TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102290/1022471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 88

Queen of the Ice Age Romance


The best-selling adventures of Ayla and Jondalar continue in
Jean Auel's latest epic

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/MONTIGNAC


    In the musty chill of the Dordogne, 30 ft. below ground,
giant bulls, painted in red and black, gallop across undulating
walls. Nearby, a cavalcade of horses, ibex, tiny deer and cave
lions dances along the curves of rough limestone. Are these
soaring images sacred or profane? A large bespectacled woman
closes her eyes and sighs in wonder. She imagines a time,
perhaps 20,000 years ago, when rituals were performed in this
same hidden cave in the flickering light of animal-fat lamps.
Slowly, tears stream down her cheeks. "It's like a church," she
whispers. "You feel you can understand the people who painted
this."

    Few have tried harder than Jean Auel, the Oregon chronicler
of Ice Age romance, to fathom the mysteries of Cro-Magnon life.
From her 1980 best seller, The Clan of the Cave Bear, through
three popular sequels, including the just-published The Plains
of Passage, Auel has fleshed out the stone-and-bone discoveries
of archaeology to create a fully realized world for her
prehistoric heroine, Ayla. In the latest 757-page volume, Ayla
sets forth from her home among the Mammoth Hunters of the
Eurasian steppes and, braving blizzards, a locust swarm and a
fall into a glacier crevasse, reaches what is now the Dordogne,
in southwest France. The region harbors a rich trove of Upper
Paleolithic remains, including the mystically painted caverns.
The Lascaux cave "overwhelms me," Auel says. "These weren't
dumb savages."

    Prehistory is not only Auel's passion: it has proved
improbably profitable. A former credit manager at a Portland
electronics firm, the mother of five, then 40, had never
written a word of fiction when the idea for an Ice Age epic
popped into her head in 1977. From an outline scribbled at the
kitchen table grew a publishing phenomenon. The first three
books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and have
been translated into 18 languages. The Plains of Passage,
Auel's first book since 1985, has a 1.4 million-copy advance
sale. Crown Publishers has reportedly paid Auel about $25
million for Plains and two yet-to-be-written volumes completing
the saga.

    The further escapades of Ayla and her blond boyfriend,
Jondalar the toolmaker, are set in the Dordogne, where Auel has
been exploring caves and sifting dirt on an archaeological dig.
"I found some pieces of flint and a reindeer milk tooth," she
says proudly, as she huffs up a path to an Ice Age rock
shelter. Far below, a narrow valley is bathed in mist. On a
forested bluff, a medieval fortress glows in pale yellow light.
"The vegetation was different then," she says. "But I need to
know the lay of the land, where the ridges are, where the high
points are, so I can move my characters through here."

    A few days later, a French archaeologist guides Auel through
Laugerie Haute, a vast excavation site under a cliff. She asks
for details about how hearths were spaced, seeking hints on how
families may have guarded their privacy. "This will be
Jondalar's apartment building," she says. At Font-de-Gaume, a
grotto of magnificent prehistoric artwork, she examines a
painting of a wolf: "I have a feeling this will be Ayla's
cave." It fits, since the adventurer travels with a wolf,
albeit one she has trained to behave uncannily like a golden
retriever.

    Auel gets passing grades from archaeologists on how she
interprets the facts. "We can tell you how the paintings were
made, but not why," says American archaeologist Roy Larick.
"Jean does as good a job at speculating as anyone else." Where
knowledge falls short, ideology takes over. An ardent feminist,
Auel makes a case for a matriarchal Cro-Magnon society, basing
her theory on Upper Paleolithic female fertility figures known
as Venuses. These statuettes with exaggerated breasts and
buttocks have been found by the hundreds, whereas no male
sexual symbols have been uncovered. "I'm trying to psych out
an entire culture when all we have are bits and pieces to go
on," she says. But of one thing she's sure: "It's wrong to
think of our ancestors bopping women over the head and dragging
them by the hair. Anthropologists have found that most
hunter-gatherer societies are very equal."

    Nonetheless, Ayla is a stereotyped wonderwoman: she stops
a cave lion's attack with the wave of her hand, learns
languages in minutes and uses birth control before anyone else
even knows how babies are conceived. In The Clan of the Cave
Bear, fact and fiction were plausibly balanced. But Plains
verges on the ludicrous as Ayla expounds on clitoral vs.
vaginal orgasm and rescues Jondalar from man-hating Amazons.
And much of Plains reads like a textbook: page after page
listing animals and plants. The archaeology may be accurate, but
stilted dialogue and "his-loins-ached-with-need" sex scenes
are alternately hilarious and pathetic.

    By and large, Auel has succeeded in popularizing a
misperceived period. Nonetheless, even she may sense that her
prehistoric cash cow may be overmilked. "Ayla's good company,
but after a while you want to write about something else," she
says. Then Auel is likely to make an important discovery of her
own: whether her fans will remain loyal once the glaciers
recede.