. Spinning .

In tagging all the Literature posts it amazes me how long ago I’ve read this or that. Of course this latest span of time spent with Ishiguro’s Unconsoled has set me way back in reading, though I’ve got a post to write on my progression through The Beans.

What really took me by surprise was how long it’s been since I’ve read my last McCarthy which was The Road. It’s been almost exactly two years–two whole years–and I think that’s good enough reason to toss Ishiguro back on the shelf regardless of the 200 pages I’m into it and select from a few McCarthy’s that I haven’t read yet.

It always makes me laugh to think what authors must think of how readers interpret their words. It used to bother me in fact to think that readers turned and twisted things around to make something out of nothing, or nothing from something meant. 

But of course, Barthes and a professor rid me of that silly notion that an author had any rights over what people want to make of his work.

So saying, there are three things from The Road that still play over in my head. 

The timeline:  It bothered me to think that after what, five or six years, the good people of earth would not have rebuilt it and worked together.  I’ve come to accept that this is not a world easily rebuilt.  Nothing will grow.  When the food ran out the good times were pretty much over.  Those left with still some shred of decency in their souls make do and move on.  The timeline then, is perhaps right on track; it would likely take that long to find that nothing works to make things better, and to go through the food supplies.  Even with my own normally well-stocked cellar (Shop Rite’s Can Can Sales) we’d likely last a year, maybe two at most without replenishment.

The "fire":  I thought at first that it was hope.  Maybe it’s faith instead.  But faith in whom?  Certainly not faith in mankind–that’s been proven to be unreliable at best, confirmation at its worst.  Faith in God then? There is a conversation between the man and an old traveler they come across that may give some insight.  Here, in random bits out of context:

The man: How would you know if you were the last man on earth? he said.

I don’t guess you would know it.  You’d just be it.

Nobody would know it.

It wouldn’t make any difference.  When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.

I guess God would know it.  (the man)

There is no God.

No?

There is no God and we are his prophets.  (p. 143)

There is another reference, but it seems to hint at indecision.  The man refers easily to God as existing: I guess God would know it.  Regardless of his doubts, it still rolls easily out of his thoughts and into his conversation.  The old man, both denial and confirmation in his statement:  There is no God and we are his prophets.  Completely contradictory within itself.

So faith may be the fire rather than hope.  And faith in God rather than man.  Although the man later refers to the boy as a god and sees a light about him.  Maybe the fire then is something else.

Maybe the fire is simply Goodness.

And third, Could people turn on each other like this?:  From what I’ve learned in my life, and what I’ve just lately accepted.  Absolutely.

What is the inborn nature of man?

There’s a premise throughout the novel that pits hope against acceptance.  Even when hope fades, there is an acceptance that short of death, they must go onward. 

There’s also McCarthy’s usual good versus evil.  Here’s where I am conflicted.  If our basic instincts lead us by self-centered survival, lust rather than love, use rather than cooperation, than the people are returning to that instinctive way that had been reasoned and civilized out of us in order to form societies that work.

But what of the boy?  He knows what’s going on, has grown up in this world, and yet has a caring for others–something that’s not quite "dead" in the man either.  The child cries more easily for others than he does for his own plight.  This caused me some concern for his safety as well as set me to wondering why a child of this time and place would be so.  The answer, I believe, is that he was not raised among the roving murderers but instead by a loving father and mother who along with the lessons he needed to survive, taught him too the things that they remembered as important.  In this child, civilization has not quite hit bottom.  That’s likely why he must remain who he is, cautious, wary, knowing, and yet a civilized human being.

Oh, I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the story settles into my mind to raise questions of the sort we don’t like to think about.

There’s always a sadness to finishing a good book.  I wanted it to go on some more.  If it were a movie, then a sequel would be planned for the boy at age twenty.  He would’ve learned some way to make the machinery work.  Some way to plant seeds deep into the earth.  Some way to rebuild life.

McCarthy leaves a lot of what other writers and readers would consider vital information out of his stories.  Was the boy in fact born after the devastating event?  The woman was pregnant at the time.  What was the slow decline of mankind in the immediate aftermath?  Starvation, moving on to seek someplace where it wasn’t all dust, helping each other until that could no longer be done, the bad guys looting right from day one, and most of the good guys going bad.  But none of that is really important after all.

It could happen.  It could happen just as McCarthy lays it out.  So it’s something to consider–and maybe not much we can do much about. 

But it can’t be forgotten.

Okay.

I’m within twenty-five pages of finishing this book and it’d be done a lot sooner (though I think I’ve broken a record here, at least for close reading versus the good old days when I read a book in a day but didn’t learn much) if I didn’t have to jump up every few pages and share via a post:

If you don’t put down the knife and get away from the cart, the man said, I’m going to blow your brains out.  The thief looked at the child and what he saw was very sobering to him.  He laid the knife on top of the blankets and backed away and stood.  (p. 215)

Dear God, what has the journey done to this boy?

