He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Don’t give up on The Road. It’s a bleak, depressing and harrowing book, but it’s still a remarkable work of fiction that deserves the praise it’s received so far, and deserves to be read to the end.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel is set in a post apocalyptic world where the human race is facing extinction. Cities are burnt and abandoned, a sooty ash covers the cold and dying landscape, food and resources are scarce. Amongst this devestation an unnamed man and his young son struggle on, following an endless road in a vague hope that they will find safety, life and the fabled “good guys”. They search and scavenge; for food, tools and shelter and the story falls into a repetitive rhythm as McCarthy describes their endless tasks – filling their cart of belongings, gathering wood for fires, seeking out new hiding places, looking always for useful things. One of the most effective parts of the book is when the man finds a rare object of beauty, an antique sextant from an abandoned ship. After admiring it he simply discards it, an object useless to him in a life only in need of useful things.
The Road isn’t a science fiction novel. We don’t find out what has happened to cause this catastrophe; it’s likely that there’s been a nuclear holocaust – but the conceit of this novel is that we must just accept what has happened. It isn’t a horror novel either, although it contains some of the most horrible scenes I’ve read for a long time. If I had to categorise this book I’d probably fail. It isn’t attempting prophecy; at the most it’s a warning of how easily humanity can slide into terrible depths, those of self-destruction, murder and cannibalism.
What makes this novel work is the father and son relationship. As a parent I found this convincing and very moving; I couldn’t stop whispering to myself “yes, yes, yes” as I read on. Their relationship is just spot on – the father’s protection of his son at all costs, the boy’s endless questioning and need for reassurance, his scepticism and how they deal with the ever present danger engulfing them. The Road asks uncomfortable questions of the reader. How far would you go to protect someone? Would you be prepared to kill or be killed? Because the bond between father and son was so believable I found myself able to consider such questions.
Unhappy reading at times, at others almost unbearable, but I was compelled to read on. I’m not giving away any spoilers here, but if you leave the book unfinished it will be a far bleaker experience for you than if you finish it. Don’t give up on The Road.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t left it long enough since finishing The Book Thief, but I found Everything Is Illuminating difficult reading. Difficult in it’s subject matter of the Holocaust rather that Jonathan Safran Foer’s experimental shifts in writing style; although at times I did find the book often trying too hard to impress. On the whole the novel is a great achievement. Foer wrote Everything Is Illuminated when he was in his early twenties, which is part of the reason I’ve put it off for so long. How can such a youngster write so deeply? Okay, how can he be so illuminating? Maybe I’m just prejudiced as an oldie.
Everything Is Illuminated is at times hilarious, such as the account of the journey that the Foer character, his interpreter, his interpreter’s grandfather and a flatulent dog called Sammy Davis Junior Junior embark upon. At other times it’s heartbreaking; the Holocaust flashbacks, and what eventually happens to the characters that we grow fond of. I loved it, but I was also infuriated by it. At times I hated it. I lapped it up and despaired of it it turn. I embraced its insight and then I didn’t understand it. I found it a breeze and then I found it unbearable. I couldn’t put it down and then I didn’t want to pick it up. Flaws in me rather than the book, perhaps. Who am I to say?
Everything Is Illuminated is one of those books I find I am unable to review, possibly because it demands rereading before fully understanding. I can only make a small suggestion. Form a book group. Recruit as many people as you can, all creeds, all ages. Read this book. I found that Patrick McCabe’s Winterwood was the same for me in that I couldn’t review it, and I am soon to start on McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, another possibly disturbing novel I’ve heard great things about.
Before that, however, I’m having a go at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ve guessed it. The novel is bleak and disturbing, but gripping nevertheless. And I’m reading Philip Roth’s Everyman after that. But whoever said things were going to be easy?
The Bleak Book Group. Apply here…
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
I first read Slaughterhouse Five when I was 15 and it instantly became my favourite novel (before being usurped a couple of years later by Catch-22). Having just read Vonnegut’s classic for the third time, however, it may just have overtaken Heller’s again in my estimation.
