Clan of the Cave Bear - # 20

We like to laugh about rape in the garage house. We laugh at it because we live with it every day. My black cat Hopkins – neutered since about 3 months of age – attempts a sort of confused attempted mounting of my two pretty girl cats regularly. Barring any success doing that, he is in the midst of an obscene relationship with blankets these days. I wake up almost every night to the little man ever so gently lifting and lowering his back feet as he clutches a blanket in his mouth. This can go on for hours. Though I think the blanket is more or less consenting, the human foot or hand that is sometimes caught up in the blanket at the time is definitely not.

Rape, in a much less amusing sense, is around us geographically as well. Our review of the website neighborhoodscout.com unfortunately revealed that on a scale of 1 to 100 – with 100 being the safest and 1 being the least safe, any given street on Tacoma will rarely crack a 9. So my chances of being stolen from, assaulted, raped or murdered are roughly about the same as they would be if I lived in a Turkish prison. Just last week I read about a 66 year old man who brought a prostitute to his mobile home in Midland Tacoma, handcuffed her to his bed and spent the next several hours raping and electrocuting her.

When I started reading Clan of the Cave Bear Jamie remembered having seen the movie – starring Darryl Hannah. I’ve heard it’s not so great, but all that he could seem to remember is that Darryl Hannah is repeatedly raped in the movie. So it was with a sense of dread that I read the book and I’m happy to report that, while rape does occur, it is hardly the main point of the story.

PLOT SUMMARY

I thought COTCB was incredible. Having finished it several days ago, I’m all the more impressed with it for how vividly it’s remained in my mind and made me think about humans, gender, nature, instinct, and all sorts of things that should occupy our minds more but somehow seem not to.

This book is about a clan of Neanderthals who adopt the main character - a little homo sapien girl named Ayla. Ayla lost her own tribe in an earthquake. The book is an interesting comparison of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals look different – they are hairier, have heavier, stronger bones, their heads are shaped differently – more like monkeys. Ayla looks like modern humans and is blonde. Another huge difference between them – in the book – is that Neanderthals can access their reptilian brain, so they share “racial memories.” Basically they can access all of the knowledge of their ancestors either by being reminded of the knowledge, or conjuring it up in ceremony. Ayla does not have this gift, but she can think abstractly and can make associations, which the clan people are incapable of doing.

Iza is the medicine woman of the tribe who finds and adopts Ayla. She is a the highest ranking female member of the clan and she totally rules. The culture of the clan is rigid and very resistant to change. It is an extremely patriarchal society. Male and female roles are so sharply delineated that if a female were to attempt performing a male duty she would be subject to a $10,000 fine and/or death (I made the fine part up.) Men have absolute power over women. Violence is used liberally in order to enforce obedience. For the most part the women do not mind or complain about their station because they accept that it is the way of things and they don’t have the mental capacity to consider rebellion. When a man is excessively violent, it is noted, but only in the most extreme cases would anyone interfere.

The clan’s religion is an important part of their culture. They believe that every person has a spiritual animal totem. It is assigned to them at birth by the spiritual leader of the clan. Totems can bring good fortune if they are happy and very bad luck if they are not. A woman’s totem must always be weaker than a man’s or she will not get pregnant. The clan’s knowledge of reproduction is not exactly impressive. They think that the way women get pregnant is that a man’s totem fights with her totem and if it loses she gets pregnant. They have not made any connection between sex and pregnancy and the concept of “father” has never occurred to them. They do have a similar relationship to father/child in that they take responsibility for their mate’s children. It doesn’t really matter who fathers the child (since they don’t know how that works) and it’s entirely possible that their mate’s children are not their own since men are allowed to have sex with whomever they please.

Ayla is special throughout the book because she is so different. Not only does she look and sound different, she thinks differently and she is compelled to act differently. For example when the spiritual leader of the group tries to explain numbers to Ayla he is “thunderstruck” when she not only easily understands it, but is effortlessly able to conceptualize numbers that he himself could not possibly understand. He says that it was only with great difficulty and diligent study that he was able to count to 20.

She is also not bred to subservience like the rest of her clan. What’s great about her is that she is not rebellious by nature, she is just herself and that is perceived as rebellious. She is actually very eager to conform. She wants to be good and obedient and she almost always is. But there’s one person in the clan who hates her to the point of obsession – Broud. Broud is the son of the clan chief’s mate and he’s a total, maniacal asshole. He is seethingly jealous of Ayla because she so often steals attention from him. It is her bad luck that the day Broud was named a man (makes his first kill hunting) she was given her animal totem – the cave lion. A woman getting a totem as strong as a cave lion is totally unheard of and it overshadows Broud’s big man ceremony. Grrrr.

But Broud is officially a man who can and does officially beat the hell out of Ayla. She’s still a little girl – less than 8 years old. However, I’ll stop and say that time is definitely relative for these people. One of the characters dies in the book. The description is something like this, “Her hair was white and limp, her face was lined with deep creases. She looked a thousand years old. She was not quite twenty-six.” My cat has a longer life expectancy. These people did some seriously hard living. So eight years old is practically an adult by their standards. Broud makes Ayla’s life as miserable as he possibly can. But Ayla – and I believe this is a very intentional theme in the book – is highly adaptable. The book is really about evolution itself. The clan are a dying race, they have no future because they are incapable of change. Ayla’s race will live and learn to dominate all other animals because they can adapt. Ayla does what she needs to do to not only survive, but flourish. When she realizes that no amount of pissyness or defiance is going to save her from Broud’s bullying, she learns to simply accept it and not let it bother her beyond the moment.

