This version of Dick's classic science fiction novel is a kind of illustrated novelization, not a graphic novel version. They don't even list who is dThis version of Dick's classic science fiction novel is a kind of illustrated novelization, not a graphic novel version. They don't even list who is doing the adaptation, but instead list two editors. The art, which just, as I said, illustrates the story, is done by Tony Parker. It is a deluxe hard cover edition with a collection of endnotes and letters to Dick, including one I read closely by Ed Brubaker, but they are writing about Dick's novel, not this novelization, of course.
I am at this reading slow (re-)reading with my spring 2018 cli-fi class the original novel, slow-viewing the 1982 film adaptation of Blade Runner by Ridley Scott as we go, and my mid-book, mid-film impression is that while the film is very good, it robs Deckard of most of the humanity and struggle Dick insists on in his book. (I will also see the new 2049 film at some point, too).
Like the film, this novelization is both slick and dark, but the film is a work of art that creates its own filmic images and action to respond to and enact Dick's narrative. The book has too many words to be an effective poetic rendition of the book or contemporary statement on the relevance of Dick's future to our present. And this is just the first of two volumes. Oh, yeah, I'll read the second half, sure. . ....more
Dylan actually wrote this song about the fear of war (the "rain" of bullets and bombs) and nuclear holocaust, during the 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis. He said he wrote it fast, in absolute terror. But the song works for any global crisis, as we surely are in right now, where global "leaders" callously continue to ignore catastrophe.
The photographs are often powerful, sometimes disturbing, often beautiful. My only quibble here is that he tends to take the lyrics too literally; for example, if the line is about a boy next to a dead pony, that's the picture. The essays are powerful, a scream to pay attention and act. About ANYTHING: School murders, poisoning the waters, and so on....more
The Drowned World is one of four novels J. G. Ballard wrote about the same time about the environment. Published in 1962, it seems prophetic, in that The Drowned World is one of four novels J. G. Ballard wrote about the same time about the environment. Published in 1962, it seems prophetic, in that it proposes that global warming would melt the polar ice caps, and the resulting raised sea level would drown cities. One interesting thing about the book is that the cause as Ballard has it in this book is that solar storms—known to affect Earth weather—become so severe that they scorch the planet. This theory roughly aligns with the current 1% (or right-wing, pro-biz) view that climate change (if it exists at all!) is not man-made, it’s just a part of What Happens. Ballard tries out the man-made theory in his next book, Drought (1964).
The Drowned World introduces us to Dr. Robert Kearns, as the world heats up. It’s 180 degrees at the equator, and in London, it approaches 130 degrees at each mid-day. The roughly five million remaining people in the world are mostly heading north, to the remaining Arctic and Antarctic circles, where the average temperature is 85 degrees. A group of military men connected to Kearns are heading north. Kerans, who has a kind of vague relationship with Beatrice, lives in the Ritz, tenth floor, though the rising water is at the seventh floor. They—and a fellow scientist, Dr Bodkin--decide to stay, though this is suicide, on some level.
They have some supplies, but the heat is getting unbearable, back to Triassic Age levels. Flora and fauna are burgeoning; animals such as iguanas and alligators are getting huge. The theory is that the combination of heat and more water would create a kind of hothouse effect, not hospitable for humans. Many of these folks also seem to be dreaming similar dreams, of swamps and lagoons from ages past, connecting as Ballard has it to the Collective Unconscious, a sort of weird psycho-biological ideology.
“That wasn’t a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons.”
Kerans sees the clock turning back through Deep Time to something primitive, but also something spiritually purer than contemporary society. Here’s another taste of this kind of thinking from Kerans:
“The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.”
After the others leave, a group of pirates, scavengers, “savages,” show up, led by a guy named Strangman. Until then, I think all of the people are white, but many of these wild drunken looters are black; seems possibly racist to me, in a kind of Heart of Darkness kinda way. Until then, Kerans, Beatrice and Bodkin have romanticized staying in dying London, until Strangman and his Wild Boys come in. No more sixties romantic vision of the future return to Hothouse Eden:
“. . . we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs.”
This is suddenly Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues turning into the dark, sinister world of Lord of the Flies, or the Heart of Darkness, where Kerans is lost, wandering, a "second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun.”
