The Mammoth Hunters
27 May 2012 2 Comments
I’m afraid Jean M Auel is getting a bit lost in melodrama as this series goes on, and what is in many ways an interesting exploration of the roots of humanity gets caught up in a tangled and unrealistic lover’s tiff.
In this novel, Ayla who lived alone after being expelled from the Clan of the Cave Bear, and her lover Jondalar meet up with a group of mammoth hunters, known as the Mamutoi. The Mamutoi come to appreciate Ayla’s abundant gifts – and she makes a special connection to Rydag, a half-clan boy adopted by the Mamutoi who cannot speak and suffers all the prejudice that was such as large part of the last novel. Ayla teaches Rydag and the Mamutoi the clan the sign language , improving his quality of life tremendously.
The Mamutoi offer to adopt Ayla and give her a home, which she accepts with no people to call her own. Jondalar supports this, although is jealous of a dark-skinned carver called Ranec who makes it clear that he wants to make Ayla his. When he invites Ayla to his bed, she accepts as per her clan conditioning. For the rest of the novel Jondalar is jealous and removes himself from Ayla. What is ridiculous about this is that he never speaks to her about it, and at the same times understands why she might have done it. Then he makes excuses as to why he isn’t good enough for her, and how he still has concerns about her fitting in with his people. It is maddening.
Ayla just doesn’t understand Jondalar, which pushes her further towards Ranec. Its hard to believe any two characters could both be so obtuse.
There are some interesting facts to learn about life for early man, and when Ayla finds and raises a wolf cub, about man’s relationship with dogs. But the magic of this series is wearing thin as the themes of communication breakdown from the last novel are repeated too closely in this novel as well. Of course it all works out in the end, and we have three more novels yet to come. I hope the themes of the next few are a little more varied.
Blonde
11 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in Historical Fiction, Talking Books
Even 40 years after her death, we are all still spellbound by the magic and mystery that is Marilyn Monroe. Today, movies and television shows are still being made about her story. I’ve been drawn to this historical novel by Joyce Carol Oates for some time, but have only now had an opportunity to pick it up.
Oates insist that this be viewed as a fiction, but it’s the kind of mesmerizing fiction where an author takes a fascinating subject and fleshes out the facts and speculations that have survived history. All of us want to know what was behind that famous pout. Remarkably, as she explores Marilyn’s early years, her years in foster care and as a wannabe actress and bonafide star, Oates portrays an intelligent but damaged Marilyn, who manages to be both naïve and worldly at the same time. The voice is authentic and emotionally real. Marilyn’s motivations are deftly explored with psychological realism. Her fragility is both sad and beautiful.
For me, the novel opens up the mystery of Monroe even further, and begs me to 
watch her films and try to divine whatever truths I can. But the reality here will always be shrouded by our images and the gossip surrounding Monroe. We can never know, but like Oates, we can imagine.
Valley of the Horses
30 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
This is the second novel in Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, that follows the story of Ayla who is raised by mute Neanderthals after she is orphaned and lost from her people (Cro-Magnons). The clan who took her in were known as the Clan of the Cave Bear.
In the first novel, Ayla struggled to be a good clan woman despite her physical, psychological and physiological differences. But she just never quite fit in. At the end, she was expelled from the clan by the cruel new leader who had victimized her for years. She is forced to go out into the world alone, leaving her baby boy behind.
Although alone, readers return to Ayla’s story in this book finding her anything but defenceless. Although she longs to find her own people, she is unsure that they will accept her. So she makes her home in a pleasant valley and shows the reader her industriousness and resilence. She not only survives alone, but shows ingenuity in finding ways to thrive. She befriends and raises a young horse that she calls Whinney, and also eventually a Cave Lion cub known only as Baby. Both animals are her close and beloved companions, filling the void of human contact. Whinney returns to the wild for a short time, and returns to Ayla heavily pregnant after the death of her mate. Baby eventually explores the wild and finds a mate, returning occasionally to Ayla.
Interspersed with this narrative is the story of Jondalar – whois travelling up the great river with his brother Thonolan. They meet and get to know a number of tribes and their exploraations also serve to show the attitudes of these clans towards the neandertahls who raised Ayal in the previous book. The brothers have a number of sexual exploits (there is quite a bit of time devoted to sexual exploits in this novel) until Thonolan marries. Jondalar meets a beautiful woman with a son, but cannot fully commit himself to her. He wonders if he is capable of fully loving another human being. When Thonolan’s wife dies, they continue travelling although Thonolan expresses a longing to pass over into the next world with her. This wish is shortly granted when he provokes the mate of Baby. Ayla is able to intervene and rescue Jondalar who she nurses back to health.
