Product Description

Ayla and Jondalar leave the safety of the lands of the Mammoth Hunters and embark on a seemingly impossible journey across an entire continent. Their goal is the Cro-Magnon settlement in what is now southern France where Jondalar lived as a young man. Accompanied by the half-tame Wolf, the superb stallion, Racer, and the mare, Whinney, they brave both savage enemies and the elemental dangers of weather and terrain in their search for the place that will become Home.

Jean Auel's imaginative reconstruction of pre-historic life, rich in detail of language, culture, myth and ritual, has become a set text in schools and colleges around the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6730 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 976 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jean Auel's The Plains of Passage, the fourth volume in the Earth's Children sequence, is one of the most massive yet (running to nearly 1,000 pages) and has all the sweep and vigour of the earlier books in the series. There are few writers who demonstrate the sheer range and ambition of Auel in the fantasy field. The Clan of the Cave Bear was a truly ground-breaking work, with its sweeping historical saga crammed with the kind of detail that had never been seen before in the genre. The Valley of Horses and The Mammoth Hunters continued to enthral readers with their breathtaking panoplies of an ancient world.

The Plains of Passage continues the epic description of our civilisation as it was 25,000 years ago. Auel's protagonists Ayla the orphan and Jondalar the traveller decide to forsake the comfort and safety of life with the mammoth hunters by the Black Sea, and set out on a daunting odyssey. Their plan is to traverse a continent, heading for the Cro-Magnon settlement which Jondalar called home as a young man. Their journey across unimaginable distances is fraught with spectacular dangers, and their only companions are the half-tame Wolf, the magnificent stallion Racer and the mare Whinney.

As so often in Auel's work, it's the brilliantly evocative scene-setting that makes her narratives of high adventure so impressive. Characterisation is, as always, functional rather than inspired, but it's perfectly suited to the Technicolor landscapes the reader is confronted with. And the descriptive passages are as evocative as ever:

The rising sun peaked over the eastern edge with a blinding burst of light that illuminated an incredible scene. To the west, a flat, utterly featureless dazzling white plain stretched out before them. Above it the sky was a shade of blue she had never seen in her life. It had somehow absorbed the reflection of the red dawn, and the blue-green undertone of glacial ice...

Publishers Weekly
'The authenticity of background detail, the lilting prose rhythms and the appealing conceptual audacity continue to work their spell'

Review
'Jean Auel has an extraordinary appeal to an enormously wide age group and the latest volume of her pre-historic saga is impossible to put down' (Rosamunde Pilcher )

'The authenticity of background detail, the lilting prose rhythms and the appealing conceptual audacity continue to work their spell' (Publishers Weekly )

On THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR: 'Beautiful, exciting, imaginative.' (New York Times )

Customer Reviews

I would walk five hundred miles...
Reading The Plains of Passage, one can't help but ponder the similarity between the grasslands of ice age Europe that form the backdrop to the story, and the book itself - they're both very large yet surprisingly empty and devoid of interesting features. A bit like an anorexic's fridge.

Auel herself described this as 'the journey book', which to my mind is a bit like describing Saving Private Ryan as 'a war film'. Despite being a spectacularly useless insight into the creative process behind The Plains of Passage, it does at least neatly sum up pretty much everything that happens in this book. Ayla and Jondalar journey, then they journey some more, then they have sex, then it's more journeying for our dynamic duo. And that's it.

Well, that's not really it. In fairness, Plains of Passage does feature the occasional interesting encounter, such as a tribe of man-hating warrior women, or a Clan couple under attack, or a dangerous glacier crossing, but these little gems are few and far between. And what lies between them are lots and lots of chapters of dull travelling, landscape descriptions and sex scenes; none of which is particularly stimulating anymore.

