Customer Reviews

The Animal Wife

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a well written and entertaining book (though perhaps not as interesting as the author's other prehistoric novel, Reindeer Moon. It's quite different from some other more popular novels set in early human history, in part because Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is better able than other authors to get inside the heads of people very different from ourselves. It's not great literature, but it is certainly an interesting, engaging book.

Writing a sequel to Reindeer Moon could certainly not be an easy task, but Animal Wife does an astonishingly good job. In Reindeer Moon we were staggered by this author's excellent descriptive prose relating nature's unsympathetic brutality to those humans of prehistory. Animal wife takes it even further, recounting man's brutality to one another. While told from a male perspective as opposed to Reindeer's female perspective, the mood is less forbidding and leans more towards the self-confidence that a future leader needs to have despite the unimaginable adversity. Once again the author's characters were markedly developed and anything but primitive with their complex social structure, complete with infighting, bickering and backstabbing. The only downside of this novel is that we readers are left with the anguish of this being the author's last work of prehistory fiction.

Given how high the bar had been set by Reindeer Moon, and given the mixed reviews posted here on Amazon, I took up The Animal Wife with some trepidation. I needn't have worried. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas brings to this novel the same strong voice, pacing, psychological insight, and sympathy for her characters that made Reindeer Moon such an utterly convincing portrayal of life in what is now Siberia 20,000 years ago (or thereabouts).

I wouldn't call The Animal Wife a sequel to Reindeer Moon so much as a companion novel. In many ways it is Reindeer Moon's mirror image; the tale--once again a "small" story devoid of the earth-shaking events, spiritual quests, and other "epic" devices that are the undoing of some other novels in the genre--is told from the perspective of an adolescent coming of age, this time a young man; and whereas in Reindeer Moon we absorbed the story from the perspective of a woman of Sali shaman's lineage and were introduced to Swift's people, now the story is told by Swift's son and we come to know the women of Sali's lineage as outsiders.

The tenor of the story itself is somewhat different than that of its predecessor--how could it not be?--but the somewhat simple (but not simplistic), matter-of-fact tone that characterizes the narrators of both books is much the same. In my view this tone plays a big part in making these books so successful in developing these characters as convincing representatives of human beings living so long ago. The author's mother wrote the first major ethnography of the !Kung / San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and Thomas has also lived among these people for several years at a stretch and has written a couple of excellent non-fiction treatments of their way of life. The experiences have served her well in portraying the hunter-gatherers of The Animal Wife and Reindeer Moon.

For readers more interested in shambling brutes, rock-em sock-em action, or puerile quests and "chosen ones," this book is NOT what you are looking for. For readers interested in a more pedestrian but more realistic approach to life as it might have been for our distant ancestors, I can recommend nothing more highly than The Animal Wife and Reindeer Moon. These books are so good, and so well written, that they really transcend the genre. A reader could have no interest in paleolithic life whatsoever and still come away feeling they've had a fully satisfying reading experience: interesting characters, a plot that engages, psychological interplay, and skillful writing that draws us out of ourselves and fully into another world. We are delighted, saddened, frightened, angered, confused--we are fully engaged and we are moved and thereby changed, having learned something about the world and ourselves.

This book should never be compared to Jean Auel's books; that would be like comparing healthful organic greens to a McSalad.

These two books could have been one book really, they are very much alike. Instead of the girl Yanan telling her story we have the boy Kori, son of the shaman Swift from "Reindeer". A good summer read, well worth it.

Thomas can write a book that is totally plausible. Harsh, unromantic, and heads above the rest of this genre. If you want a prehisoric love romance, don't bother. If you care about good writing, read on.

I did not find this so interesting as a novel, in terms of plot or character development.

I also found it not at all enlightening in terms of paleontological knowledge or archeological & anthropological accuracy. The author's portrayal of life 20,000 years ago is probably more of an accurate portrayal of Bushman & Eskimo lives in the 20th c.

The book is really, really depressing. The characters eat mostly meat, & are concerned only with killing animals & gobbling them down. Where is the stuff that makes them human? They don't seem to have time or inclination for creating art (which we know pre-historic people did a lot of), or making music (ditto), or dancing & joking together. They seem to just snap at each other all the time.

They are also constantly hungry, despite the constant killing. They are forever getting very thin, & just about starving to death. The infants are emaciated. One wonders why all these people did not die out of malnutrition.

Actually, of course, the archeological record shows that hunter/gatherers were pretty healthy & well-nourished. The archeological record also shows that pre-historic people had food stores, and processed grains. That kind of information would make for more interesting reading, as would a recognition that people live together because they care for each other.

Well, this is just an awful mish mash of a novel.

Thomas wrote one really splendid book--The Harmless People. After that, it has been downhill.

I looked forward to this book because of the general subject matter (which I love), but was hugely disappointed in it. In fact, I only got about 100 pages in before I quit in disgust and sheer boredom. I think that many readers accept the author's portrayal of an Ice Age society as realistic simply based on her reputation as an anthropologist. Unfortunately, she picks and chooses among theories of modern anthropology to make mainly unsupported and anachronistic assumptions about prehistoric humans. The main effect is patronizing to the characters and leaves the reader with a sense of undeserved superiority at living today rather than in such "primitive" times. This isn't helped by the author's complete inability to get inside her characters' heads or tell a novel-length story (the main plot doesn't start until halfway through). None of them are likeable and none of them like, let alone, love each other. So, why should we care about them? They are just anthropologically-correct manikins that do whatever the author feels they should do next to support some theory of hers about prehistoric life. She fails to give any sense of how even (or perhaps especially) people who live on the very knife's-edge of existence can be happy, feel joy, laugh, love and hate. In fact, the only (unintentional) humor you will find in this book is in the animalistic sex scenes. As for any understanding of people who not only believed in, but saw, shamans and spirits, forget it. Her description of that is totally mechanistic and not at all convincing--a completely outside view of Ice Age people. Very disappointing.

The above title best describes how I ultimately felt about this book. I got sick and tired of hearing the words meat and eat. That's basically the entire book content.

This review concerns the audio tape which I work out with, and the only reason I choose this title, was the narrator, Frank Muller. Mr. Muller, who due to a serious motorcycle accident will never again bring magic to another audio book could read a laundry list and make it interesting. His dulcet-toned reading is the only thing that keeps me listening as I run endlessly on my elliptical.

In all honesty, I have not completed the entire story, nor have I perused Ms. Thomas' Reindeer Moon, but if I have to hear about the butchery of one more animal, if another berry is picked, if Kory has to have...ugh, meat one more time, I may just drop the entire story and listen to something else.

I say that every time I run.

By the way, the three star rating is for Frank Muller, The Animal Wife gets none.

Average Clan of the Cave Bear clone with the usual hunting action and incidental paleontology education.