PLAINS OF PASSAGE, by Jean Auel; Crown Publishers, Inc. October 1990; 760 pp; HC $24.95.

An ancient and honorable tradition in the field of speculative fiction is the 'journey' 
book. As old as The Odyssey, or older, it is basically the account of a person or group's 
travels through an unfamiliar landscape, and the wonders that they encounter along the way. 
This sub-genre includes such disparate literary gems as Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's 
Travels, Around the World in 80 Days, Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Alice's 
Adventures in Wonderland and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Carson of Venus series. 

The latest addition to this well-loved group comes from that prominent Oregon author, Jean 
Auel. Her latest installment of her Earth's Children saga, Plains of Passage hews closely 
to the conventions of the journey story as Ayla, with her faithful companion Tonto... I 
mean, Jondalar travel across the largely unpopulated wastes of prehistoric Eurasia with 
their horses, Whinny and Racer, and their pet wolf, Wolf. (When your pet is the first of 
its kind in the entire history of the human race, it is not necessary to be too inventive 
when it comes to names.)

While not quite up to the high dramatic standard set by Clan of the Cave Bear, the first 
book in the series, Plains of Passage struck me as a definite improvement on Ms. Auel's 
second and third books, Valley of the Horses and The Mammoth Hunters. Let me qualify the 
preceding statement: Plains of Passage is better and worse, both more and less enjoyable 
than her previous efforts. Worse, because the book has less of a plot than the others; by 
its very nature a 'journey' book is likely to have a less complex plot than similar 
non-journey books, travelling in something of a straight line from beginning to end. Many 
readers will decide that there is simply too much in the way of descriptive passages, too 
many scenes that do nothing more than to move the characters from one location to another. 
Still, the scenery is magnificent, the descriptions of teeming masses of wild animals such 
as we have never seen, and will almost certainly never see for ourselves, are mind-boggling 
in their strangeness and grandeur. Ms. Auel, in her 'Acknowledgments' at the end of the 
book, states, "...the 'travel book', has been both the most difficult and the most 
interesting (of the four) to read and to write..." I can only stand in awe of the mind that 
did the research needed to make these novels possible, whether her interpretations of 
current theories are technically accurate or not. The most stringent quibble that I had 
was of Ms. Auel's tendency to set up dramatic confrontations and other highly-charged 
situations, then to defuse them at the end of the book by letting them simply fade away. 
The problem of Ayla's upbringing by Neanderthals is one such case, and by the end of this 
book it seems to have mostly evaporated. Of course, it will probably revived in Book Five, 
but its lack of resolution in Book Four was a considerable disappointment.

On the other hand the story, what there is of it, is well done, and the writing has 
improved by all-but imperceptible gradations from the first of the series to the end of 
this book. This is not meant as a criticism of Ms. Auel as a writer; after four novels, 
somewhere in the vicinity of a million and a half words, it would be strange indeed if her 
skills had not been honed to an even sharper edge than when she began. The story, while 
not skimping on the inter-personal relationships that lend it much of its richness, 
utilizes less of the wealth of clinical sexual details that many readers of her earlier 
works found excessive. 

A frequently-heard criticism of books such as these is that the multitude of inventions 
attributed to one or a few people is highly unrealistic. In reality, these critics would 
say, such inventions as the spear-thrower, the use of flint and iron pyrites to start 
fires, the taming of horses and wolves (and rabbits and cave-lions), the grinding of flour 
to make biscuits, and all of the other pivotal inventions chronicled in these pages would 
have been discovered by many different people, and these discoveries would have stretched 
over eons of time. They are probably right, but so what? The events chronicled here could 
have taken place more or less as described, over a fairly short span of time. Are our own 
histories of past ages any more correct in their minor details?

Anyway, the main invention detailed in this fourth volume seems to be the discovery of how 
to make soap (and perhaps mammoth-leather horse shoes). Remember, though, that there are 
still two volumes yet to come in this series. It seems highly possible that these will 
reveal even more technological advances, some of them lost to us in the mists of time, 
either from the minds of Ayla and Jondalar or from those they come in contact with. I have 
heard rumors that there is a small tribe, somewhere in the higher hills to the south who 
have discovered how to make and use hang-gliders, and there is always the possibility of 
inventing the (horse-powered?) paddle-wheeled steamer...

by Norm Hartman
http://home.teleport.com/~nhartman/nnotes04.html