Now, anyone who read my review of The Valley of Horses (go on, read it now - I'll wait until you come back) will know that one of my few criticisms of the book was the lack of interest generated by Jondalar's half of the tale. Plains of Passage is basically that, except spun out into an entire book and with no other character to cut to. Not only that, but almost none of it is new - nearly all of the tribes that Ayla and Jondalar visit in their travels will be familiar to readers of the previous books already. And it's not like any of these people are so fascinating that we really need to meet them again. It feels very much like a sightseeing tour of some historic city - you make your way from place to place, taking a few photos, ticking the boxes and pretending you wouldn't rather be snorting a line of cocaine from the cleavage of a beautiful woman. Okay, maybe that's just me.

And call me cynical if you like, but I've started to notice a distinct pattern with these encounters - Ayla and Jondalar reach the designated settlement to find some entirely arbitrary problem laid out for them which Ayla promptly sorts out, thus winning the love and adoration of all and sundry. Honestly, there's nothing this woman can't tackle, be it setting broken bones, helping a rape victim piece her shattered life back together or reconciling one half of a warring tribe with another. Really, are these people so completely lacking in initiative that they can't sort out anything by themselves? Bah, I say! This smells of bad storytelling.

It doesn't exactly bode well for character development either. Each previous book in the series has seen big leaps in the progression of Ayla's character as she picks up new skills and learns more about being part of society. Here, she's pretty much reached a plateau - she's great at almost everything; charming, intelligent and confident. It makes one wonder how or indeed where she can progress from here. If she was to become any better as a person, she would vanish in a white light and ascend to some higher plane of existence.

And it's nice to see Auel continue her growing tradition of writing unintentionally hilarious dialogue. During one tender lovemaking scene, Jondalar says to Ayla (with complete seriousness), "Your fur may not be deep red, but it holds something that is, something like a red flower with many petals." Now, my first thought on reading this was: I'm so going to quote this out of context. But then I realised that I didn't have to - it pretty much does my work for me.

And then there's the 'villain' of the story - Attaroa. Her subplot was hinted at in Valley of Horses, and many people waited a long time to find out what form this vague nebulous threat would take. Fortunately I wasn't one of them, since I was only seven years old when this book was released and doing far more interesting things like shoving lego bricks up my nose. Still, even I was rather disappointed by the demented bunny boiler who finally shambled into the story like Britney Spears at an awards show. After spending the best part of two days planning how to kill Ayla, the best she could come up with was to get drunk and lunge at her with a knife.

I'm not making this up.

They say that nothing kills a sequel quicker than reverence, that's what this book suffers from. Plains of Passage almost seems in awe of its predecessors and afraid to try anything new, like a short skinny ginger kid constantly bullied by his older brothers. The Mammoth Hunters, for all its melodramatic love triangle, was at least confident enough in itself to try new things. Plains of Passage takes the safe road, and suffers as a result.

It's not that this is a terrible book, because it isn't. It's just that it's not a particularly good one either; a bit like a Volvo Estate - solid and competent but ultimately boring and uninspiring. The cracks that were starting to show in the series with The Mammoth Hunters have become yawning gaps in this installment. And anyone who expected a return to form with Shelters of Stone had better have some cement handy...

A good sequel, lacking a bit though
I loved the three first novels in the "Earth's Children" series - and this too. However, it does lack a bit of what the other three had - originality perhaps most of all - and is a bit long-winded, even for Auel. It is still excellent read, though.

Now she's run out of ideas
This is the fourth book in Jean Auel's Earth's Children series. My mother always taught me that if I didn't have anything nice to say, I should say nothing. In which case, this would be a blank page: I have nothing good to say about this book at all.

Ayla and Jondalar set out from Lion Camp to return to his tribe. They travel across a landscape notable for having many cold rivers which the two humans, Wolf (who is a wolf) and their two horses cross with much trepidation but complete ease. They meet some people briefly but these are never allowed to intrude into our real purpose in this book which is to bask in the glory that is Ayla and Jondalar. There is sex. There is botany, zoology and geophysics which looks like they've been copied directly out of the textbooks. Repeat to fade. Good grief, this was boring.

The only thing that impressed me about this book is that I managed to finish it.