I like the world building in this more than the story or mystical ideas. I liked the references to painting throughout, especially Ballard’s focus on the work of surrealists from Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux and others. Unreason reigns. As the madness of Strangman ruins Kerans’s happy vision of psycho-biological devolution, we can see that some of the darkest dimensions of surrealism are an influence on Ballard. This becomes a pretty scary short dystopian book I am glad I finally read with my Cli-Fi (for Climate Change Fiction, you wannabe hipsters!) students. I liked it early on, thought it was too weird for awhile, then liked it as it got darker, actually. 3.5, rounded up. ...more
So what happens to old ships when they die? And what will happen to the thousands of ships as the oil runs out and we return to sailing clippers, as tSo what happens to old ships when they die? And what will happen to the thousands of ships as the oil runs out and we return to sailing clippers, as the cities drown and the poor scramble for their small share of the diminishing resources? Ship Breaker is a YA dystopian novel about a time in the not too distant future when the coasts are significantly diminished, when the oil is gone, when category 6 hurricanes—city killers—have finally destroyed key coastal cities like New Orleans. The rich—the swanks--go inland; you don’t have to worry too much about them, they will take care of themselves. But what do the poor do?
Ship Breaker features a number of economically disadvantaged—let’s call them the underclass—young people, almost all of them people of color, who break beached and abandoned ships down, strip them of whatever is marketable for a small profit, making a huge profit for whom they sell the scrap. It is a brutal life, violent, with people scrambling close to starvation.
Our hero is (maybe) 15 year-old Nailer, whose abusive Dad is a drug addict; they live in a hut on the beach. He is protected somewhat by Pima and her Mom, Sadna. He belongs to a scavenge crew, just barely surviving, but tenacious, and resourceful. One day a city killer wipes out everything on the beach, as it sometimes does, and Pima and Nailer travel down the beach to find a broken clipper with one swank survivor, Nita, and unbelievable riches on the boat. They get there first, but soon they are not alone. Nita could be traded back to her swank family, she could be harvested for her organs; what is she worth to these folks she refers to as “savages?” A lot, potentially.
Nailer has a chance to kill Nita, but doesn’t. Why not? Something to do with ethics in the face of disaster, and the nature of family. What will we cling to, what matters to us as we fearfully face each other? This is a good book, a winner of the Printz Book Award, a nominee for the National Book Award for YA, though I was a little surprised by that. It is not really special in some respects; it’s typically YA coming-of-age, but it does tackle aspects of issues few YA novels—or any literary fiction—address, issues of climate change, and the disproportionate impact this already has on the poorest people on the planet.
“Spending money on the poor is like throwing money in a fire. They’ll consume it and never thank you.”
This is a good, not great book, that I might rate 3/3.5 for the overall writing, but because it addresses global issues, and climate change, I bump it to 4 stars. It speaks of ethics and belief systems that support ethical actions. But it is better at world-building by far than story. That world will stay in my head for a while. It’s the first volume of a trilogy, setting up the second volume, Drowned Cities.
From “Mr. Day’s Dismissal”: A Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, April 22, 1953.
In 1952 Republicans won the White Making America Great Again
From “Mr. Day’s Dismissal”: A Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post, April 22, 1953.
In 1952 Republicans won the White House and immediately began dismantling environmental protections in favor of big business concerns. Day was fired as Secretary of the Interior and replaced by a political appointee with no experience in environmental work. I know this is shocking to read, because no current administration would do something this stupid with the natural world currently in even greater peril, but see excerpts from what Rachel Carson wrote then. It feels like a sibling to Orwell’s 1984:
. . . the way is being cleared for a raid upon our natural resources that is without parallel within the present century.
The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.
By long tradition, the agencies responsible for these resources have been directed by men of professional stature and experience, who have understood, respected, and been guided by the findings of their scientists. . . .
These actions within the Interior Department fall into place beside the proposed giveaway of our offshore oil reserves and the threatened invasion of national parks, forests and other public lands. For many years public-spirited citizens throughout the country have been working for the conservation of the natural resources, realizing their vital importance to the Nation. Apparently their hard-won progress is to be wiped out, as a politically minded Administration returns us to the dark ages of unrestrained exploitation and destruction.
