11 Oct 2013 03:57:47
Modern kids have it easy. Thirty thousand years ago, your average adolescent would have had a child or two, killed a few of animals and survived several winters on not much more than a handful of mouldy nuts. Loon, the hero of Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, has to endure more than most: an orphan, he has been chosen as his tribe's shaman. On the eve of his 12th birthday, he is stripped naked and sent into the wilderness for a fortnight alone. He must make new clothes for himself, then light a fire, gather food, lay traps and find a place to sleep where he won't be eaten by a passing pack of wolves. On the final days of his "wander", Loon gulps down a handful of herbs and mushrooms, then dances and hallucinates alone, before returning in triumph to his tribe. (The name Loon refers to an American grebe-like bird that British would call a diver.) Having passed his initiation, Loon is taken on as a pupil by Thorn, the current shaman. Writing hasn't been invented yet, so memory is the only way to store expertise, and Loon must learn everything from medicine to creation myths.
The shaman is a sorcerer, a doctor, a mystic, an engineer and an artist, too: guided by Thorn, Loon is allowed access to a series of underground caverns, where successive generations have painted dramatic scenes on the walls. Robinson has based these specifically on the Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave in the Ardèche, which was discovered two decades ago, and has recently been the subject of Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams; his descriptions are vivid and beautiful.
The point-of-view shifts occasionally to another member of the tribe, or leaps momentarily into the mind of a cat or a wolverine, but this is mainly Loon's story. Through him, we meet the rest of the Wolf pack, a tight tribe of around 40 humans: Schist, the headman, and his wife, Thunder; the other teenage boys, Hawk and Moss; and the old woman, Heather, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of herbs and enviable linguistic dexterity: "Bunch of drunken old spelunkers, you shamans, and you hunters mere pig-stickers and jerk-offs, all your splendiferous vainglorious buffooneries and ass-holeries, hootenanies and corroborees, wandering around thinking you're men, just get the meat!"
Every summer, when the weather mellows and food is easier to find, the Wolf pack dismantle their shelters and bury their heavier possessions, then walk for a few days to meet several other tribes at a festival. There they sing and dance around blazing fires, celebrating "another year passed successfully, the kids mostly fine, no one starving quite". Here Loon finds Elg, a woman without a tribe of her own, who will become his wife and the mother of his children.
Robinson injects some drama with a conflict against another tribe of ice-dwelling northerners, but this is mostly a simple story of day-to-day survival in the Ice Age. The most moving section of the book is a melancholy friendship between Loon and one of "the old ones", the Neanderthals who had inhabited Europe undisturbed until humans arrived from Africa. "He had a huge beak of a nose, big furry eyebrows and a forehead that receded to a balding head." The humans and the Neanderthal might be similar in many ways, and can communicate with grunts, gestures and a few shared words, but there isn't room for them both in a landscape with such scarce resources.
Shaman is set in an era of human history almost unimaginably different from ours, but Robinson brings it alive through a detailed account of Loon's experiences. This mass of information is often overwhelming and sometimes tedious, but is also absolutely convincing and has an astonishing cumulative potency, hurling us back through 30,000 years into the life of a boy struggling to survive in a bleak and brutal environment.
