Jean M. Auel is the author of a popular series of books featuring the life and times of cave woman Ayla as she ventures among the various first peoples of Europe. “The Clan of the Cave Bear” (1980), “The Valley of Horses” (1982), “The Mammoth Hunters” (1986) and “The Plains of Passage” (1990) all are part of the “Earth’s Children” series.
The first two volumes were best sellers; the third and fourth were savaged by critics as nothing more than romance novels decked out in animal skins instead of frilly negligees. Perhaps as a result of such response, Auel hadn’t offered a new “Earth’s Children” novel in more than a decade.
Now, “The Shelters of Stone” (Crown, 753 pages, $28.95) picks up where “The Plains of Passage” left off. As the previous book concluded, Ayla and romantic interest Jondalar were traveling across the continent toward a scary encounter with his people, a separate race known as the Zendalonii. In “Shelters of Stone,” the couple has arrived, and Ayla must learn to get along with her soon-to-be in-laws, who find her exotic and distressingly different.
That’s it. Throw in a little family politics, and there you have it. That’s the entire plot. First-time Auel readers will find the basic background of the earlier novels woven into the pages of “The Shelters of Stone.”
They may also discover that the book is unbearably long. And the characters speak in a modern idiom that is so jarringly out of place that the dialogue casts an aura of bad theater.
Characters’ proper names are so confounding and sometimes similar that it is a struggle to keep the huge cast straight. Eleven characters have the same name — Zelandoni.For all the shortcomings, though, there are reasons that Auel’s previous Ayla yarns proved wildly successful, and those reasons are still present in “The Shelters of Stone.” What keeps the book compelling is Auel’s brilliant choice of time and place. Her characters are those who first learned to tame animals, to weave, to practice medicine, to make wine, to establish the beginnings of civilization.