It is one of the ironies of our times that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within. ...more
“You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”—Joni Mitchell
The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. They and area lakes and river“You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”—Joni Mitchell
The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. They and area lakes and rivers have been repeatedly poisoned for the last couple hundred years, as if water supplies were somehow permanently resilient and endless. They are neither. When I swam in Lake Michigan in the seventies, for a couple summers I had to wade through a sludge of alewives spread across the shoreline. On the other hand, during that time you could never imagine a time in which you could swim in the Chicago-area lakeshore, where I now live, but today many do.
I am a huge fan of Rachel Carson. Dan Egan’s award-winning book stands in the same proud tradition of calling attention both to the greed and stupidity of neglecting one of our most precious resources and also the heroism of scientists (can I use that word, 45?!) who have had the ingenuity to time and time again rescue it from that greed and stupidity.
Our ambition in opening up the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Chicago ship canal has in the past had disastrous consequences, Egan shows us. What are the problems we now face? Invasive species such as Asian carp, sea lamprey, and zebra mussels have decimated native species and are not just a sport-fishing problem, but actually endanger the entire United States. Algae poisoning caused by over-fertilization and run-off poisoned the water in Toledo in 2004 to the point where no one could drink it. This problem intensifies now, and is not yet solved.
We all know about Flint, still drinking water from plastic bottles. Perhaps you know about the water crisis in Cape Town, which runs out of water in less than 90 days. Our heads in the sand will not save it; neither will diverting water to all the other places that no longer have adequate water. The news today is that the snow levels in the US are at a 30 year low. In the already drought-devastated states west of the Rockies, this has serious implications for the immediate and not just the distant future. Climate change is real and heating up the lake, causing unprecedented evaporation.
Trump’s plan to gut the Clean Water Act, which is keeping the Great Lakes (and other lakes and rivers), alive, though corporate greed and its attendant rapacious poisoning practices continue and will inevitably increase, thanks to shorts-sighted and ignorant businessmen.
Vote for not only the restoration of the Clean Water Act, but an increase in protections, always. The thing I like about Egan’s book is that while making sure you know the threat of devastation is real, he also shows that we can still do much to save the lakes. Especially if you live near these lakes you should read this or at least some of this book. Necessary!!
“If you drink water and breath air, climate change is your business"--Klein
“If we are innately greedy, there’s no hope. What if a corrupt ‘human natur“If you drink water and breath air, climate change is your business"--Klein
“If we are innately greedy, there’s no hope. What if a corrupt ‘human nature’ is not the problem, though. What if the problem is a story, one we have been telling us for 400 years, a story about capitalism and progress?”--Klein
That story, begun centuries ago: “The Earth is a machine, and we are its masters.” Mother Earth is a Mother Lode for Man to Progress With rather than Live With, in Balance.
“Growth is the closest thing we have to a global deity”--Klein
I read this book and saw the documentary by the same name, which you can view for free online. Klein visits the Alberta Tar Sands, the largest industrial project on Earth, a project to extract oil from “flyover” land that is also very much sacred land, the province for centuries of indigenous tribes populating what we now know as Canada. She talks with a range of folks, those bent on extracting the oil and those who feel defiled by the rapacious activity. She investigates native collective action, resistance, and this is moving and inspirational (though at the same time almost, for me, hopeless, as there are so few and they are so poor and so typically powerless—I mean in an conventional institutional sense; they are amazingly powerful spiritually—standing up to the billionaires).
We travel to Montana to talk with people about the pipelines, we travel to South America; everywhere we see rapacious practices, short-term thinking, and local resistance. We travel to talk with the anti-mining solidarity committee of Greece. We go to growth-choked China--now committed to solar, it looks like--and to depressing India, still committed to aggressive coal expansion.
Core problem, and a long known one: An economic system that insists on “progress” and rapacious land use and disregard for ecosystem. A capitalist model of growth that is impossible to sustain. Exploitation, not management, of resources. Growth without Limits, at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable people.
And there’s some local resistance, in pockets, sometimes whole countries. We see everywhere locals crying, shouting, resisting, locals committed to wise land use and management. Renewables, working in harmony with nature, and ecosystem. Spirit of the Sun.
