text: Do you feel different from people around you?  Do they resent your ingenuity?  Have you been kept from achieving your full potential by tradition-bound brutes who live only for base needs?  Do you long for the company of others like yourself, who, tragically but inevitably, are biologically destined to wipe these shorter, darker subhumans from the face of the earth?  Congratulations!  You are either in the aryan nations or the Clan of the Cave Bear fan club, possibly both!
  
  (I exaggerate- you could be a nineteenth century English settler in Australia, or a Boer in South Africa, or maybe you just like Larry Niven, but that's beside the point)
  
  I can forgive Auel for the historical inaccuracies in the book.  In the late 1970's when she did her research, we didn't have the genomic tools to reconstruct the lives of Neanderthals, and even now enough controversy persists to keep the discussion page lively over at Wikipedia.  Ultimately we'll never know for sure what the paleolithic was like, and Auel's is if nothing else a vivacious fictional suggestion.
  
  Similarly, her bloated, almost puffy writing style is excusable in a first-time author, though one wonders what parasite infected her editor.  I haven't read her more recent works, but I imagine she has probably improved.  Even with the pendulous sentences Clan is not unreadable.
  
  What infuriates me is the casually racist subtext of the story, nowhere critiqued or even acknowledged.  The story reads like a near-literal historicization of Helena Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine on the fall of the "aryans"- who interbred with "subhumans" introducing the world to, oh I dunno, domination by the unworthy, blind tradition, suppression of the individual, all the hallmarks of the book's neanderthal culture.  Of course, even in this the blond-haired blue-eyed Ayla is innocent, overpowered by a brutish thug.
  
  Against this master narrative, all the admittedly interesting side notes about plant-based medicine and flintknapping make no impression.  I would recommend anyone interested in paleontology take a trip to a museum or cruise the internet, and give Auel's books a wide berth.
  
  Also?  Enough rape scenes already
  