They are immediately attracted to each other – Ayla has never seen another man before – but much of the rest of the novel is taken up with the barrier in their communication, not just verbal as Jondalar eventually teaches Ayla the language of his people, but in all the non-verbal communication that is so difficult. Jondalar also expresses some prejudices about the Clan that he needs to overcome before they can be together. This represents the prejudice Ayal feels sure she will meet if she leaves the valley.
They nearly separate a number of times until eventually they come to better understand each other and consummate their love. Over and over again. Much like a Mills and Boon novel really. Don’t get me wrong – you want to see them together and hope they can overcome the obstacles facing them, but there are plenty of moments whereby you just might blush.
Jondalar eventually decides he cannot leave Ayla, although he longs to return home to his people. He convinces her to take a tour of the surrounding areas, where they run into a group of Mamutoi hunters – the first group of Cro-Magnons Ayla has been exposed to. You feel sure that they will continue to journey to show Ayla the world she has been kept away from. Still engaging – athough I need a bit more than a love story to keep me interested.
The Marriage Plot
15 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
In the time of the Victorian novel, it was all about the “marriage plot”. Even though Austen is not technically a Victorian, her works embody it – it was so important for women of that time to find a suitable husband that this search was a key fixture in a lot of the important literature of the time.
There is a marriage in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, but really this is a coming-of-age story surrounding three characters in America in the 80s who have just graduated from Brown University and have to figure out life after college.
Madeleine is the central figure of the novel – a Victorian Literature student who is ashamed of being so ‘normal’. She is surrounded by passionate, opinionated and alternative classmates while she finds solace in classics. She has no real plans beyond being with her boyfriend after graduation, and feels intellectually inferior to everyone around her.
Leonard, her boyfriend, tells us the most poignant tale. A manic depressive who hid his condition from Madeleine behind a façade of indifference, when Leonard has a breakdown and struggles with his medication, and how it affects him emotionally, mentally and physically. He clings to Madeleine as the only stable figure in his life – but she has never experienced the highs and lows of his mania before and struggles to be what he needs.
Mitchell, a religious studies major, stands in the sidelines. In love with Madeleine but consistently overlooked by her, her image stays with him as he travels around the world in search of some kind of religious truth. By the end of the novel – he questions everything he once held to be true but is able to look towards the future as a fresh start.
Many have compared this novel to Eugenides’ other two unfavourably, but I found much to enjoy in this – possibly because of my age and also my interest in literary studies. While it does not cover ground-breaking territory (which his other two novels seem to) it does acknowledge that there are difficulties in every life and that just living is a constant series of challenges and self-reflection.
The Radleys
07 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
I’ve read some good reviews of this, and had some personal recommendations, but this is a little too “I was a teenage vampire” mixed with a dose of “Home and Away” (not a compliment) for me.
The Radleys are a family of vampires who are abstainers – vampires who have chosen to give up the consumption of blood. There are two problems with this – firstly, it makes life so dull it is barely worth living. Secondly – the teenage children have no idea. So when it all goes astray and their daughter Clara gives in to bloodlust during a particularly traumatic teenage experience the weakened Radley parents call in Uncle Will – a bad boy of long standing who cannot conceive of the choices they have made. He also harbours a secret love for the wife Helen, based upon an affair they had many years ago.
All that saves this novel is the fact that it argues that a life spent in complete denial is not worth living. The Radleys eventually find a way to be vampires – thus solving a lot of teenage angst in the meantime – and also keep from becoming murderers. One for vamp fans only – not a huge amount of new material.
Clan of the Cave Bear
23 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Historical Fiction, Talking Books
This is an older text that has sort of stuck with me as something I should read at one point. I always make a point of reading those book that end up with a large cult following – I have to know what so many people see in them.
For ten minutes I was completely bored with this (read as an audiobook), but soon after I was absolutely entranced. It is set in the earliest days of man’s existence on Earth, telling with painstaking research and clarity their relationship to the world around them, and the evolutionary process from Neanderthal man to Cro-Magnon man. But, it does it in an indescribably beautiful story. Ayla, a young girl of the more advanced race is orphaned and comes to live in a Neanderthal clan who claim the Cave Bear as their totem. Ayla has many of the modern sensibilities readers will recognize in themselves, and she is the victim of suppression and prejudice in her clan. However, her strength of character and capacity for kindness and compassion inspire love in many of those she encounters, who come to accept and appreciate her despite their obvious differences. But she is never accepted and even hated by the son of the clan leader, so the reader knows it is only a matter of time before the family she has carved for herself under the most difficult of circumstances, is going to be destroyed forever.
Very touching – an interesting exploration of humanity in a time when many would assume that complex emotion did not exist.