Slaughterhouse Five is one of those books that you expect everyone to have read, but I’ll try to avoid making that assumption and attempt a summary. It follows the life of Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner of war who experiences and survives the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Billy also travels in time, thanks to the aliens who kidnap and display him as an animal in a zoo, and the novel jumps from one part of Billy’s life to another as he timehops, encompassing his war experiences, his marriage and later life, more war experiences, more civilian life and even his own death. Call it a jigsaw, a jazz piece, interactive, whatever you decide, but Slaughterhouse Five always remains fresh and original.
It’s really an extraordinary and poetic work that’s beyond review. Vonnegut has a masterful way with words, very similar to Heller’s, where he can blend the absurd with the tragic, ironic and unavoidable. He’s also wry and very humourous, often darky as he exposes the sheer hoplessness of human situations. Billy Pilgrim is also a very unusual main character for a book in that he’s fairly weak, dim and charmless; many of the characters he encounters in the novel take an instant dislike to him. But as Vonnegut reminds us:
There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
Whenever I reread Slaughterhouse Five I enjoy the opening chapter more and more, where the Vonnegut character sits down to start writing and gives the introduction that provides some snippets of what is to come. It’s one of those books that improves with rereads partly because you do know what is going to happen. Like the fourth dimensional Tralfamadorians and their all-encompassing vision of past and future, and like Billy’s own toing and froing through time, you can view this novel as a whole with no timeline or real beginning, middle or end.
But don’t be put off by the time travel element of this novel if you’re not a science fiction fan. Of course, we only have Billy’s word for it that he’s travelled in time anyway (whover he tells about it naturally thinks he’s crazy and it is revealed that he is suffering from the trauma of a plane crash). The fantastic parts of the book somehow add more weight to the depiction of the awfully real events. The controversial bombing of Dresden wasn’t widely known about or discussed much when the novel was first published in 1969; Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim a prisoner of war in 1945, witnessed the devestation first hand. His real experiences are weaved into the fiction of the book magnificently, using repetition of phrases (such as ‘so it goes’) and repetition of the haunting incidents in Billy’s life (the execution of a soldier for the triviality of stealing a teapot).
Whatever Vonnegut might say, Slaughterhouse Five is full of characters I will never forget: the disturbingly dangerous soldiers Roland Weary and Paul Lazzaro; the crazy science fiction author Kilgore Trout; the executed soldier Edgar Derby and Montana Wildhack, Billy’s ‘mate’ on Tralfamadore. Best of all is Vonnegut himself as he lurks in the background, who adds a touch of horrible reality – the flamethrowers used to incinerate the dead; the destroyed Dresden resembling the barren surface of the moon. Like shooting the soldier with the teapot, Man does pointless and futile things. And he will continue to do them.
I love it, what more can I say? Go on, read it. Or reread it. You know you want to.
Sigmund Freud visited New York in 1909 for his only trip to the US. His experience forms the backdrop to The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld, with Freud and Carl Jung joining a cast of both real and imaginary characters in this lengthy crime novel.
Although it might give that impression when first picked up, The Interpretation of Murder doesn’t cast Freud as a Sherlock Holmes character. Instead the sleuthing is left to two fictional characters, Dr Younger and Inspector Littlemore, the former a keen practitioner of psychoanalysis (and a fan of Shakespeare to boot), and the latter a conventional New York cop.
Murder and sexual perversion are at the heart of this novel. A girl is apparently murdered, with another left molested and disturbed. Younger and Littlemore to the rescue but … sorry … I can’t go on. Unfortunately The Interpretation of Murder is a real bore. Freud and Jung, by far the most interesting characters in the novel, remain mostly in the background as the increasingly convoluted plot takes hold. Rebenfeld may know his subject matter (he’s written a thesis on Freud) but he’s no novelist. This novel lacks pace, believability and any real sense of mystery. As a writer, I’d put Rubenfeld in the Dan Brown league. And that’s not a compliment.
