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No one minds a wait. A wait is something you do for a short time, you know like waiting for a bus. Waiting for the commercial break to end. But waiting decades for something, only to be disappointed, is rather hard to take.

Jean M. Auel, author of the phenomenally successful Earth’s Children series of books that began with The Clan of The Cave Bear in 1980, seems to have been inspired by Samuel Beckett and his play Waiting for Godot, in which Godot never arrived.

Between the release of fourth in the series, The Plains of Passage in 1990, readers had to wait 12 years for The Shelters of Stone. And again the wait for The Land of Painted Caves has been an astonishing nine years. All up, we’ve been waiting 31 years to find out what happens in this story. (OK, I haven’t been waiting that long. I couldn’t read in 1980. So I really feel for those who have been waiting that extra decade for some resolution in this series.)

The series is set roughly 18 000 years ago, at a time when Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that’s us, everyone!) are co-existing uneasily in the chilly times of an Ice Age, when mega-fauna roamed the permafrost, and before the wheel had been invented. Ayla, a human girl, was raised by the Clan (the Neanderthals), but has since met Jondalar, a man of the Others like herself, and has journeyed across Europe to live with his people in France, the Zelandonii. Ayla has invented everything along the way from feminism to domestication of animals, stopping short only at toughies like starting a farm or inventing flight. Oh – and the wheel. She hasn’t invented that one. Yet.

So, what was left to cover in the series? She’d met the man, had her adventures, returned to people like herself, got married and had a baby. Ayla even looked like she had a nice little future career ahead of her as a Zelandoni (two i’s for the people, one for the job title), the group’s spiritual and mystical leaders.

Well, we could always have found out a bit about what her training might involve. See if she gets around to inventing the wheel, maybe.

And what did we get?

About 300 pages’ worth of descriptions of caves.

I am not joking. I just re-counted the number. From page 78 to page 443. Caves.

In the acknowledgements, Jean M. Auel writes, “I am lucky to have Betty Prashker as my editor. Her comments are always insightful, and she takes my best efforts and makes them better. Thank you.” One might wonder, then, what Betty Prashker was thinking about to allow through to the final draft more than 300 pages of description about crawling through caves and seeing pictures on the walls. Because they are boring, repetitive and do very little to advance the plotline.

Throughout the description of all of these caves, we are given tantalising little hints about what Ayla’s training for admission into the Zelandoni will involve. She must give up Pleasures for a year (that’s what they call ‘sex’, and is a very important part of the series.); she must spend a year watching the sunrises and sunsets … but before any of that, Ayla must see every single cave painting in France!

And when she has finished looking at them all, the story abruptly skips about four years into the future, and Ayla has already succeeded in foregoing her year of Pleasures, and has just about finished her year of watching the sky. … Oh. Ok.

This seems to me like the most heinous crime against effective storytelling ever committed. It goes against every tenet of writing that I am familiar with: edit out the interesting parts, retain the tedium. Is this an experimental literary attempt that has been lost on me, perhaps? Some kind of Joycean treatment?

Let’s set aside the punishingly dull dialogue, and the recycling of plotlines from two of the earlier books for a moment and consider another of Auel’s strange editorial decisions.

The Earth’s Children series is synonymous with graphic and detailed descriptions of sex. Most readers of the series agree that the lengthy descriptions of extinct grasses, or of techniques for disposing of sewage, or of how best to scrape the hide of an extinct creature, and handy hints for how to use the entire carcass to make everything you will ever need are not the primary reason that they keep turning pages. No. Most readers are in it for the sex. The incredibly over-descriptive tendency that makes Auel’s writing about caves and grass painful is an absolute bonus in her descriptions of sex.

And there was hardly any sex in this book. Again, Auel has played a weakness in her writing, at the expense of a strength.

And there are strengths in her writing. No one can have a success of that kind without the works having some merit. Reviews of her earlier works have pointed this out:

“[In Ayla] Auel may be creating one of the most believable characters in English fiction–one to rank with Sherlock Holmes, Scarlett O’Hara and a handful of others,” UPI wrote, when talking about The Shelters of Stone. “Lively and interesting,” Washington Post Book World claimed of The Mammoth Hunters. “Shiningly intense… Sheer storytelling skill holds the reader in a powerful spell,” Publishers Weekly said of The Valley of the Horses. Clan of the Cave Bear was made into a movie, starring Darryl Hannah.

And yes, Auel has the capacity to imagine what life was like 18 000 years ago. She has created likeable characters that readers want to follow. She has invested her prehistoric landscape with a richness and detail that makes a civilisation so removed from our own seem not so different at all. Her people and places have a freshness, and an innocence, in regards to the way they move through the natural world as a part of nature. And the sex is great.

But readers have not been shown this side of Auel’s formidable skills in The Land of Painted Caves, and that’s a shame. Especially since this is supposed to be our farewell to Ayla, Jondalar and the others. Since Auel’s readers are used to waiting, maybe we should wait in hope of something better to end a beloved series.