lifeonqueen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lifeonqueen) wrote2007-04-30 04:20 pm
lifeonqueen) wrote2007-04-30 04:20 pm
Beautifully Written, Too Bad About The Cannibals
I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road over the weekend.
I'm really rather sorry I did.
If you read sci-fi, fantasy, horror or any of the other “disrespected” literary genres, you’ve probably encountered the phenomena of the Big Name Serious Literary Author who is lauded for his or her novel of Big Bold Allegory and Metaphor, often featuring a “stunning” or “gripping” or “chilling” “vision” of humanity’s/America’s/civilization’s future.
For Canadians, I think the best-known example of this is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, her mid-80s novel about a future American theocracy where fertile women have become chattel, forced to bear the children of an increasingly infertile White Male Christian elite. 20 years later, Atwood’s Feminist call to arms seems rather more prophetic than it did in the late 80s when The Handmaid’s Tale started popping up on the syllabi of high school English classes across Canada but it’s still only a middling novel as these things go - technically proficient but soulless, more interested in agitprop than honest emotion, sopmewhat lacking imaginative scope - Margaret Atwood’s good but she ain’t Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin or even plain ol'William Gibson.
You will, however, find The Handmaid's Tale shelved under “Fiction and Literature” in the bookstore (or library) rather than the “Science Fiction” ghetto with Dick, Leguin, Gibson and so on. If we were all bigger people inside maybe where a certain author’s book is located in the bookstore wouldn’t matter but the fact is that books about werewolves and space aliens and dragons and the future (and especially books about all four) just don't get taken as seriously as your big, heavy, literary, memoirical tome about how your parents were awful and turned you gay (*cough*Anne-Marie*cough*lookingatyou*cough*). And really, that would be something I could live with if not for two things a) I happen to like writing about werewolf space alien dragonriders from the future and despise the self-absorption and navel-gazing and general depressive atmosphere of the contemporary Canadian literary novel (and no, my parents didn't turn me gay, they turned me celibate but that's a story for another day). B) Big, heavy, literary, memoirical tomes about how your parents were awful and turned you gay shelved in "Fiction and Literature" generally sell better than books of equal, if not superior, quality shelved in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, at least partly as a result of how these books are positioned and promoted in store.
So it always burns me when a "serious" author is lauded for taking on traditional genre tropes, such as future distopia or apoca-fic, as if no one has ever written about repressive future theocracies or post-apocalyptic futures before (John Wyndham even got in a two-for-one in The Chrysalids). Which is not to say that this author or that doesn't deserve whatever gold, glory and gaudite's they can get but I'm frustrated when I see rather routine treatments of familiar tropes praised as if these books said something new or particularly noteworthy.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I've decided, is such a novel.
(Halfway through writing this post, my employer sent me an e-mail asking me if I my family's emergency survival kit was prepared. This caused much laughter because, seriously, my plan for the apocalypse, should - God forbid - it come, is to die in the first wave, thanks much.)
The Road is technically stunning, the work of a master wordsmith at the height of his expressive powers. McCarthy's prose is spare, driven forward by an "and x and y" construction that recalls Hemingway, punctuated by the odd flash of linguistic dexterity that catches the reader and temporarily lifts the novel above the ponderous, unremitting despair and depravity of its subject matter. The Road is the Great American novel tipped on it's side and trod on until only the most basic, most robust tropes are left: the quintessential American literary pair of father and son and a journey - years after a nuclear apocalypse that is implied but never mentioned, a father and son walk along the road towards the coast.
The Road lacks, in what is likely a deliberate choice, the specificity that is a hallmark of most speculative fiction/sci-fi - we never know what caused the devastation or where, exactly, the road leads except towards the coast. Yet there's something magisterial in McCarthy's confident sweep of his hand across game board of American civilization, leaving nothing behind (presumably anyone asking how any calamity nuclear or otherwise that could reduce the whole of the American continent to ash and leave anyone alive five or six years on is missing the point of McCarthy's grand conceit). All this, McCarthy says, from the Internet to fresh water, is insubstantial, can be taken away, and with it all that makes men not merely civilized but human. And men specifically - make no mistake, McCarthy's apoco-topia is no place for a woman. It is, in fact, a world that no sane woman would choose to live on in: the missing third of his post-nuclear family is nothing more than a faded memory of someone not strong enough (or possibly foolish enough) to make the journey.
Perhaps there is a message in the relentless brutal depravity of McCarthy's phallo-centric tale: that when women cede their responsibility to safeguard their children, chaos is the end result. Perhaps that puts an overly misogynistic spin on the tale but, of the three significant mentions of women in The Road, it is implied that one chooses suicide over her child, one literally eats her own young, and the third, the only redemptive figure in the bunch, is wife and mother. The reader may draw her (or his) own conclusions.