The best thing about this book is that we talk to actual people that move us to act, indigenous activists. Klein is a big picture writer, but when she actually makes people come alive, she is at her most effective. Most people reading this review know all of this stuff by now, I suspect, but if you want a not-completely-hopeless book on the subject of capitalism and the environment, this is a good one.
For instance, Germany is a rapid energy transition, now getting 30% energy from renewables. 400,000 jobs have been created from renewable energy in that country in the past 5 years ago. The German government also enacts policies that are destructive, but—and this is the point--local people fought for alternative energy and against nuclear energy and coal. They run the energy grid themselves, through community-base cooperatives. A German woman says: “We realized; this is the moment.”
“Put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on. The only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road, and simultaneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. If that happens, well, it changes everything.”--Klein...more
This is a silent story—no words—about a bird and two boys in the style of Japanese Kamishiabi, or "paper tRereading with my spring 2018 cli fi class.
This is a silent story—no words—about a bird and two boys in the style of Japanese Kamishiabi, or "paper theater,” which has a long tradition in Japan. In this story, two mean boys hurt a bird, who flies away, and then the boys apparently get turned into animals themselves. The point would seem to be that these boys need to think of themselves as animals who must live in harmony with nature, who need to understand other animals and birds as fellow travelers on the planet. There’s an openness in the telling so you can decide what is happening, though. Left pages are blank, in fact.
Good for comics fans and for readers to read together. I maybe like the learning about Kamashiabi as much as the actual execution of this story, which is sort of an adaptation of the process, because the actual street performance of paper theater is even more fluid. But this is cool.
Ted Kooser was U. S. poet laureate 2004-2006. I've been reading his poetry, and saw this, which is not poetry, Rereading for Spring 2018 cli fi class.
Ted Kooser was U. S. poet laureate 2004-2006. I've been reading his poetry, and saw this, which is not poetry, but which I absolutely loved, a picture book with gorgeous art by one of my favorite illustrators, Jon Klaasen. I am also reading Eaarth, by Bill McKibben, which has has helped confirm my view that within a century or two the planet will be here and we humans will very very likely be gone. So this book as it goes on feeds into my fear/realization in a way, but then it undermines or complicates those fears in another also powerful, maybe more spiritual way. Let me explain:
A guy clears trees to build a house on a prairie. He wants a perfect lawn and clips every evidence of a tree that makes it to the surface. The way millions have approached vegetation in the last couple centuries, to privilege grass over trees and prairie! It's man's "dominion" over nature, promoting a certain aesthetic (classically, neatly cut grass vs wild, romantic, unrestrained prairie).
The guy loves his lawn, but his two kids love the neighboring woods (trees, right), where all the rich diverse ecosystem exists for play and discovery. As with the Rainforest, this forest and prairie needs to do what it needs to do, grow!
The children grow up and move away and Dad continues his battle against seeds becoming sprouting trees, chopping off every evidence of a seedling every chance he gets, to the very end, when one day he too moves to the city and no one buys the house, so naturally, nature begins to takes over, and the scene begins to look like the story supports McKibben's point about nature quietly asserting itself after we have destroyed it.
But then something surreal happens that would be more of interest to imaginative kids (and me) than coherent story lovers: The trees indeed do take over the house, but instead of destroying it, as you will expect, the trees lift that house up in the air (hence the title!! You forgot the title??! Well, I did forget it, when reading it, actually. . . ) and what is evoked finally is not so much a sad allegory about loss (though there is a bit of sadness in there, of course) so much as a celebration of life lived, of mystery, of nature as a force of beauty, not as peripheral to humankind, but central to living with it in harmony. The house and its life there is preserved, in a way, and not just destroyed. McKibben would probably like that positive rendition of our part in the environment, too.
Note to teacher self: We also read in this class J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, which depicts an over-heated planet diminishing the human population and returning to Triassic period oversized flora and fauna, retaking the Earth, which again, is discussed as a possibly just fine--if not so good for humans--thing biologically for the planet, part of a process.
Klaasen's art is spare and lovely and fits the rural plains and contemplation. Such a great picture book!...more
Philip K. Dick has a rep for crazy. The word is as many as 14 of his books were accomplished with the use “The electric things have their lives, too.”
