Nehaveigur

Nothing remains of the millions of brilliant men and women who lived before we invented writing. A few cave paintings and some carved figurines are the only exception. But what about their music, their science and their worldview? We know next to nothing, and this is likely to remain the case.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Shaman, which is set in the Paleolithic, at the time the paintings in the Chauvet cave were created, has a scene in which an old man dies. He is aware that the knowledge he has accumulated is of great importance, but he also knows that it will be lost once he’s gone. He is trying to express this to his young apprentice:

You have to remember. Take care of the kids. They’re the ones who matter. You have to teach them everything I’ve taught you, and everything you’ve learned on your own. It will only go well if we keep passing it all along. There are no secrets, there is no mystery. We make all that up. In fact it’s all right there in front of us […] I worry what’s to become of you all. What’s going to happen when Heather dies? There’s none of you old enough to know everything you need to know. You’ll be limping along like it’s the dream time again. It’s fragile what we know. It’s gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again. I don’t know how you’ll do it. I mean, I wanted to know everything. I remembered every single word I ever heard, every single moment of my life, right up to a few years ago. I talked to every person in this whole part of the world, and remembered everything they said. What’s going to become of all that?

This is one of the more tragic scenes in Shaman. There are several other scenes that are more lighthearted, such as this one, describing a wild cat’s thoughts:

The humans would kill anyone, and then not only eat their kill but tear off its fur and tear out its teeth and wear the afterward, macabre trophies that were part of what humans so awful, along with their smell, and their ability to kill at a distance by throwing rocks and sticks. None of the other animals could do that. The cat disliked all the other animals, including her own kind. Cats at least liked to stay away from each other, they had that basic courtesy. All except the lions. Lions acted like they were wolves, it was sickening.

There are some great boy-meets-girl scenes as well, such as this one:

Let’s dance, she said, as if they weren’t already, and raised her hands over her head and shimmied. She was more graceful than an elg, and her loon cloak bounced and flickered in the firelight, and Loon with his owl vision danced with her with his gaze cast down, watching her legs and hips and hands, keeping his gaze from hers as she kept hers from his, except for a moment now and then, when a move made them laugh or they bumped together hard. Right now they couldn’t look at each other, but once in a while they would both look up and their eyes would meet. Are you there too? Their gazes asked, and then answered, Yes, I am here. We are here, together in a bubble of our own, which all of a sudden popped out of nowhere around us. Isn’t it exciting? Yes it is! And then they would look down and dance, almost as if abashed, or a little shocked, needing a little time to take it in.

Shaman is one of the few books set in the Paleolithic. I first read it about ten years ago and then re-read it recently because of an interest in the Paleolithic I’ve developed. It’s one of Robinson’s best books, and it’s clear that an enormous amount of research has gone into it. I didn’t come across anything that I found implausible.

For example, there is a scene in which Loon, the protagonist, holds his hands against walls of Chauvet cave and paints around them. From having watched Werner Herzog’s documentary about Chauvet, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I know that the artist who made these prints had a crooked little finger. Loon also has a crooked little finger because it was injured much earlier in the book. No-where else, including the scene where he paints his hand, is this ever mentioned, proving Robinson’s incredible commitment to historical accuracy.