Torbett studied the country out there. The shadows long on the road. Who the hell are these people? he said.
I dont know. I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my grandaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustlin cattle. Now they’re runnin dope. But I dont know as that’s true no more. I’m like you. I aint sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build a annex on to hell.
For anyone who has recently finished The Road and are looking for another Cormac McCarthy fix I highly recommend No Country For Old Men. This is another helping of McCarthy’s distinctive and highly original prose that immediately grips from the start. There’s also a high quota of bloodshed, some disturbing themes running throughout and one of the most effective literary villains I’ve encountered in a long time.
Similar to The Road, No Country For Old Men works wonders with an ostensibly simple story. A Vietnam veteran (the setting is 1980) stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone horribly wrong. He finds a suitcase full of money and decides to take it, a decision that immediately causes him a lot of anguish.
After stealing the drug money Llewellyn Moss is pursued by the ruthless killer Anton Chigurh. Also thrown into the heady mix is the laid back and contemplative sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Although a fast moving thriller – at times Chigurh’s determined and tireless pursuit of Moss makes him seem like a distant cousin of The Terminator – this is also a deep and thoughtful piece. McCarthy takes his sleepy Texan setting and slams the modern and ugly world of drug running in its face. No Country For Old Men is also a novel that trips you up just when you think it’s possible to become comfortable following Moss’s life as a fugitive. McCarthy turns the whole thing on its head with a shocking turn of events – and then he does it again with stomach churning effect.
I couldn’t wait to finish whatever else I was doing and get back to this book; it raises the stakes on what can be justifiably be classed as a page turner. No Country For Old Men has recently been filmed by Joel and Ethan Coen and I’ve already heard good things about it. In fact, if it’s anything as good as the novel I’m expecting a masterpiece. I do wonder though how they have turned this into a piece of cinema; whilst the novel at times reads like a screenplay – and McCarthy writes smart, witty dialogue that outstrips anything the Coen brothers have ever written – some may judge the outcome anticlimactic. No Country For Old Men becomes a quiet and resigned rumination on unbeatable and sickening evil and I admire McCarthy all the more for it. He’s brave enough to avoid the happy and neat ending – something that doesn’t belong in this young man’s world.
After looking forward so much to reading Don De Lillo’s Falling Man I’m unable to hide my bitter disappointment in the novel. This is a big subject tackled by one of America’s leading authors, but simply stamping “9/11” on a work of fiction isn’t enough to make it a great one. I just spent too long waiting for the book to kick in, and while I was nodding sagely throughout – attempting to gel with the novel intellectually – it didn’t grip me emotionally. I found the characters flat and unengaging, and although Keith – survivor of the attacks on the twin towers – may be written as an invisible person, walking back into his family’s life after the terrorist attacks like a virtual ghost – the undead survivor perhaps – this is way beyond my capabilities as a reader.
While I commended De Lillo for waiting so long to tackle “9/11” – while others (British authors, I won’t mention their names) were bashing away at their keyboards to produce articles for next morning’s press before the second tower had even fallen – I wish he hadn’t produced something so leaden and pretentious. This isn’t going on my list of recommendations for 2007.
I finished Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin with a sigh; I found it a disturbing, haunting and exhausting novel. It made me address a lot of difficult issues; mainly the huge and heavy responsibility of the parent. Who can justifiably hold their hand up and say that they are fully qualified for the job?
There is a point in the novel where Eva, the narrator, tells the story of a mother who leaves her small child in the bath for three minutes to answer the door. In that short time the child suffers a fatal accident; the mother – dutiful as a parent for all the other minutes in the day is now forever tortured by this terrible act of neglect. How many of us have been in a situation where this could have happened? How many of us make mistakes in the protection and nurturing of our children? How many of those mistakes are irreversible? Who do we blame when we get it wrong? What do we do when it really goes wrong? Let’s face it, “I blame it on the parents” is an often repeated cliché we’re all used to.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is composed of a series of letters by Eva to her estranged and unresponsive husband Franklin. Their son, now sixteen, has committed several murders in a single act of aggression which Eva sees in her resigned view as another instalment in the depressing series of similar events in the USA. Eva’s voice is an exhausting one because it drilled right into me, nagging away to make me decide whether or not I could or should condone her. Ever felt guilty about something and constantly gone over events trying to iron them out and persuade yourself that you’re blameless? This is what goes through Eva’s mind; she also picks over incidents in Kevin’s early childhood to discover clues to why he has turned out the way he has. The vandalism of Eva’s maps, the cycling accident of a neighbour, bugs in his sister’s backpack, even the failed attempts at potty training – are they all examples of a dangerous individual?
For me, We Need to Talk About Kevin was the literary equivalent of a hangover. It took a while to get over and it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. It has a truly shocking outcome, but I’m glad I can now rid myself of Eva’s torment, a privileged position compared to the other tortured Evas of this world.
‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’
A famous television series from 1981. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. Teddy bears. Long visits to Venice to meet Laurence Olivier. Oxford undergraduates drinking heavily and speaking through megaphones. These are just a few of the images that have haunted me over the years, stopping me in my tracks every time I thought about reading Brideshead Revisited. But I decided it was time to take the plunge, and although I had many flashbacks when I was reading the novel I just held on tight until they passed. My edition is the 1957 Penguin; it’s been in my possession for as long as I can remember. I’ve moved house eight times in the last 15 or so years and this is one of those books that has always travelled with me.
An army captain is billetted to an old house during the Second World War. He’s been there before, and it evokes memories of his past; Oxford in the early 1920s, where Charles Ryder befriends the effete, charismatic and extrovert Sebastian Flyte. They quickly develop an intense and often disturbingly insular friendship; whilst their relationship is never revealed to be a homosexual one, they prefer their own company to others and are indifferent to the charms of women. Although both from the priviliged upper classes, both also come from dysfunctional families; Charles’ closest relative is his eccentric and slightly mad father, Sebastian’s own father lives in apparent exile overseas after leaving his mother. They begin to drift apart when Sebastian himself drifts into hopeless alcoholism; neither Charles or his own family are able to help him. Ten years later Charles, now a successful artist, embarks on a doomed love affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia.
Although he’s perhaps not someone you’d want to be associated with in real life, the star of Brideshead Revisited is definitely Sebastian. He’s the friend from hell; you begin to despise them and their actions of self destruction but you still try, and fail, to save them. He irritated and infuriated me, but the parts of the book where he wasn’t around were just dull. And the teddy bear, which was a suitable affectation for the fashion conscious of the early 80s, is one of just many keys to the personality of a doomed individual. And putting the homosexual debate to one side, Sebastian, as Charles’ first love, represents the first love for all of us – the one we can never forget even if we might want to (even if it means settling for the sister).
I’ve heard reports that the new cinema version, due for release in 2008, will concentrate mainly on Charles and Julia’s relationship. Something that won’t capture the imagination, or haunt the memory, nearly as much. Why? I found them unappealing characters, and the novel sagged without Sebastian’s disturbing exploits. Unfortunately Brideshead Revisited is ultimately a depressing read. The scenes with Charles’ father are hilarious but the comedy in this novel is minimal. There’s always the sense that life will be a disappointment, even before it’s really got going, with things lost never to be retrieved again:
I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
Crocks of gold? I think in Waugh’s mind, if memories of youth are rekindled they invariably only serve to cause feelings of sadness or regret. Depressive that I am, I tend to agree with him.
They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most.
According to Harold Bloom, the four major American novelists of the current era are Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. After recently reading and enjoying McCarthy for the first time I decided to move onto Roth’s latest. Interestingly, both authors were born in 1933 and, although The Road and Everyman are vastly different, I did find them exploring similar themes, or at least provoking me to consider certain, very big, subjects.
Philip Roth’s Everyman is about death, illness, regret and dying, but strangely it isn’t really a depressing read. The novel begins with an unnamed man’s funeral before backtracking over the events of his life. It’s intelligently written and moving, and Roth manages to delve into the complex life of an individual in such a comparitavely short book. The novel moves back and forth rapidly through time but there’s meaning in Roth’s meanderings. His subject’s memories tend to spark other memories, many of them being linked by periods spent in hospital, either as a small child with a hernia, or visiting others – dying parents and friends. Roth also conjours up a vivid image of a Jewish family and their New York jewellery shop in the 1940s, bringing the past alive, while at the same time delivering an elegy to a spent life.
Roth’s Everyman isn’t a particularly likeable character. I read him as arrogant, and I wamed to him less during the scene where, as an old man, he attempts and fails to pick up a young girl jogging in the park. There’s also sections of the book describing his particular sexual preferences that I’d much sooner have remained unaware of. He’s failed at marriage three times, two of his three children dislike him. He grows old, grows ill and faces death. Why should I feel sorry for him? As a reader it was entirely my choice; the dying man seeks redemption and he’s in the hands of the reader. His plight becomes compelling; I didn’t like him but I did care for him. And I forgave him.
There’s much to admire in Everyman because it is such a skilfully written novel. The closing pages were the most effective for me, where the man visits the family graveyard and strikes up a conversation, Hamlet – style, with the resident gravedigger. It’s poetic and elegant writing at its best, and where a lesser writer could fail dismally (sinking too far into Shakespearean pastiche) Roth handles it with real art.
Everyman is a concise and brilliantly written book by a writer who, although now in his mid seventies, is – and here comes the cliché – working at the height of his powers. It’s a meditation on life and its end that I would imagine -and hope – Ian McEwan will also be delivering twenty years from now. Until then, Everyman is one of the best ruminations on death that I’ve ever read, and features an admirable homage to Hamlet. And do I agree with Harold Bloom? Two of the best novels I’ve read this year are by McCarthy and Roth so, partly, yes, although this jury is still out on Pynchon…
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