Cormac McCarthy- The Road

okay, if you don't like that sort of fiction, why read it in the first place?

A fair question, but then imagine asking, on ILM, "if you don't like that genre of music, why listen to it in the first place?" When you extrapolate like that, you can recognise the impulse (on Vahid's part?) to discern in the genre something he's previously missed? Of course, we can now say he's still missing it and he would say that's because it's not there!

Possible SPOILERS ahead.

Another thought on this novel: the critique or concept is so overused that I'm already wincing that I'm about to use it, but I was truly haunted by this book, and at regular intervals, too -- the nights where they couldn't even light a fire due to the lay of the terrain and the wind, the grey snowflakes, the one barking dog, a weird realisation that cows are probably extinct, the yellow toy truck, the distant percussive "event", the eventual heartbreaking coldness (in every sense) of the sea. And on many other occasions. Some of the detailed imagery is hard to shake. I think I might be obsessed, and not even in a good way.

Also, and this is horrible: love is more painful than death.

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/2539/12112rg4.jpg

It certainly confirmed my sometime-suspicion that giving people such capacity to hope is one of the nastiest tricks evolution has played on us. The SPOILERS SPOILERS behaviour of the wife is much more reasonable than that of the husband; it's hope that leads him on and on. The same sort of hope that leads to genocide victims digging their own graves before they get shot in the back of the head--hope that something, somehow, impossibly, will turn up and save them before it's all too late.

yeah

but -

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

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someone, somehow, did turn up! pretty CONVENIENT!!

I must admit I'm not usually averse to a bleak hopeless ending, but I actually liked the way The Road ends, pretty much due to my own imagination surrounding the little boy being left alone becoming pretty much unbearable. Perhaps I'm getting softer hearted as I get older. I wonder if those who were okay with this ending (a tiny glimmer of hope in the darkness, really, nothing more) are the same ones who were alright with the ending of Children Of Men (the movie, I haven't read the novel)? Both worked for me, but I can understand somebody not buying it too.

A fair question, but then imagine asking, on ILM, "if you don't like that genre of music, why listen to it in the first place?"

I started The Pesthouse last night. Maybe I should just read post-apocalyptic fiction for the rest of the summer.

Yeah, that's a better question, and fair enough.

Also, have you (has anyone) read Eastward, Ho! by Jim Crace? Yet another post-apocalyptic novel.

Do you mean The Pesthouse?

'The Pesthouse' is a disappointment, I feel, both in comparison to 'The Road', and as a Crace book. An interesting failure, but still disappointing. The world in which it was set never really seemed to come alive, despite some good ideas.

Do you mean The Pesthouse?

Oh yeah, that's what I meant.

this is my very favourite genre of art; i'm going to look to find a copy of this around for cheap.

Do you mean good post-apocalypse stuff? If so, let me know: if got a reading list that'll have you slitting your wrists and/or dreaming of the bomb every night.

Bum. I've got a reading list, I meant to say.

ooooh, post it, please.

Here we go. This is from a scan of the books not packed away in boxes, so apologies if some obvious ones are missing. Everything here has at least some pretensions to literary quality, so there's nothing of the ilk of 'The Horseclans' or other foolish swords-and-sandals-after-the-bomb series.

The really good ones are marked with an *, the really depressing with an #

*#Ian Macpherson: Wild Harbour – a married couple try to stay alive and unnoticed in Highland Scotland as the world falls to pieces through war

*Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker – life in post-holocaust UK, wonderfully written in its own invented pidgin English

*#John Christopher: Death of Grass / No Blade of Grass – global crop failure, society collapses

John Christopher: The World in Winter – sudden new ice age, society collapses

*John Christopher: A Wrinkle in the Skin – sudden global tectonic disaster, society annihilated overnight

Jack London: The Scarlet Plague – travels of a boy and his grandfather in plague-obliterated America

*Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Liebowitz – post-nuclear-war Catholic Church tries to save civilisation, among their holy relics a shopping list belonging to one St Liebowitz

#Neville Shute: On the Beach – military and civilian survivors of nuclear war wait in Australia for the inevitable deadly fallout that will kill everyone else

*Graham Greene: ‘A Discovery in the Woods’ (short story in ‘A Sense of Reality’) – explorations of a group of children born several generations after nuclear war

*John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids – sudden global blindness plus genetically engineered killer plants, society collapses

*John Wyndham: The Chrysalids – post-nuclear-war puritan village society in Canada, kids with special telepathic powers living in hiding

*George R Stewart: Earth Abides – life of a survivor of plague which kills almost everyone else

Mary Shelley: The Last Man – also the life of a survivor of plague which kills almost everyone else (see also the excellent poem of the same name by Thomas Hood at http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/hood.htm)

*#William Golding: Lord of the Flies – isolated society of children goes berserk after crashing on isolated island fleeing nuclear war

Jean Hegland: Into the Forest – non-specific societal collapse, two sisters living alone in a house in the forest try to survive

#Aldous Huxley: Ape and Essence – New Zealand documentary crew investigates the nuclear war that ended most of civilisation