Philip K. Dick has a rep for crazy. The word is as many as 14 of his books were accomplished with the use of psychedelics, consistent with the Harvard LSD experiments in which Aldous Huxley was engaged and reported about in The Doors of Perception. Androids is darkly imaginative, a strange and sometimes disrorienting dystopian novel, but it does not seem particularly acid-soaked (as others seem to be).
Rick Deckard is an android bounty hunter for the government, and not initially much reflective about that: Androids, made to be slaves for those who have left Earth for Mars because of the nuclear holocaust, are being made smarter and some of them have revolted, killing some humans, and have returned to Earth. Deckard, as a member of the San Francisco Police Department “retires” some of them for a bonus. How does he find out they are androids? He tests them for empathy with some elaborate equipment.
With this bonus he saves money to buy an actual, organic animal, though they are expensive, since most humans and animals are now dead. In lieu of an actual electric one, Deckard and his wife Iran own an electric sheep.
The real focus of Androids is empathy. At first, it seems clear-cut, but not too much consideration will take you to the fact that many humans seem to lack empathy; and with the development of androids, it seems many of them have it, or something like it.
Or love, which becomes a related focus of the book. Can humans fall in love with androids? Deckard and Iran are struggling in their relationship; Deckard seems to have trouble killing attractive and talented female androids, and one in particular. Ethical and epistemological issues abound.
So, a dystopian romance? The ending is strange, and strangely powerful, and worth my thinking through, again, but I liked rereading it (this time with a class), and seeing Blade Runner with them. I think for sci fi fans this is a must read.
Interesting dimensions of the book:
*Mood organs for adjusting psychological states
*Mercerism as a world religion; you can “fuse” with Mercer
*Kipple (accumulating “stuff” of consumerism, filling homes
Norwegian Henrik Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People, first produced in 1882, is what we might now call a “whistleblower” tale. Dr. Stockman, brother of tNorwegian Henrik Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People, first produced in 1882, is what we might now call a “whistleblower” tale. Dr. Stockman, brother of the town’s “Burgomaster,” Peter, investigates the source of the resort town’s fortunes, The Baths, and discovers it is being polluted, and for the health of locals and visitors, recommends that it be shut down. Dr. Stockman becomes “the enemy of the people” in this play because he stands against the town’s position that The Baths must continue regardless of its threat to public health; they need the money too much.
I know what you're thinking: It can't happen here! (or, same ol', same ol'.)
Peter, the Burgomaster: It is you, in your blind obstinancy, want to cut off the town’s chief source of prosperity! Dr. Stockmann [his brother]: That source is poisoned, man! Are you mad? We live by trafficking in filth and corruption!
Maybe you have heard of the 2017 film The Post? Chelsea Manning? Edward Snowden? The raiding of the Arctic for oil? Flint? 45 and his Billionaire Boys Club making it illegal to use terms such as “climate change” or “global warming” because these words are tools of the anti-business socialists trying to keep America From being Great again, and the liberal media grinding out fake news? Well, then this (prophetic) play may be just the play for you.
Is it too dark a vision to swallow? You decide, but Ibsen sees what "progress" is made through greed: “All our sources of spiritual life are poisoned, and our whole society lies upon a pestilential basis of falsehood.”—Dr. Stockmann
However you see it, in this play, the Burgomaster knows how to save The Baths and how to preserve (well, for the present, anyway) the economic health of the town: By firing the doctor and taking control of the media and the language used to talk about water.
I am also in the middle of a terrific book of journalism, Dan Egan’s award-winning The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which in part documents the pitting, on the one hand, the mindless greed and ignorance that continues to put at risk the source of the remaining 20% of the planet’s surface freshwater against, on the other hand, the ingenuity and resourcefulness of scientists (wait; is it legal for me to use that word now?) to save it. These two books seem to speak to each other, sadly.
