What this author does so engagingly is take many of the elements of the classic magical fantasy journey - the seeking out and defeating of an evil sorcerer - and relocate them from their usual faux medieval setting to the Stone Age of northern Europe.
Her imaginative recreation of this distant historical world is both accurate and totally convincing. She researches meticulously, making herself familiar with geographical locations as well as archeological evidence, and it shows. Yet her detailed background knowledge is not obtrusive. She simply creates landscapes, people and lifestyles that are vivid and completely engrossing. So immersed is she in this distant past that as a reader you are brought closer to the life of our early ancestors than you would have thought possible. Of course this is helped, too, by writing of high technical skill that transports you simply and directly to the heart of her vivid imaginings.
However, despite all its historical accuracies the world this author creates is a fantasy one; magic and spells, shape-shifting and demons are not just features of the belief systems of its people but are a very real part of their lives. Here the wizards of other fantasies become the mages and shamans of the hunter-gatherer clans and a world that already has much of darkness about it becomes darker still through the all-pervading influence of their magic. For in this book magicians, here the 'Soul-Eaters', are essentially evil and provide the adversaries for its protagonist, the young Torak. However Chronicles is not altogether as simple as this. It is a long, rich and deep narrative, with many twists in both events and characters. The ambiguity in nature of some of the mages, together with the complexity of other characters, not least Torak himself, provides much of the power of this engrossing tale.
Michelle Paver cleverly introduces two other key elements too, particularly potent perhaps for a young audience. These add further intensity and involvement to her story. She clearly has herself a great affinity with animals and uses introduces friendship between humans and animals, particularly between Torak and his 'wolf brother', as a key element. She can get right inside the mind of an animal such as Wolf and imagine how it feels very convincingly, even giving the creature's thoughts a language that seems absolutely right. As a writer she also knows just how to tug at heart strings, to stretch them to agonising breaking point and indeed sometimes to snap them. Like many of the best stories of human/animal relationships this one is both heartwarming and heart wrenching. However, she also introduces and exploits human friendship, together with all its aspects, warmth, loyalty, jealousy, betrayal and loss. Indeed Torak's friendship with a girl contemporary, Renn, is one of the most central relationships in the book, although it is far from the only one. Michelle Paver is a rare author who can create a wide range of characters convincingly, male and female, human and animal, good and evil - and all with as many complexities, ambiguities and confusions as in real life.
Although it is six books long, Chronicles is very much a sequence and not a series. It tells one overarching narrative, albeit in many interweaving episodes. It is essentially a human journey - a journey to defeat evil, but also the journey of Torak's gradual growth into the person he has the potential to be. And if this is a somewhat unoriginal theme for fiction, then that is only because life is in this sense unorinigal. The journey is the same for all people, in all places and through all times. It is the telling of this universal story which needs to be original and compelling, and this is both.
Chronicles is a more easily accessible work for children than many of the others I have so far identified as all time greats and it is aimed at a slightly younger audience than some of them. My quest here is not primarily about finding follow-on recommendations for young readers who have enjoyed Harry Potter. However if it were, Michelle Paver's wonderful sequence would come up as a very strong contender. This does not, of course, prevent it from being a hugely enjoyable and indeed enriching read for any older age too. In awakening, as it does so thrillingly, its 'ancient darkness' it reawakens in all of us a potent magic which lurks deep within our humanity as well as our history.
Footnote:
I am currently reading this author's more recent sequence, Gods and Warriors, the third volume of which is just out, and hope to write about it soon.
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