*#Cormac McCarthy: The Road – father and son try to survive in aftermath of total nuclear war

*#Wilson Tucker: The Long, Loud Silence – a man living in biowarfare-ruined America tries to get to the “normal”, uncontaminated part of the country

*#Robert O’Brien: Z for Zachariah – excellent YA novel about young girl living alone in isolated valley after a nuclear war, until a stranger arrives…

*#Robert Swindells: Brother in the Land – another fine YA novel, this one from the point of view of a boy who survives the war and tries to survive the aftermath
HRF Keating: A Long Walk to Wimbledon – a man travels through ruined London to find his ex-wife

Richard Jefferies: After London – pastoral-ish novel of life in post-collapse UK (available at www.gutenberg.org/etext/13944)

Luke Rhinehart: Long Voyage Back – people who survived a nuclear war by being in an offshore boat desperately search for safe place to land

*JG Ballard: The Drowned World – early disastrous global warming novel – a few survivors surrender to their reptile brains in tropical, submerged London

JG Ballard: The Drought – massive fresh water shortage, society collapses

Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor – general societal collapse, annoyingly pretentious

#Mordecai Roshwald: Level 7 – increasingly insane existence of the only survivors of a nuclear war, the people living in bunkers in charge of the remaining weapons

*Nadine Gordimer: July’s People – (written pre the collapse of Apartheid) general collapse of South African “society”, white family sheltered by their ex-housekeeper’s black family in the bush

*Stephen Vincent Benet: ‘By the Waters of Babylon’ (short story) – the son of a priest explores the Great Dead Place (ie New York)

Pat Frank: Alas, Babylon – Floridians try to survive nuclear war, story undermined by not taking the effects of fallout, etc, seriously enough

*#Maggie Gee: The Burning Book – seemingly “normal” literary novel interrupted partway through by nuclear war

RC Sherriff: The Hopkins Manuscript – a man’s life story before, during and after the total collapse of society because of the Moon dropping out of orbit (good, but scientifically daft)

Carolyn See: Golden Days – seeming satire of Californian New Age/inspiration industry types interrupted partway through by nuclear war

Dick Morland : Albion! Albion! – so-so adventure story set in post-collapse London, by a pseudonym of Reginald Hill (Dalziel & Pascoe)

Jim Crace: The Pesthouse – disappointing story of two people living in post-collapse America

Not yet read…
Tatyana Tolstaya: Life in post-holocaust Russia, a new translation from NYRB Classics

Oh, and the Mary Shelley's downloadable from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18247
and there's also a good Victorian-era short story by Grant Allen about London being wiped out by volcanoes (The Thames Valley Catastrophe) at http://www.heliograph.com/ff/library/thames/thames.htm

What about something like Robert Merle's Malevil? I read it a long time back but i seem to remember that it was a good read.

Yes, I've heard of Malevil, and it sounds like my cup of grim tea, but I've never been able to get my hands on an English-language copy.

I should also add...

Harold Rein: 'Few Were Left' - 1950s novel about a man about to commit suicide by throwing himself on the NY subway tracks when nuclear war starts, destroying the city and trapping him undereground as defacto leader of a group of similar survivors.

I kind of breezed through the last 25-30 pages of The Pesthouse. My god was that unconvincing and uninteresting.

because "the road" is supposedly a MAJOR CULTURAL EVENT, not a country song.

music, comic books, video games, hollywood films, etc - i can pick any of these things up and go "enh, it was good for what it was". this paris hilton album, it's a shallow and one-sided view of life without much in the way of nuance. it's good-timeyness, the relentless empowered girl on the prowl vibe, yeah, it's a little oppressive, but maybe i'll just only put it on when the sun is out and the top on my car is down, or maybe just when i'm getting dressed up to go out on friday night. it's good - for what it is.

but you know, i just can't do that with books! books are capital-i IMPORTANT in my world, maybe because i worked in a bookstores + libraries for eight years straight and now i work in education, i just can't, won't look at literature that way. i want ... three dimensions or something in stuff i read. "70% gray" is a pretty good way of describing this novel (the other 30% is what, pitch black??) and i just feel like that's too flat for me, it just bounces off of me.

i like dystopian science fiction a lot! "super flat times" is probably my favorite book of the last 10 years, and i surprised myself by actually liking and getting into "rant" (i HATE HATE HATE palahniuk, or so i thought), because they bring the funny and the eerie and the sexy and the mundane at the same time they bring the soul-crushing horror of it all ...

but this one, i dunno, it's like a MAJOR CULTURAL EVENT / SERIOUS NOVEL just because he takes mad max and lays cartoonishly thick manly-men-only existentialism/nihilism over the top? no thanks.

^^ btw i realize this is probably extremely old-fashioned / naive of me anyway.

i mean, why NOT think of books on the same level as country CDs or TV shows? it's not like being made of paper gives it some special sort of power ...

i actually came here to start a thread maybe about "rant" but now i am regretting that i admitted to liking a palahniuk novel ...

i sorta think video games and movies and CDs are presented by their various manufacturers and distributors as EVENTS far more than most books ever are, any more!

that's absolutely true, but i live in an intellectual ghetto

IOW "major event" in my world = NYT and new yorker say so

also i guess we can add ILX to that list!