Trump, as you know, decided to roll back the Clean Water Act, which to my mind is essential to the survival of the Great Lakes, and necessary to the survival of the planet:
Some modernist frameworks assume that Mankind only gets better each year, knows better, and progresses ever onward to some Higher State. If this is true, how did old Ibsen in 1882 know what we would still be facing today? Chilling, prescient, elegant, The Enemy of the People has been produced as a (dark) comedy, but I think, as with Bertolt Brecht’s dark comedy, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about the rise of facism in Chicago, I expect the Goodman Theater production of An Enemy of the People can no longer be produced as a comedy.
“What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. OkayRIP, Cormac McCarthy, 6/12/23
“What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay”--McCarthy
4/25/21 Had easily our most intense family viewing of a film ever in watching the film adaptation of this book and because I am a teacher I pulled it off the shelf and share passages from the book with those interested, and I left it out to see if anyone would read it--nope, too soon after the viewing, they thought--and so I went through it again fairly quickly, as it bears rereading, especially since it is McCarthy's masterpiece, or one of them, and one of my favorite books ever, as devastating as it is.
4/6/18 Re-reading this for my spring 2o18 Climate Change class, and even knowing how it ends, I am wrecked, just demolished by this book, so horrific and so beautiful and moving. Sobbing as I do at the most intimate of losses, but feeling the intensity of any great passionate beauty, too. The beauty of a great book that helps you see what matters. A portrait of terrible desolation and human evil, but at the core of it are these great human possibilities. The love of a father and his son.
9/1/14 Original review, edited a bit in the light of my most recent reading.
An amazing book. So powerful, understated, majestic, moving. Just blew me away. Some one said this was a "dictionary" book, meaning that they had to look up words a lot, and yes, it is a book that loves language, some of it ancient and forgotten, maybe befitting the subject of loss, but McCarthy is always this blend of Faulknerian epic-loss-language and Hemingway's power-through-simplicity-language. Some of the cadences are Biblical, as in King James elevated language, as in The Grapes of Wrath and Cry, The Beloved Country. A book of sweeping tragedy, obviously. And the simple, devastating power we also see in Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea. Books of allegorical significance and moral power.
In a way, this tale, set years after nuclear holocaust and environmental devastation, is a kind of guide for the apocalypse--any apocalypse, the Big One, your own or a loved one's death, the end of anything--with principle, with character, dignity and love; in this case, it is a father and son facing oblivion, moving forward, Pilgrim's Progress, "carrying the fire" against all odds, never giving up, and it is heartbreaking and anguishing. You wonder, like them, whether you could or can go on. This simple, bleak tale has a kind of echo in it of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," where Thomas urges his own father to fight death and not just acquiesce to it, or give into it.
The man in this story teaches his son to fight to stay alive and be one of the "good guys" (or, ethical) with any means available at their disposal. In this simple, bleak dystopian story, we are very possibly at the end of time, in an ash, Beckettian landscape, waiting for Godot, people reduced to their most animal selves. And yet, there are relationships that remain, with simple pleasures, enjoyed by fathers and sons. They read a book. They find a can of Coke, they eat a can of peaches, they tell each stories, they draw pictures, they play a primitive flute they have made, the arts comforting and sustaining them when they need it.
Recently, we had the suicide of Robin Williams, someone we had come to believe we knew well through movies where he played characters urging us to laugh and seize the day, every day. But he was playing characters in movies, and we began, as we do, I suspect, to make the mistake of believing that the convincingly hopeful characters he played were internalized in his own soul. And maybe they were, for a time. Camus said, post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust, that suicide was the only important philosophical question that remained, and McCarthy, aging as we all are, helps us contemplate this question, too, as we face or imagine facing illness, or death, that nuclear winter.
Throughout the book the man speaks to or reflects on his wife, years gone, who made another choice than he has, and given what they faced, she faced, a reasonable one, and one the man teaches his son to passionately resist, though in his quietest moments, he longs for it himself. When they encounter an old man, a kind of dark seer, on the road, they speak of luck and what it can mean in such a time, and neither are sure what it even means anymore: Is it luckier to live or die in the face of the very end? The man has no hope, though:
“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”
The old man says to the man, “There is no God and we are his prophets.”
But the boy believes in and is shaped by his belief in God. He and his father are committed to being the good guys who draw the line at barbarity, even when it makes some sense to succumb to it.
