Retroland by Peter Kemp

Author:Peter Kemp [Kemp, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300275025
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Pre-historical Fiction: William Golding, Jean M. Auel, Thomas Keneally and Raymond Williams

Golden Hill, West and Lincoln in the Bardo resurrect eras infrequently visited by historical novelists. Even thinner on the ground are books by what might be called pre-historical novelists, authors who have undertaken very long-haul flights of imagination into the past. Impelled by the pervading urge to scrutinise starting-points, some have peered as far back as the emergence of our species. Immeasurably the greatest writer to do this, William Golding, set an unsurpassed standard for such fiction with his 1955 novel The Inheritors, which displays how a tribe of peaceable, slow-thinking Neanderthals are exterminated by a band of aggressive, quick-minded Homo sapiens. Golding’s scenario – encounter between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens seen as a grim warning of lethal things to come – was inverted and stretched out across six mammoth novels by the American author, Jean M. Auel, in her hugely bestselling series, Earth’s Children. Beginning with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) and concluding with The Land of Painted Caves (2011), Auel offers The Inheritors turned upside down. Where Golding’s novel ended with a sole surviving Neanderthal baby boy being adopted by a tribe of Homo sapiens, The Clan of the Cave Bear begins with a sole surviving Cro-Magnon little girl (orphaned after an earthquake engulfs her family) being adopted by tribe of Neanderthals. The authors’ attitudes to ‘the Others’ (the term both Golding and Auel use for their Homo sapiens) are diametrically opposed. Where Golding sees them as baleful, Auel regards them as beneficent. Her Cro-Magnon heroine, Ayla, matures into an almost Californian-seeming, blue-eyed, long-legged lovely with rippling blonde hair, a lissom figure and voluptuous breasts. At first squinted at askance by the swart, squat, barrel-bodied Neanderthals as a creature sadly lacking the pelted allure of their own bandy-legged belles, she increasingly astounds them with her feisty refusal to be cowed into subservience as a female and by her feats of physical and mental agility. Prognathous jaws drop in amazement as she lopes around the tundra, applying tourniquets, braining hyenas, doing advanced maths and – to assist her unrivalled hunting prowess with a sling-shot – inventing the bra. Carnivores and curses, ostracism and earthquakes are all taken in her effortless Cro-Magnon stride: ‘I would have been back earlier,’ she murmurs modestly, ‘but I got caught in an avalanche coming down the mountain.’ Not one to trouble about linguistic incongruity, Auel has a Neanderthal reflect that the Others ‘verbalised more fluently’. But, in her pages, Neanderthals themselves seem no slouches when it comes to verbalising (‘“Iza, she is just perfect,” Ebra raved. “I must admit I was a little worried when I learned you were pregnant after all this time”’). Though her publishers maintain that Auel’s ‘extensive research’ into the Ice Age has ‘earned her the respect of many renowned scientists, archaeologists and anthropologists around the globe’, in her fiction the result is more plasticine than Pleistocene.

Another remote-harker-back, Thomas Keneally, worked a variant on the widely favoured format of two storylines that counterpoint two eras in The Book of Science and Antiquities (2019).

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