Disposable Lit Reviews

St. Martin’s, 1997
395 pp.
ISBN 0-312-96300-9

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I mentioned back in my review for Almost Adam that the recent subgenre of novels dealing with discovering other “living fossil” hominids has developed (or should I say, “evolved”?) a surprisingly consistent set of plot points, tropes, and downright cliches in a short time frame. Neanderthal carries most of them, and does it fairly well; although less erudite and less given to anthropological digressions, Neanderthal has better adventure-story pacing, and doesn’t rely on lone modern human musing to himself to lend meaning to the proceedings. (There’s another of these “lost world of hominids” novels I read a couple of years ago, and I dearly wish I could remember the name of it, because it took all of these obligatory ingredients and presented them in the most cliched, potboilerish style possible; I want to use it as the contrasting “bad adventure novel” to today’s better adventure novel.)

So, what do we find that we fully expected to find? First up, of course, is the hidden tribe of protohumans. In this case, it’s Neanderthals in the Himalayas, the source of the Yeti legends. And, in the most comic-booky element of the novel, their hidden valley is artificially warm, compared to its snowbound surroundings, thanks to — yup — geothermal venting.

We’ve got our intrepid explorers, roped into the quest in the most Indiana Jonesish fashion: Two former students of a great anthropologist are summoned by a secretive research organization and informed that their mentor has disappeared in the Himalayas, but not before sending back an artifact: A Neanderthal skull — one which dates at being a mere twenty-five years old. The two younger researchers, Matt Mattison and Susan Arnot, have both taken their former instructors theories in different directions, and are great academic rivals; and hey, whaddaya know, they also used to be lovers. Who would have guessed?

There’s also the requisite political angle. I haven’t yet figured out why all of these novels have to throw in politics, as if the discovery of the missing link alive wouldn’t be intriguing enough a premise for a full novel, and thus a good/bad conspiracy theory is thrown in to flesh things out. In this case, the research organization is run by the paranormal-investigation offshoot of the CIA, and they’re so interested in Neanderthals because the accidentally caught a stray a few months back who demonstrated fantastic talents in remote viewing and nonsensory communication (the obvious answer to why such a large-brained hominid never invented language, of course).

And just to make matters worse, the Neanderthal tribe itself is divided into two warring factions, as our exploring heroes discover when they finally stumble into the hidden valley: While the peaceful vegetarians live in harmony with nature and each other in the warmer part, the violent misfits have congregated in the nearby cave system, from which they make raids on their gentler cousins. And naturally, the violent faction is the one that is discovering weapons, carnivorousness, and all the other “advanced” accoutrements that will soon make them the only Neanderthals around.

It’s not a bad read, as such things go, as long as you can keep yourself from playing taxonomy with all of the retreaded parts that were used to put the novel together: aside from the normal gestalt of the subgenre, other parts invite direct comparison to Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I suppose that if evolution is merely the refinement of pre-existing traits to best fit the environment, then it should be no surprise that these “missing link” novels keep reusing the same elements, trying to find the best possible combination. However, I fear that by the time a truly great novel along these lines rolls off the presses, the environment will have been depleted; readers will have grown tired of reading the same old thing in slightly different form.

Nathan Shumate