I never viewed it as a major cultural event, IMPORTANT novel, etc., but I rarely view anything like that. I don't see where there's anything to be gained in responding to hype that a) may not be a legit gripe and b) isn't a function of the work anyway (unless the novel sets out to be important, and nothing about The Road tells me that it was).

Besides, it's an OPRAH selection. That is not exactly the mark of intellectual/artistic snobbery,

waht

well then off the top of my head i can name about twenty better postapocalyptic genre pieces

Define "better".

I mean, that's a really arrogant statement, and even after you've named these twenty superior pieces, any one of us might disagree.

arrogant? you said it was "the most perfect fable of the 20th century". any one of us might disagree.

OK, i "might" be able to name 20 postapocalyptic novels which "might" be better.

Then name them. Wtf have you been waiting for, an advocate? It might even be interesting. (As long as you define "better", obv.)

Back on track, McCarthy was a lot more cheery/positive on Oprah than I ever thought/imagined he'd be.

Then name them. Wtf have you been waiting for, an advocate? It might even be interesting. (As long as you define "better", obv.)

Not that Moonship should expect any kind of response, if the reaction to my own list is any indication. Ah well.

i really appreciate your list, james. thanks! i was just going over it yesterday. this definitely sounds like something i would love:

"#Ian Macpherson: Wild Harbour – a married couple try to stay alive and unnoticed in Highland Scotland as the world falls to pieces through war"

It's a good one - Canongate (the Scottish publisher) have it in print, if that helps track it down.

i thought this was breathtaking. could hardly finish the last few pages through tears.

i bought this. because the bookshops are all attempting to flog it at half price.

i also got three jim thompsons for a fiver and 'maximum city' for half price. and bob dylan's autobio and what happened to the purchases thread anyway

cute: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0730,idea,77350,9.html

i finally read the road, while on vacation. a cheery little beach read. i liked it, despite or because of the relentless repetitiveness of it (find food, travel, almost starve, get in some kind of confrontation, repeat), which includes the language (i'd like to see a word count on use of "gray," "ash", "black" and "cold"). i liked how he stripped down his verbiage but still managed to work in his wacky vocabulary ("crozzled"!).

but so basically, it's just a story about a parent coming to terms with the fear/knowledge that he will die and leave his child behind. alice munro could tell that story in 25 pages and it would probably be better even though it would all take place in the backyard or on a trip to the grocery store or whatever. this being cormac, though, it has to be freighted with the doom of the world. but he has a lot of fun with the landscapes, and the father-son dialogue is pretty good. sweet, even. it's easily the sweetest mccarthy book i've read, which would have been betrayed if the ending had been more bleak.

i loved this book and i think the stripped down,minimalistic story-telling fable is the best form for mccarthy to write in.
compared to "blindness" by saramago (which is kinda overrated, imo), it is much better.BUT, mccarthy,as always, is better in moving the plot forward,making a great,page turning adventure story (david lynch should direct the movie adaptation in "the straight story" style!), and far less good in digging deep into the depths of the characters,and the moral questions the novel arises.
one can say it fits mccarthy's style and perspective, and it might be true, at least in this form of writing, like "the old man and the sea" did for hemmingway.
but i think, in the "going forward" vs. "digging deep" fight, the first one wins,and when that happens in a book,the same happens with the reader: you go forward with it,but it doesnt reach deep into your soul and mind,like the best books in the world do.

still,i enjoyed it very much.it's a sort of a bible style tale,only with a modern american approach.and much more accesible because of that.

you can say the boy and the child can be read as one character:
in every person theres a struggle between hope,wheich is less realistic, but keeps us alive (the boy) and the realism, which leads to despair sometimes (the fatehr)
SPOILER:
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when the father dies, cause he realise they are at the end of the road, and the hope for a better future is more than questionable, the boy takes his place, and,yeah, like in hollywood, hope wins after all.
but the boy,of course, learned a lot from his father, and now he is a "complete man": he has hope, but he also holds the gun,and he is much less affraid.so the combination between hope and realism is now perfect.

(and as mccarthy said to oprah,love is important)

if the boy or the father would travell alone in the road on their own,cause hope cannt exist alone,nor pure realism,so they feed one another with their believs.

an irish guy came up to me and told me i should read this the other day.

'it's so dark.' he said. 'you can feel the cold.'

i read it in one sitting - absorbing doesnt really do it justice.

I came to the conclusion that the catastrophe was most likely natural, probably a supervolcano. I don't see much evidence that it was nuclear. There's no radiation sickness, little suggestion that there was ever any form of government (just the road itself really) let alone one that brought on this calamity, and the damage isn't localised. There's also just too much ash and darkness. The screaming corpses in the tarmac are harrowing, but made me think more of Pompei than Hiroshima.

I've seen it described (in the UK) as the first great climate change novel. I'm sure it's not about that.