Ayla is driven by a need to learn and improve. Though she does not have the considerable gift of being able to remember all the memories of an ancient race, she is a very quick learner. She learns from Iza, the medicine woman, how to heal. She does not instinctively know the uses for all plants, but what she can do is make associations between one illness and another, and be innovative with how she uses healing remedies. Her body is not as strong as clan members’, but her limbs are longer and she is more agile. She can swim and she can wield a slingshot better than the clan members (though the latter is strictly forbidden to her.) She has a natural curiosity that cannot be quelled no matter how good her intentions. Over and over again she breaks the standards and traditions of the clan. Yet, possibly because her intentions are always innocent and good, they almost always yield some benefit for the tribe. It creates both gratitude and great uneasiness in the clan, and it stokes the hatred that Broud feels for Ayla.

Eventually, as must happen in every girl’s life, Ayla’s totem starts fighting other totems, on a monthly basis and the blood from her totem’s kill drains from her. It will soon be time for Ayla to take a mate. The problem is she is uglier than sin to the Neanderthals because of her unsightly flat forehead, fair coloring, and disturbing lack of shoulder hair. This is fine with Ayla because she has an independent spirit. She does want to be a mother, but is pretty much resigned to not having kids because really – what male totem could ever kill a cave lion totem? Right around this time Broud starts to realize that he can torture Ayla by raping her. The concept of rape is totally unknown to them. If a man wants to have sex with a woman he merely gives her the signal, she “assumes the position” and it’s business as usual. Sex is as ordinary to them as eating or collecting roots so they do it in front of each other and children imitate it. I will at this point interject that, if the behavior of my cats is any indication, there is nothing natural about female acquiescence to random male urges. When Hopkins gets within a foot of Mithril the windows shake from her screeching, and hissing and she has taken out entire filing cabinets in her attempt to flee from his “signal.”

Something in Ayla, however, does not want to assume the position for Broud, but he makes her and beats her savagely for disobeying him. This is a very fun new game to Broud and he rapes her several times a day for several months. Coincidentally, this is around the same time that a freakishly strong male totem defeats Ayla’s cave lion totem and she becomes pregnant. Ayla is thrilled by this turn of events and even forgets to mind that Broud continues to signal her that he wants to “relieve himself” with her. Now that she no longer cares, Broud is bored with it and stops.

So, Ayla dies in the book a few times. Don’t worry, none of them are permanent. The clan has a very strange way of dealing with those who break a serious clan rule. They will “kill” you. Let me explain. In a rational society this would mean that they would quite literally end your life. But in the clan world, they “spiritually” kill you – meaning they say a few words and you’re “dead.” No one can see you or hear you and you just disappear to them. Now, let me further clarify. They’re not saying that they shun you, or merely agree to ignore you. They really, really believe that you have died and, though you’re still standing there, they believe your body is just a spirit. They think you are dead. Most of the time when a person is cursed to death it is permanent and the cursee actually does end up dying because they also think they’re dead and that’s just too depressing to handle. Ayla – though not unmoved by the ceremony – also gets that she’s sort of…not dead. Ayla was only temporarily cursed for a month, and if she can somehow survive the month she’ll be able to rejoin the clan. Someone surviving temporary death has only happened once – in a legend. I’ll just go ahead and ruin the surprise and let you know that she does survive her death. The clan is convinced she was in the spirit world the whole time.

Overall, the story is about Ayla’s young adulthood – I think she’s only around 12 when the book ends but she’s behaved and been treated like a full grown woman for years. It’s about her struggles with nature, the clan and the asshole Broud who becomes leader of the clan at the end. I learned that this is only the first in a series of books and I am very interested to read the next to see what happens to her.

REVIEW

The story is very fast-paced. I sort of dreaded reading the book, both because of Jamie’s recollection of the movie and because Nikki read it and didn’t like it at all. However, I couldn’t put it down and I think it was remarkably well written. I love it when I get sucked into a book that I don’t expect to like. I know that Nikki was irritated by the sexism in the book and of course it can be difficult to stomach. But I read it as a feminist book because it shows the indomitable spirit of this bright girl who never seeks revenge, but is constantly vindicated. She is an uncommonly strong character and one who is totally, believably unaware of her own greatness. She has been criticized her whole life for what makes her great, so she is practically ashamed of her accomplishments. I would tell more of the plot, but I do not want to spoil it for anyone and I definitely encourage you to read it.

Something that struck me about Ayla’s character was how happy she usually was. She would run through the woods, practice hunting, gather herbs, and be absolutely joyful. Being free to be herself was all that she needed to find peace and happiness. And while it’s easy to make fun of the clan’s superstitions, ceremonies, and batshit beliefs, there is something enviable about a society that holds so much sacred. There is a very fine line between genuine reverence and hypocrisy – especially when religion is involved. However, in our world that has lost its freaking mind and maybe even its soul, the thought of there being something sacred is beautiful. I love to laugh at things. I was just making jokes about rape, which if you think about it, isn’t all that funny. The clan’s values were unshakable, and most of them were pretty decent. Be loyal, contribute something with your talents, take care of each other... what values do we have now? Look at what we’re doing to each other and to the rest of the world. For more COTCB deep thought by LoLo, stay tuned for Part II…

RATING
I’m going with &&&& - four Ampersands! Definitely list-worthy.