Now you see why McCarthy won the Pulitzer?

(WARNING: Not only spoilers–as all my postings on lit may be, though my readings of past classics are not as threatening to the general populace as a recently published book such as this might be, but then again, who hasn’t read this book already?–but some rather blunt remarks about McCarthy’s inclusion of rather upsetting images for which those of us who love McCarthy have sworn acceptance.)

Nobody does dead babies like McCarthy.  If that seems a rough statement, just watch the news at night.  Not just Iraq or whatever current war with its visuals, but the boyfriend who didn’t think his girlfriend’s baby was just too cute to ever…well, you know.

What bothers me the most–and the whole scenario is meant to disturb–is that McCarthy let the boy walk right into it and the man and I let it happen!

The boy forgets to bring the gun and they must go back for it; the father tells him it’s not his fault, he should have been watching. The boy doesn’t shut off the gas valve on the stove and they run out of fuel; the father again accepts the blame and assures the boy it wasn’t his responsibility.  As the boy takes on more and more, sees worse and worse horror, we forget how fragile he really is.

We were supposed to be watching over him and I, for one, feel I’ve let him down horribly.  Lulled into the sense of seeing death and obvious signs of cannibalism, remembering that dog barking in the beginning pages, we let the kid–as does McCarthy because he sees the purpose to it–walk right up to that campfire.

As I see the real possibility of this world, I see as well how I might act in it.  That’s immersion.  That’s fear.

There’s a change happening within the characters–as well there should be, according to fiction "law"; but who’dve thought that McCarthy would abide?

Showing, via the dialogue, that as the man becomes more unsure of their fate, the boy, still frightened, begins to offer suggestions.  The father begins to ask for his opinion.  Mutual dependency develops as the boy becomes better as a lookout, a scout.  Even his quiet acquiescent Okay becomes firmer.  You can just tell and you start reading the same word differently as its meaning changes.

And what does this mean:

I think maybe they are watching, he (the man) said.  They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.  (p. 177)

Here then, is the antithesis of beauty in the beauty of words:

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.  (p. 152)

These two sentences are typical McCarthy.  They also follow a sentence that has been often quoted in reviews; one which reveals a bit more of the state of the world.  But I am looking at words here.  Words that are carefully chosen and strung together to give more than their definitive meaning to the story.  The long sentence structure differs from the majority of the aforegoing text.  This seems to bring a mood of hopelessness as the landscape takes on the structure of a never-ending plane.

It’s all the same, McCarthy is telling us; it won’t get better.  The coastline is just as ravaged as the interior land.

McCarthy has a way of keeping things from us that he doesn’t think we need to know, that may shift focus away from the moment.  Then again, he has a tremendously subtle way of saying something that we might have missed if we’re unused to him:

The boy nodded.  He sat looking at the map.  The man watched him.  He thought he knew what that was about.  He’ pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived.  Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory.  Themselves among others, everything in its place.  Justified in the world.  Come on, he said.  We should go. (p. 153)

The difference defined:  stability, the known, the safety of home versus the movement of We should go.

McCarthy loves to throw out a question of ethics and leave the reader to decipher for himself beyond the character to go inside one’s own head.  He weaves it throughout this book as well, never letting us forget that we must go through the pages just as the stages of this journey with the big one hanging over us:  If it comes down to it, will he kill his son?

Backtracking a bit, we get the picture clearly of what the man has taught his son because of the kind of world they live in:

Don’t be afraid, he said.  If they find you you are going to have to do it.  Do you understand?  Shh.  No crying.  do you hear me?  You know how to do it.  You put it in your mouth and point it up.  Do it quick and hard.  Do you understand?  Stop crying.  Do you understand?  (p. 95)

But the man finds that the boy is terrified, too terrified to trust to do what he’s been told. 

Even as, later on, when they stumble into a well-stocked underground shelter, we already know that the danger hasn’t gone away; that the reality of the plan and the possibility of the need to kill themselves will not go away.  Maybe, we keep hoping, maybe the whole world isn’t like this.  But we know that hope is just that, hope.

So when does the love between them that has managed to overcome what I believe–and likely McCarthy as well–to be man’s instinct for personal survival over caring for others become an act of killing for the sake of love?  What is the transitional thought process?  It’s got to be more than not wanting someone you love to suffer.  It’s a total reversal of love’s intent.

Something clicked as I realized I’m at the halfway point in this book.  The sparseness of words, the white space, the dialogue, the emptiness of the visual text that matches the landscape of McCarthy’s world.

