connect sex with pregnancy (DUH!) In Auel's world, however, neither Neanderthals nor Cro-Magnons have figured out that connection. This is one part of her world-building that I personally consider implausible; without going into a long digression on this subject, I don't believe there ever was a human culture that was unaware of this (I've heard the claim on one TV documentary that some Australian aborigines don't know this, but I find that dubious), and I don't believe a primitive Mother goddess cult would regard sex as sacramental without that connection. But this is a key concept here and in the rest of the series.

The point above relates to two other differences from the first book. Here, Ayla gets a love interest, and he and she happen to be the only two humans around for most of the book. So romance will play a big role in the plot, though not the only one. And (both before and after Ayla and Jondalar get together) there's a LOT of explicit unmarried sex here. Like the natural history lectures, those parts can be skipped over with no loss of narrative coherence (and that's what my wife and I did), but they're a drag on the story-telling. As my four-star rating indicates, this wasn't a deal-breaker (but it cost the book a fifth star). Apart from the overly descriptive aspects, and the lack of sex-pregnancy connection awareness, though, Auel's characters are believably trying to figure out for themselves what love and commitment actually means, in the context of a culture that has no real concept of either and that glorifies sexual looseness. In that respect, they're very much like a great many modern people, which is why many modern readers probably find them so easy to relate to.

Compared to the first book, some reviewers have complained that this book doesn't convey as strong a sense of prehistoric culture, that the characters are too modern. That's true, but I think it's an inevitable result of the fact that human nature is the same today and in the Ice Age; what differentiates us is our various cultural factors, and here Ayla and Jondalar are outside their cultural contexts, except for what baggage they have in their heads. (And Cro-Magnons are inherently more modern-like, in any era, than the backward-looking, Memories-dominated Clan.) Also, some have felt that crediting Ayla with both discovering that fire can be produced by striking rock with flint AND domesticating a horse is too much, and that her recovery of her childhood memory of verbal speech being triggered by a dream is too facile. Personally, though, I didn't have a problem with those aspects. Both of the first two achievements were the result of fortuitous accident --and believable accident, in the circumstances, IMO-- rather than Edison-like research. And nothing is ever forgotten by the subconscious, which comes out to play in dreams; being exposed to verbal speech again after so long (Clan language, in Auel's world, is mostly a matter of hand signs), to me, would seem like a very plausible trigger for such a dream. I do, however, have a degree of sympathy with critics who find Jondalar less than ideal. He's well-drawn, and he's got his good points; and he grows in the series. But he's got his flaws; there are times when I'd like to clout him upside of the head, and Auel's evident fascination with his sexual prowess can be eye-roll inducing.

A word about the rest of the series might be in order (since it's taken me this long to actually review just the first two books). The third book, The Mammoth Hunters, would get five stars from me. (That's probably a minority view.) Its sequel, The Plains of Passage, would be lucky to get two. IMO, it should have been reduced by 80% and incorporated into the following book (and probably would have been, if the publisher hadn't wanted to sell another doorstop-sized book). The Shelters of Stone, the fifth book, would have made a fine conclusion to the series. My wife read the actual concluding sixth volume, The Land of Painted Caves and almost didn't finish it, though she did and finally allowed that it was okay, though not up to standard. From her feedback, I'm not interested in reading it! ...more

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Jan 31, 2009 Crystal rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

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