The novel has been praised for the authentic depiction of Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th Century and in part I agree; the relentless building work as skyscrapers are rapidly erected, the social divides, the emergence of the automobile – by far the best part in the book is where the crazed villain of the piece hauls a distraught horse up in the air by a crane – but it isn’t substantial enough. And Rubenfeld let me down. Another interesting part of the novel is the description of the underwater construction of the foundations for New York’s bridges with workers risking their lives in the subterranean caissons. Alas the truth of this has to be stretched a little to serve the plot, which ruins the supposed ‘educational’ aspect of the book.
All in all, I was desperate to finish this novel and was glad when it was all over. Rather like Freud’s impression of America:
His face seemed much more deeply furrowed than it had been a week ago, his back slightly bent, his eyes a decade older. As I began to disembark, he called out my name….‘Let me be honest with you, my boy,’ he said, from under his umbrella, as the rain poured down. ‘This country of yours: I am suspicious of it. Be careful. It brings out the worst in people – crudeness, ambition, savegery. There is too much money. I see the prudery for which your country is famous, but it is brittle. It will shatter in the whirlwind of gratification being called forth. America, I fear, is a mistake. A gigantic mistake, to be sure, but still a mistake.’
Note to self: avoid bestsellers.
In a year or two, the older generation that still dreamed of Empire must surely give way to politicians like Gaitskell, Wilson, Crosland – new men with a vision of a modern country where there was equality and things actually got done. If America could have an exuberant and handsome President Kennedy, then Britain could have something similar – at least in spirit, for there was no one quite so glamourous in the Labour Party. The blimps, still fighting the last war, still nostalgic for its discipline and privations – their time was up.
On Chesil Beach examines one evening in the life of a young couple called Edward and Florence, the most important in their lives as they prepare for their wedding night in a Dorset hotel. It’s 1962, and Ian McEwan is knowingly aware of the worldwide cultural changes that are beginning to take place. The novel portrays Edward and Florence as products of a stifling era that will thankfully soon be over – both are sexually inexperienced, the former frustratingly so – and they both face their wedding night with terror. And this is the rub. Such importance has been placed on this experience – this event – this night – that the odds are very high on things going wrong.
There is a sense that McEwan hates this point in history, that he can’t wait for the 1960s to get into swing and for the English to grow their hair and let it down. Even though On Chesil Beach can’t help appearing to view the respective childhoods and adolescence of Edward and Florence as taking part in charmingly innocent times, I still (as a cynic) read a lot of sadness into McEwan’s account of their formative years. Edward’s mentally unbalanced mother, his strange flirtation with physical violence, Florence’s desperately competitive father; it’s all brilliantly subtle writing – the sort of thing that makes McEwan the master he is.
Ian McEwan has a knack for slowing down time, examining events that happen very quickly by reducing them in his narrative to a snail’s pace. The ballooning accident in Enduring Love and a road rage incident in Saturday are two such examples, where he thoroughly examines what is only really a fleeting moment in time. In On Chesil Beach it’s this fateful night, no more than a hour in real time, that is examined so thoroughly and becomes so unforgettable, haunting and poignant.
There’s a point where our most vivid memories become ingrained on our consciences forever. For Edward and Florence it’s this very evening that they spend together on and near to Chesil Beach; still vivid, disturbing and nightmarish to them for the next 45 years. This is the substance of the novel and of their memories. The concluding “catch up” part of the novel – 1962 to the present day – comprises only a few pages; without giving anything away the lives of Edward and Florence are brought promptly up to date. Events since 1962 are insignificant and fleeting – for the reader and for them. For significance as one of life’s major turning points, it really does all happen on Chesil Beach.
On Chesil Beach may appear insubstantial in its brevity but I really believe that McEwan is at the height of his powers, mastering the ability to leave a lot unsaid, and leave a lot to the consideration of the reader. I’ve been rereading one of his earlier novels, The Child in Time, and it’s noticeable how much he has matured, becoming much less laboured as a writer. His prose is graceful, flowing and absorbing. Britain’s greatest living author? He’s getting there.
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