No Country for Old Men wasn’t up to Suttree or Blood Meridian, and I even photographed the book during my reading and postings. It was untraditional McCarthy, I felt.  Seen just in the arrangement of words into narrative structure.  Maybe it was a hint of what was to come in The Road.  But in this book, it’s vital to the setting, matching the story in its expanse of space.  Something’s missing from the pages just as it’s missing in a desolate world.

I’ve rooted for a character before, I’ve warned him not to open a door.  Never before, however, have I waited as he passed a light over a discovery and looked him in the eye in that moment of awe of discovery.

He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered.  Oh my God.  (p. 116)

As reader, I am immersed totally in this grey world which McCarthy has so carefully plotted to make me aware of by his persistance of language. When there is a new stretch of landscape I check the ashes for footprints before the man does.  I don’t have complete trust in his abilities; he’s tired, worn, overwhelmed by responsibility.

We watch out for the man.  Me and the boy.

Not merely a vision of a possible future, a warning of sorts, but a vision of man’s nature comes from this story, and it’s not the nature of man that enabled this mess, but rather what occurs later, in McCarthy’s devastated world many years after the event that destroyed it.

What disturbs me the most is that while I can well imagine a fight for survival, a binge of looting, helping each other, clustering into compact groups as an aftermath, I would have guessed that eventually a drive to rebuild would come about.

This may in fact be impossible in McCarthy’s world, perhaps a place where nothing will grow and if food cannot be planted and harvested, then it would indeed come to this.  But it would seem to me that enough is left standing to have somehow gotten around the problem.  Hydraponic gardening?  Deep digging?  Animal husbandry?  When the man found dried up apples (not decomposed?) he ate them seeds and all.  My first thought was no–save the seeds to plant!

McCarthy doesn’t tell us what happened after the blast that wrecked the world, but it appears that the event was not the killing blow, but rather, what came after.

McCarthy has given a lot of thought to creating this world, and the greyness of it that he so repeatedly and rather singlely described it as is truly all it is. 

He hits us below the belt with the simple journey of the man and the boy.  Our fears are of the unknown, the grey dust of nightmares in which we come upon monsters.  But it is the known that offers the real danger, and maybe this is the message.  The few people, the few houses, the road itself are to be feared; in the dark woods there is safety.  McCarthy has reversed what we feel we can trust.

That, as I’ve learned from experience, is the worst fear of all.

What he gives us as the only enduring trait among men turned cannibalistic is a father’s love for his son.  The child holds onto a mere shred of trust in his father; he has come to question his decisions, has come to develop his own instincts for survival yet has a child’s easy acceptance of the ultimate outcome.  He hopes rather than trusts that his father can keep them from death. 

Just as I am getting into Francine Prose’s section on the "beautiful" sentence, what better place to be than in a McCarthy novel?

Prose states: 

The well-made sentence transcends time and genre.  A beautiful sentence is a beautiful sentence, regardless of when it was written, or whether it appears in a play or a magazine article.  (p. 36)

And here’s McCarthy:

He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers.  Then one day he sat  by the roadside and took it out and went through the contents.  Some money, credit cards.  His driver’s license.  A picture of his wife.  He spread everything out on the blacktop.  Like gaming cards.  He pitched the sweatblackened piece of leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph.  Then he laid it down on the road also and then he stood and they went on.  (p. 43)

A brevity of language, delivered in short, clipped, grammatically incorrect incomplete sentences.  But the hopelessness, the almost breathlessness of the staccato structure instead of making it a single long sentence or two is planned.  By the time we get to the final moment of his brief action and reflection, we are with the character, in his head, feeling lost and turning our backs on all we’ve known. 

As you all know, I’m a big McCarthy fan but maybe I’m getting a bit persnickety about his writing.  At his best, he is absolutely awesome.  At his worst, he’s still in the top 5%.  But in this novel, while his forte is creating the environment, even I am starting to get tired of the repetitious greyness of ash and blackness of the landscape. 

Another bothersome issue is the timeline as presented.  We catch on pretty quick that what happened is likely the result of an atomic bomb, we are also given information that it happened years ago.  Why are there still fires?  Why, in this barren landscape is there still wood for a campfire?  Why did he wait so long–years?–to start on the journey with his son? 

I’m just at the point where there are bits of flashback to the day it all went down, so maybe some of my questions will be answered.  But in the meantime, I’m questioning the character’s choices.

McCarthy does give us more insight than usual into his characters; the tenderness of the father’s concern for his son, the feelings towards his late wife, the hardness with which he deals with the one traveler they’ve met, and the son’s mature acceptance of their situation; his quiet "Okay." 

Nice, nice and powerful.  Terribly moving and allowing enough action and conflict to add interest to their plodding ordeal.