Where McCarthy does indulge his appetite for the detail is in the privation facing father and son, the precariousness of their survival, where an overlooked field of windfalls and a forgotten water barrel mark the line between life and death, and the degenerate grotesquery of the other denizens of the road. The Road is peopled with cannibalistic tribes of irradiated bogeymen; rape gangs and piles of viscera from unlucky travellers field-dressed like venison mark the pages with a gooey and vomit-inducing frequency, incident piled upon incident until the reader is stunned into a nauseated submission. Too often The Road resembles American Psycho for the post-apocalyptic set and the novel suffers as a result: the world of The Road is so impossibly hostile that the "lucky" breaks that befall father and son feel increasingly inauthentic. McCarthy is too good a writer to stage a scene that ever feels wholly contrived or out of place but in a world where, as he implies, humans farm other humans for veal, how many times can one man stumble upon forgotten canned goods? How can a child who's only know strangers as dangerous still have a natural curiosity and generosity? McCarthy is a brilliant writer but a lousy psychologist.
The Road, for all it's technical brilliance, is in many ways an old man's petulant screed against a world he sees as increasingly devoid of intrinsic value: goodness, decency, morality, the most instinctive of taboos have all become so ephemeral in our world that they could be wiped out of existence like cable TV in a blackout and with as little effort. There's precious little in the way of hope or goodness in The Road and the book's marginally optimistic coda seems almost a betrayal of the story that has gone before, as if McCarthy was forced to tack on some semblance of happy ending to keep the punters happy.
Reading The Road was not a pleasant experience when it wasn't downright vomit inducing. The last time I read a book that nearly made me puke (not including some of the more grisly details of Holocaust) was Cujo, nearly 20 years ago, a rather queasy coincidence because The Road put me in mind of nothing so much as Stephen King's The Stand. Of the two, I prefer The Stand, not only because it's an essentially optimistic work versus McCarthy's pessimism. To be blunt, King is the better storyteller. McCarthy could write concentric rings of gleaming prose around King any day of the week - but King is the greater storyteller, the better psychologist, the more consistently authentic voice. King's characters live between the pages, often even after they're dead, while the denizens of The Road merely exist.
And if McCarthy demonstrates anything in The Road, merely existing is not nearly enough to live for.
I'm really rather sorry I did.
If you read sci-fi, fantasy, horror or any of the other “disrespected” literary genres, you’ve probably encountered the phenomena of the Big Name Serious Literary Author who is lauded for his or her novel of Big Bold Allegory and Metaphor, often featuring a “stunning” or “gripping” or “chilling” “vision” of humanity’s/America’s/civilization’s future.
For Canadians, I think the best-known example of this is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, her mid-80s novel about a future American theocracy where fertile women have become chattel, forced to bear the children of an increasingly infertile White Male Christian elite. 20 years later, Atwood’s Feminist call to arms seems rather more prophetic than it did in the late 80s when The Handmaid’s Tale started popping up on the syllabi of high school English classes across Canada but it’s still only a middling novel as these things go - technically proficient but soulless, more interested in agitprop than honest emotion, sopmewhat lacking imaginative scope - Margaret Atwood’s good but she ain’t Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin or even plain ol'William Gibson.
You will, however, find The Handmaid's Tale shelved under “Fiction and Literature” in the bookstore (or library) rather than the “Science Fiction” ghetto with Dick, Leguin, Gibson and so on. If we were all bigger people inside maybe where a certain author’s book is located in the bookstore wouldn’t matter but the fact is that books about werewolves and space aliens and dragons and the future (and especially books about all four) just don't get taken as seriously as your big, heavy, literary, memoirical tome about how your parents were awful and turned you gay (*cough*Anne-Marie*cough*lookingatyou*cough*). And really, that would be something I could live with if not for two things a) I happen to like writing about werewolf space alien dragonriders from the future and despise the self-absorption and navel-gazing and general depressive atmosphere of the contemporary Canadian literary novel (and no, my parents didn't turn me gay, they turned me celibate but that's a story for another day). B) Big, heavy, literary, memoirical tomes about how your parents were awful and turned you gay shelved in "Fiction and Literature" generally sell better than books of equal, if not superior, quality shelved in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, at least partly as a result of how these books are positioned and promoted in store.