Recently, in the Chicago area, I wept to read of another suicide, one of an 82 year old man whose wife was in hospice and living with his two aging children, developmentally disabled; the man first murdered the family everyone knew he had deeply loved, then killed himself. (I know, sorry, this is bleak). But no one in their neighborhood or family questioned his love for his family or even his choice. Who can blame this man, facing an inevitably harder end, his friends seemed to say. Not me, the father of two sons, one with severe autism and the other also now diagnosed autistic. I'm 61. What will happen to them when I am gone? Sam, 18, autistic, living during the week in a group home, comes here to my house every other weekend, and so many of the minimum wage folks he works with are caring and loving, but 3-4 years ago we took a young man to trial for pushing him down a flight of stairs, where he was knocked out and his arm badly broken. He can't speak to defend himself. What future does he have, and what future especially without a loving parent to help defend and speak for him? What does his "road" hold for him? Sometimes, in my worst moments, and thankfully they are few, I think we are Liam Neeson, in The Grey, facing the wolves of destruction in the Arctic (as Neeson himself did in a sense when he lost his wife to a skiing accident, facing his own emotional holocaust and nuclear winter), knife in hand, to the end. But I can't give up, I have to and heartily agree be his father, of course, even the older father that I am.
I have heard this is McCarthy's most personal novel, and since he is a father, and dedicates the book to his own son John Francis McCarthy, I can guess this maybe this is true. I can imagine it as a letter to him, or to all fathers and sons, to help them face down their own terrible moments with grace and resourcefulness. In this book, the man is handy, he is always problem-solving, fixing what he has with the tools available to him, scavenging, finding food and water, reading and telling stories to his son with lessons he sometimes barely believes himself anymore. Whatever he does, McCarthy tells us the son watches his father, and learns. Without his son, there is only death, and he must to the end teach his son how to be handy, to be resourceful, to go on, to live, the best he can.
My own father, the weekend before he died on the operating table for his second bypass surgery, at 76, dropped down to slide under the chassis of my aging Chevy and check out my fading brakes, to the end urging me to care about my stuff, to do the right thing, mentoring me in the right way to live. That night he held one of his last great grandchildren in his arms; less than 48 hours later he was dead, which was still the most devastating moment of my life. Reading the father-son relationship that is at the heart of this book through my own loss makes it tender, gives it depth and rich sentiment. I mean, it is harsh, and bleak, this world the father and son live in, but the story is fundamentally sweet and moving. It's about what matters, as the best of books always are.
McCarthy urges me and us to go on, to be resourceful, to care for each other, and to care for the Earth we were given. There are images so terrible in this book that the man tries to shelter from his son, though the son sees them anyway, and we see them, too. Are they useful to see? I surely don't want some of them in my memory, but there they are, reminding me of past genocides and tragedies and prefiguring the ones surely yet to come on personal and global levels. Maybe it's useful to remind me of the "bad guys" who the man and boy meet on the road, who make the immoral, the wrong choices. What evil is humanly possible? But also, what good? What do we need to do to save the planet? Do we really want to? How long can we keep our heads in the sand, as humans with the power still to (maybe) reverse the environmental end? McCarthy teaches us how to live, and why it is so important: Because of love, and family, and the beauty of the planet. Because we are alive.
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery”--McCarthy
Camus suggests that we humans, post WWII--the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and Stalin, all of it-- should just keep pushing that Myth of Sisyphus-boulder up that hill without any assurance of meaning beyond the doing of it. I can't go on; I'll go on, Samuel Becket has his narrator say at the end of The Unnameable, and that's what the man does and teaches the boy to do, and perhaps it is what we all should do in the worst of circumstances. McCarthy know his Beckett, but finally, McCarthy is not Beckett, as much as this tale owes to McCarthy's master; McCarthy gives us just a little more dignity and hope than Beckett, I think.
I think, too, in my darkest moments that I understand Robin Williams, facing Parkinson's disease, and that 82 year old man, seeing the bleak future for him and his wife and children. I am not and have never yet been suicidal, but I understand their choices. I understand Camus and Beckett on these important subjects. I may have to reread this tale again and again to keep me on the road the man took instead of the one his wife chose. After all, I have sons (and a daughter) to care for. Maybe I'm gonna hug my kids a little bit harder tonight....more
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