The Road

This book by Cormac McCarthy will (calling it, yup) go down in history as one of the best and most poignant novels to emerge from the United States of America - ever.*

   A non-specific apocalypse has ravaged everything. All plants and animals are dead, and human civilisation has collapsed, over several years descending into a horror beyond misery, where simply meeting other people can be life or death as you don't know if they'll kill you to take your stuff or rape and eat you. Against this backdrop, utterly bereft of hope and beauty and goodness, a father and his young son follow the road south to the coast, trying to scavenge food (anything but other humans) and survival supplies and avoid raiders and cannibals on the way.**

   The story is extremely simple - so the father/son relationship is given space to become the main character, with heartwrenchingly direct dialogue, illuminating the main theme of the book: that even when all else is seemingly lost, if we have others whom we can trust and love and be loved by, there is hope, and we can carry that fire within us to persist in facing the challenges that may arise in the hope of finding others who are holding onto the same hope and still believing in goodness, the human capacity for helping each other. The omnipresent threat of slow (starvation) and sudden (cannibal-thieves) death looms over this relationship founded on a hope that the boy has little experience of other than through assurance from the man that it exists; several brief encounters with kind people widen this, though several brief encounters with horrifically threatening people narrow it, and ultimately it is ambiguous (until the end but spoilers) whether the boy who has grown up in this bleak world genuinely grasps what the man has been trying to pass down.

   It is also exquisitely well-crafted - everything from description of surroundings to conversation to carefully-warily methodical actions evoke the sense of utter desolation, of a grandly poetic lack of anything grand or poetic, of a constant urgency and dread and fear and slow rasping unworldly decay. The world is as vividly drawn as it needs to be, the atmosphere hanging low and heavy everywhere so even simple details are pervaded with an imagined visualisation of things burned, twisted, broken, lost, dead and gone. McCarthy's construction of such a real-feeling world lends an immense tenderness to the central relationship; we are drawn into the lives and the man and the boy so as to be constantly enraptured by their devotion to each other and constantly terrified for their survival. They are living in a world without nature or civilisation, where the only life is human, and the only life that can be trusted to be good is each other.

   Ultimately it is a novel that shows us how much we have to lose, in a social-economic-ecological context, but reminds us alongside this of what we can never lose if only we are determined to hold onto it - and that is our own decision to try to be good. Even when surrounded by unimaginable hardship and evil. As the man teaches the boy, so the fire is passed onward. We persist.

   Anyway. It is incredible. Read it.

* Instant classic. Yes. The film adaptation of it is also by a pretty long margin the best post-apocalyptic movie (except Wall-E maybe) ever; the bleak visual style echoes the flavour of the book's prose brilliantly and Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee bring the man and the boy to life perfectly. But is it as good as the book? I'm not going to answer this as I hate this question.

** Reading or watching stories set in this kind of world, I am growingly aware that were such a civilisational breakdown to occur, I would struggle a great deal to survive. Our socioeconomic systems of convenience have not prepared me for such a life. My best hope would probably be hiding underground somewhere with loads of bottled water and tinned beans and stuff to read until it all blows over or everyone who might eat me is dead from mad cow disease or whatever you get from eating people... man, I need to start digging and stockpiling

The Orchard Keeper

This book, the long-ago debut of legendary modern American novelist Cormac McCarthy, was not at all done justice my attempt to read it. I read the first half of it during the return coach journey from Sheffield to Berlin, and the coach being full of progressively inebriated economics students was probably not the best reading environment - then I had a solid two weeks of trying (and failing) to get elected, so did no reading and kind of forgot everything that I'd already read of it, and upon returning to the poor neglected book a few days ago was completely lost, but decided to slog apologetically through the remainder and promised myself that I'd just read it again properly someday.
   Even given my terrible approach to this probably-excellent novel, it's not that easy to read. McCarthy's writing style is poetic, verbose, verdant, densely descriptive; it resembles painting more than prose. With a deft turn of phrase he can thrust deeply resonant and specific visions of place and person and deed into the reader's head - which he does most shockingly when narrating acts of meticulous violence. I'd prior read his haunting post-apocalyptic work The Road, and it's probably one of the best novels I ever have. His style pulls you in, fills your head with stark atmospheric landscapes and sad solitary animals and humans observed from a distance, never felt, only seen, settings and figures and actions and descriptions and memories and speech all woven together almost indistinguishable from each other but for the larger collected result of a piercing scene. This style in The Road is pure magic, because there are only two real characters and they're nameless, and the plot is fairly linear and progressive. When I found this book in a second-hand shop the day before I was to leave for Berlin I thought, hey, Cormac's a great writer, I'll get that to read on the 22-hour-each-way journey - bleh. The barely-distinct characters in their inexorably-poignant plots get called 'the man' or 'the boy' or 'the old man', similar to The Road, but here rather than just one everyman and his son going on a walk there are several dozen characters living in a range of time periods with complex relational hinges between all of them.
   The style, the being-on-a-noisy-coach; I got very confused and sort of gave up trying to understand the story. I gathered that there was an outlawed bootlegger called Marion Sylder who befriends a boy called John Wesley Rattner, there was a bar called the Green Fly Inn built suspended over a ravine which unsurprisingly collapses one day, there is an old guy called Arthur Ownby who for reasons I failed to apprehend had a shootout with the police one day before running off to scrape a living selling ginseng roots, there's several wildcats who are the protagonists of their own little scenes and more than a few dogs who pop up all over the place, there's an orchard of bitter apples planted around a burnt-out pit in which is buried a car and the rotting corpse of John Wesley Rattner's father who was beaten to death by someone (maybe Marion but I didn't think he was that old). The story takes decades and hops around a lot, with blurry effectively-anonymous characters acting out sketchy ephemeral passages through the collective history of the lawless godless Tennessee countryside they all populate.
   I honestly couldn't tell you a quarter of what actually happened in the novel. Maybe I'm not supposed to be able to? Maybe it's simply a lengthy experiment in description and scene-setting, which McCarthy is incomparably beautifully good at, coupled with an overall wistful dry recognition of the odd suspensions between a continuous place and an ever-changing set of mortal creatures which occasionally commit murderous actions. Maybe it's that and the actual story doesn't matter so much? I feel that might be right. Maybe it's just a bad novel? No, absolutely not, I just read it very badly indeed.
   Sorry Cormac McCarthy, and sorry to my followers - I can't legitimately recommend this book as a novel, though hopefully I will be able to next time I attempt it. Regardless, I can vouch for it as a painting of words, for which it is truly beautiful. Even my distracted disengaged self was swept along by the torrents and droughts of detail that make up the real weight of the book.