So it always burns me when a "serious" author is lauded for taking on traditional genre tropes, such as future distopia or apoca-fic, as if no one has ever written about repressive future theocracies or post-apocalyptic futures before (John Wyndham even got in a two-for-one in The Chrysalids). Which is not to say that this author or that doesn't deserve whatever gold, glory and gaudite's they can get but I'm frustrated when I see rather routine treatments of familiar tropes praised as if these books said something new or particularly noteworthy.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I've decided, is such a novel.
(Halfway through writing this post, my employer sent me an e-mail asking me if I my family's emergency survival kit was prepared. This caused much laughter because, seriously, my plan for the apocalypse, should - God forbid - it come, is to die in the first wave, thanks much.)
The Road is technically stunning, the work of a master wordsmith at the height of his expressive powers. McCarthy's prose is spare, driven forward by an "and x and y" construction that recalls Hemingway, punctuated by the odd flash of linguistic dexterity that catches the reader and temporarily lifts the novel above the ponderous, unremitting despair and depravity of its subject matter. The Road is the Great American novel tipped on it's side and trod on until only the most basic, most robust tropes are left: the quintessential American literary pair of father and son and a journey - years after a nuclear apocalypse that is implied but never mentioned, a father and son walk along the road towards the coast.
The Road lacks, in what is likely a deliberate choice, the specificity that is a hallmark of most speculative fiction/sci-fi - we never know what caused the devastation or where, exactly, the road leads except towards the coast. Yet there's something magisterial in McCarthy's confident sweep of his hand across game board of American civilization, leaving nothing behind (presumably anyone asking how any calamity nuclear or otherwise that could reduce the whole of the American continent to ash and leave anyone alive five or six years on is missing the point of McCarthy's grand conceit). All this, McCarthy says, from the Internet to fresh water, is insubstantial, can be taken away, and with it all that makes men not merely civilized but human. And men specifically - make no mistake, McCarthy's apoco-topia is no place for a woman. It is, in fact, a world that no sane woman would choose to live on in: the missing third of his post-nuclear family is nothing more than a faded memory of someone not strong enough (or possibly foolish enough) to make the journey.
Perhaps there is a message in the relentless brutal depravity of McCarthy's phallo-centric tale: that when women cede their responsibility to safeguard their children, chaos is the end result. Perhaps that puts an overly misogynistic spin on the tale but, of the three significant mentions of women in The Road, it is implied that one chooses suicide over her child, one literally eats her own young, and the third, the only redemptive figure in the bunch, is wife and mother. The reader may draw her (or his) own conclusions.
Where McCarthy does indulge his appetite for the detail is in the privation facing father and son, the precariousness of their survival, where an overlooked field of windfalls and a forgotten water barrel mark the line between life and death, and the degenerate grotesquery of the other denizens of the road. The Road is peopled with cannibalistic tribes of irradiated bogeymen; rape gangs and piles of viscera from unlucky travellers field-dressed like venison mark the pages with a gooey and vomit-inducing frequency, incident piled upon incident until the reader is stunned into a nauseated submission. Too often The Road resembles American Psycho for the post-apocalyptic set and the novel suffers as a result: the world of The Road is so impossibly hostile that the "lucky" breaks that befall father and son feel increasingly inauthentic. McCarthy is too good a writer to stage a scene that ever feels wholly contrived or out of place but in a world where, as he implies, humans farm other humans for veal, how many times can one man stumble upon forgotten canned goods? How can a child who's only know strangers as dangerous still have a natural curiosity and generosity? McCarthy is a brilliant writer but a lousy psychologist.
The Road, for all it's technical brilliance, is in many ways an old man's petulant screed against a world he sees as increasingly devoid of intrinsic value: goodness, decency, morality, the most instinctive of taboos have all become so ephemeral in our world that they could be wiped out of existence like cable TV in a blackout and with as little effort. There's precious little in the way of hope or goodness in The Road and the book's marginally optimistic coda seems almost a betrayal of the story that has gone before, as if McCarthy was forced to tack on some semblance of happy ending to keep the punters happy.
Reading The Road was not a pleasant experience when it wasn't downright vomit inducing. The last time I read a book that nearly made me puke (not including some of the more grisly details of Holocaust) was Cujo, nearly 20 years ago, a rather queasy coincidence because The Road put me in mind of nothing so much as Stephen King's The Stand. Of the two, I prefer The Stand, not only because it's an essentially optimistic work versus McCarthy's pessimism. To be blunt, King is the better storyteller. McCarthy could write concentric rings of gleaming prose around King any day of the week - but King is the greater storyteller, the better psychologist, the more consistently authentic voice. King's characters live between the pages, often even after they're dead, while the denizens of The Road merely exist.
And if McCarthy demonstrates anything in The Road, merely existing is not nearly enough to live for.