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| Hearsay: |
Which do you think it is? You’re wrong. The answer is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl”. McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
The Road fits into my list of “should see/read” movies and books. I know it’s good, I know it’s probably good FOR me, I know I SHOULD read it, but I just don’t know that I can take the emotional equivalent of shaken baby syndrome. It’s like Schindler’s List: I still haven’t seen it. Why? I can’t seem find a day when I feel emotionally together enough to choose to get sucker punched in the heart. It’s even worse with fiction.
I was explaining to someone last week, when asked why work wasn’t coming quicker with my novel-in-progress, that at least with poetry I’m something of an insider and know the mechanics well. In some ways, I know too much. (Like with theatre, which I did for years before I started writing: I can’t see a show now and suspend my disbelief — I see the procenium, the running crew, the faint light of the stage manager’s lamp in the wings, the heads bobbing in the orchestra pit, but the magic is gone. I’ve lost the wonder. Same, to some extent, with poetry.) Mostly I’m unimpressed, but occasionally something comes along that knocks my socks and glasses off and suddenly I’m barefoot and blind, afloat in another world. The mystery is still there because I’ve forgotten the machine for a moment.
The problem is, fiction is still too often mysterious to me. When I read for pleasure, I have no internal novelist breaking scenes down into strategic tricks and techniques. I get so caught up, I can’t back away to see how the machine moves. So now that you know this, imagine me reading The Road. That’s a few dark days of cold sweats and panic attacks I just can’t afford to have.
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October 30th, 2007 at 8:47 am
George, have you heard of “blindness” by Jose Saramago. Its a horrific tale of a society driven to the edge of sanity (or over the edge) by a plague of blindness. Depressing, but so well written. I havent been able to see Schindler’s list, either. I don’t think i’ll ever be together enough for that.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:18 am
As a writer/editor (especially as an editor), “The Road” is unreadable for me. I remember some reviewers being boiled alive for daring to mention McCarthy’s pretentious and/or lazy I-dont-do-apostrophes trip, but they were right. After about a chapter of interesting prose punctuated by… nothing, I couldn’t take it any more.
I’ll buy the no-quotation-marks approach, within reason. That at least makes some sense, in the right hands. (Tom Spanbauer’s “In the City of Shy Hunters” springs to mind.) Leaving out apostrophes is just irritating, like misspelling every “the” as “thi.” Plus, unlike eschewing quotation marks, apostrophobia doesn’t translate, so there’s no pretending it means anything.
If they release a special “editor’s cut,” I’ll check it out. In fact, I’m tempted to edit the thing myself just so I can read it. Bring on the guerrilla editing gangs! We’ll slice you with em dashes and bind you with quotation marks! We’ll chop “The Da Vinci Code” into a pamphlet!
October 30th, 2007 at 9:28 am
“, but I just don’t know that I can take the emotional equivalent of shaken baby syndrome. It’s like Schindler’s List: I still haven’t seen it.”
Oh, fabulous comment. I am reeking with empathy.
But I worry if this squeamishness is a first sign of old fartdom?
My father, who used to be intellectually unshockable, sometimes mutters: “I just don’t need to know/read or see that…” as he reaches now exclusively for biographies.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Scary, isn’t it? I’m looking to stop this ageing train, but the porter tells me can’t get off ’til the last station.
October 30th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I listened to “The Road” as an unabridged audiobook. I recommend it. Having someone read it to you is soothing – the reader/narrator doesn’t dwell on the horrific images like one’s reading eye may. Sure, you can rewind and listen again but except for the last few pages I did not rewind.
And in listening to the book I had no idea McCarthy was not using apostrophes! I note that the book I’m reading now, Michael Winter’s “The Architects are Here” does this as well. And it is distracting.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Proust wrote that when we hear about a great book, we can only imagine great books we’ve already read. The reason why it’s great is always beyond us until we read it. I’m not saying “The Road” is great but it isn’t anything like the depression-fest you seem to think it is. Nor is Schindler’s Ark, the novel (as it was called when I read it). I hadn’t read McCarthy before and assumed it would be the usual neatly-disguised, redemption-ridden kitsch that frequently passes for literary fiction in the US nowadays. But it wasn’t. Cold sweats and panic attacks will never be so pleasurable.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I feel the same way about “The Road” and “Schindler’s List” and many many other things…which is slightly odd, because I actually studied the Holocaust for a good two years, but even then, besides the required course work and research for papers, or perhaps because of them, I didn’t feel prepared to sit through re-enactments. My little sister is reading “The Road” now, so I’ll see what she says about it.
Of course, with “The Road” I also run into the problem that I swore long ago that I would never buy a book with an “Oprah’s book club” mark on it.
I find these days I sooner reach for intellectual non-fiction books and shy aware from anything that’s going to be hard-hitting emotionally.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Ooh, George, the magic of theatre is gone? I am so sad when the magic of anything goes, but theatre… As for old fartdom, I find the idea that avoiding the hell we know to be out there means we are old farts an interesting idea, but I hope something else is true. I hope we’re looking for magic that hasn’t died. Even if we never find it. As for the apostrophe thing, I know I’m Michael’s sister and we have genetic compatibility, but really, I don’t even notice the poor little things are gone…
October 30th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
“I note that the book I’m reading now, Michael Winter’s “The Architects are Here” does this as well.”
The thing about The Architects Are Here is that there are basically only a few specific contractions where he uses that no-apostrophe device. I can’t for the life of my figure out why it’s that selective.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Maybe I’m hard-hearted, but The Road didn’t shock or depress me that much. Go on, give it a read – I really enjoyed it, even with the punctuational quirks.
October 31st, 2007 at 7:31 am
I always thought ‘Schindler’s List’ should have been subtitled ‘Steven Spielberg Shows He Can Kill a Child Too’.
With ‘Blindness’ I couldn’t get over the heel of a blind woman’s shoe inflicting damage akin to a gangster with an awl in his fist. Talk about the lamp in the wings.
McCarthy’s Blood Meridian though – It left me feeling like it was the best novel to ever come out of the US. I felt similarly about ‘The Crossing’. I’m afraid to read his more recent stuff, not because it’s too bleak but because Cities on the Plain made me feel like he was past his prime.