Rebecca
10 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
Reading this book, I can certainly understand why Jasper Fforde might create the harrowing image of an army of Mrs Danvers…
Somehow I missed this book through my exploration of Austen and the Bronte sisters… it was not until recently that I saw a positive discussion on it on First Tuesday Book Club that I figured out I had been missing something.
This is the story of a young woman – who remains nameless despite narrating the tale – who despite considering herself shy and plain – meets and marries a wealthy widower in possession of a large estate called Manderly. It is clear from the beginning of the novel that our narrator, the new Mrs De Winter, has become somehow separated from Manderley.
When she returns home, she immediately feels lost in the shadow of the former mistress of the estate who everyone describes as charming, beautiful and very social. Many of her husband’s closest friends and family express surprise at his new wife. But above all the housekeeper, the skeletal and devious Mrs Danvers, makes continual references to the perfection of Rebecca whom no second wife could ever live up to.
The new Mrs De Winter soon believes that her husband must be disappointed with her, and is almost convinced by Mrs Danvers to take her own life by plunging herself through the second story window. The spell of this is soon broken by a loud sound, indicating that a ship has wrecked itself upon the nearby coast. The discovery of Rebecca’s boat near the wreckage leads to the revelation (unsurprising to the reader who has begun to piece this together, but a mystery to the narrator) that Rebecca was really a fiend.
There is much tension and many unresolved issues from the past to be worked through, but the new Mrs De Winter starts to be able to come into her own, despite the treachery of Mrs Danvers.
This had me hooked at many points, and was narrated with a fabulously period accent.
Hand Me Down World
02 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
The first chapter of Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones sets the scene for the rest of the story. A young African maid, chosen for her beauty to work as a maid in a resort hotel, tells the story of her room-mate, who has a baby with a German guest. When he sets her up in a house and holds her hand during the birth, her friends think she is the fairytale story they have been told not to dream of.
But when the father and the baby disappear, the girl we come to know by the pseudonym ‘Ines’ travels across the seas and through Europe to find him. It is an alarmingly touching context for an exploration of human nature.
The first half is told entirely through the eyes of those she meets on her journey towards her son. These represent the best and worst of humanity. Some give unselfishly of themselves, assisting her to travel or allowing her to stay with them a while. Others take advantage of her terribly.
Ines herself appears in many of the stories as an immoral creature who cares only for getting to her boy. She steals regularly from a blind man, and takes a series of lovers for money. She inadvertently causes the death of one of the people, whose name she takes as a ‘hand-me-down’.
In the second half of the novel, we finally hear the voice of ‘Ines’, who tells her story which in many cases is very different from those in the first half. Admittedly she is abused by many of those she encounters, but in return she steals from or lies to even those that offer her kindness. And yet somehow, Jones is able to still elicit sympathy for her from the reader. The magic of the bond between mother and son, who were separated by years and oceans. And the magic of ‘Ines’ herself.
A magically woven tale.
The Broken Teaglass
06 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
Audible was recommending this as one of their best audiobooks, so I thought I would give it a try. The premise seemed interesting to a book nerd like me – a mystery wrapped up in the files of a dictionary company.
And if you ever wondered what it is like to work at a dictionary company, and how dictionary references come about, there is plenty to learn here.
The mystery itself is a little slow, but ultimately satisfying. I thought about giving up several times, and took several lengthy breaks from the narrative. But ultimately the “story-within-the-story” got me – a story that is revealed piece by piece through the dictionary’s citation files. Numbered quotations all appear from the ficticious novel “The Broken Teaglass” – which once found by two of the editors, begin to reveal the truth about an unsolved local mystery – which may have involved one or more of the people they work with.
If you can persevere through some of the slower parts, and recognise that you will never reconcile some of the eccentricities of the main characters, you might just find something here worth your time.
Prince of Mists
18 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
I made a real effort to finish this yesterday, as I began the audio a few weeks ago and did not finish.
In the introduction, Zafon tells us that this – one of his earlier works only republished after the success of the monumental Shadow of the Wind and in my mind, the somewhat disappointing The Angel’s Game – and a work of young adult fiction. It took a little while to get into – and it was not until the second half of the novel that I became really quite hooked.
Young Max and his family move to a seaside town that has all the gothic clues for the reader – a mysterious cat, a scary statue of a clown and so on. It begins a little bit cliched. But as the story progressed, I found myself more and more engrossed.
The basic premise of the novel is ye olde “Deal with the Devil”, referred to as the Prince of Mists. And this devil even reaches beyond the grave to claim that which has been promised to him.
I wont reveal too much – but this story, although aimed at younger readers – has a little bit of everything; true love, ghosts, a shipwreck.. I feel like I am quoting The Princess Bride here! Its worth a look, but I am not disappointed that I got the audio rather than the book itself. Four hours of lovely distraction. Persevere and the last two hours will be your reward.
