Book Review: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (New York: Vintage International, 2006. 287 pp)

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933. One of six children, Cormac’s family moved multiple times in his childhood as his father accepted different occupations. In 1951, McCarthy attended theUniversity of Tennessee majoring in Liberal Arts. Midway through his studies, McCarthy served in theAir Force for four years. After his service, McCarthy returned to college, writing his first short stories. In 1959 and 1960, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for Creative Writing. Mccarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. Several years, grants, and fellowships later, McCarthy published Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses marking his rise in literary acclaim. McCarthy is widely considered one of the great modern American authors and many of his works have been translated to film.

Back to Basics

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy explores the idea of innocence, good and evil, and the idea of “carrying fire”, where he explores innocence and human resilience. Unlike so many dystopian novels that merely explore what humanity’s darker sides are, McCarthy uses the harrowing and depressing post apocalyptic landscape to ultimately show the brilliance of the human spirit.

The Road opens in a post-apocalyptic world which sees humanity reduced to its most basic elements. A never named father and his son journey across the landscape.

"He’d had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality” (88).

Filled with ash and devoid of any living animals and vegetation, many humans have resorted to cannibalism or committed suicide. The boy’s mother gave up after the disaster and evidently committed suicide before the story begins. The more sophisticated elements of human civilization have been obliterated, but perhaps more importantly concepts such as altruism or the ability to hope no longer exist. The boy, however, is told to carry “the fire” by his father, a concept developing throughout the book.

Good versus Evil

In Starkian fashion, the man realizes winter is coming, and decides to take the boy south, where it’s warmer. The father is sick, coughing blood occasionally, but continues south with his son, hoping to get him to where it’s warm before he dies. The father’s love for his son is incredibly deep. He vows to take care of his son no matter what.

 “You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?Yes.He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said. Yes. We’re still the good guys.And we always will be.Yes. We always will be.Okay” (77).

The father, carrying a pistol with only two rounds, killed one of the cannibal attackers on their journey. He justifies the killing as a sacrificial act, but a difference in innocence begins to emerge. The father doesn’t doubt they are the “good guys”, but conversely the son wonders having murdered someone if they can truly be considered “good”. The father wants to protect his son at all costs, but with the new world in which he lives, the rules of good versus evil have changed, morality is different, and he struggles to transform with the times, finding himself an alien in this new hopeless landscape.

Carrying Fire

The Road is one of the darkest most hopeless books I’ve read. Perhaps showing a bit of McCarthy’s philosophical stance on human life, the book serves to tell of how humans will always strive for hope, to carry the “fire” (as McCarthy puts it in the novel) of humanity’s greatest achievements forward. But, the universe is indifferent. In the wake of the unnamed calamity, the earth has left humanity no foreseeable future. But, despite the universe’s disinterest, life goes on.

"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" (130).

The boy and the man still carry the “fire”. The fire isn’t literal fire to survive with, but a symbol of hope and human resilience. The man consistently tells the son to carry the “fire”. No matter what horrors they encounter, the boy never desires to hurt others, and through his innocence, protects the human condition. People will always carry the fire, but sadly, far too many people choose self-preservation at the cost of genuine love and concern for others. Our world is more complex than the one in which the boy and his father live, but this truth remains the same: the fire of human compassion is too easily lost. McCarthy seems to argue that innocence is the only thing that can preserve it. His characterization of the boy is an attempt to show that innocence in the juridical sense is one of the most important human attributes. Though The Road is dark, hopeless, harrowing and depressing, the truth extrapolated from the text is worth a read.

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5


What do you think?  Do you enjoy post-apocalyptic novels, and do you find this one to be different?  Is innocence one of the most important human attributes?  Did you find The Road to be hopeless? Share your thoughts below.
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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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Book Review: Genesis

Genesis: A Novel by Bernard Beckett (New York: First Mariner Books, 2010. 150pp)

Bernard Beckett (b. 1967) is a high school teacher in Wellington, New Zealand. He teaches math, drama, and English. He wrote Genesis while researching DNA mutations.

A Doctoral Thesis 

I entered a vacant room. A projector glowed, brightly illuminating the tension of the space. In the next fifteen minutes, I watched academics, some of whom I knew, fill the room in quiet anxiety. Then, my friend, a hopeful doctor, entered the room, connected his computer to the projector and nervously waited for three influential professors to ascend their thrones of power. As they entered the room, the one in the middle addressed the crowd, announcing,

“Welcome to the oral portion of the doctoral defense, we will now begin.”

I then watched my friend eloquently, yet nervously, present his dissertation to the panel. All the while, I understood that I would never willingly go through that kind of hell. In Genesis by Bernard Beckett, the protagonist, Anaximander, is presenting her thesis to a panel on the life of Adam Forde and the android Art, whose interactions are crucial to the forming of a new utopian republic after the world collapsed into apocalyptic ruin. Successful completion of said defense gains entry into “The Academy”, the elite governing institution of her perfected society.

“It would be a great honor to be selected, of course, bun Anax was clear that it was not honor that motivated her. To join The Academy was to serve the society. The society she loved. The finest society the planet had ever seen. To join The Academy was to take responsibility for the peace that settled over the shelters, and the laughter that echoed in the streets. The Academy designed the education program. The Academy moderated technology’s march. The Academy managed the balance between the individual and the cause, between the opportunity and the fear. The Academy pored over the details of the past, and learned from each advancement and every mistake. The Academy had met the Idea head on, and negotiated with it a lasting peace” (117).

Bernard Beckett

The Academy exists as the prominent answer to the decline of civilization. The world had become corrupt and inevitably engaged in war over oil, religion, etc. But, during Anax’s examination, she comes to the conclusion that perhaps The Republic isn’t the wonderful utopia she thought it was.

“The Republic, in the end, was a rational response to an irrational problem. To arrest change is to arrest decay. To bury the individual beneath the weight of the state, is to bury too the individual’s fears. It was possible to see what they were trying to do, but easy too to see, from this distance, that no state can ever weigh that heavily. Always, the individual’s fears will wriggle free” (116).

In order to gain admittance into The Academy, Anax presents her thesis on Adam Forde and Art over several grueling hours. She confronts unresolved questions of science and philosophy unexplored by her utopian counterparts. The Republic was formed in order to create a perfect society, but during the course of her examination, Anax begins to find flaws in The Republic, and in the story of Adam Forde.

Android versus Human 

Through her examination, Anaximander describes the interactions between Forde and Art, retelling the history with careful deliberate words. Anax exposes new and cohesive ideas on both Forde and Art, which consistently surprise her panel.

“I am saying only that Adam believes he should follow his head, I do not however believe he can. This is the second element. We see here the battle that every person faces. For while he may reason one way, he is still victim to his emotions” (86).

Consciousness

Anax tells that as Art and Forde get to know each other, their conversations become deeper, and Art grows far more intelligent than expected. In conversation, they tried to distinguish human from machine, from organic thought to robotic thought. As Art tells Forde (read from a transcript),

“I don’t know what it means to be conscious. You have stripped me of that certainty. I find, having you as my only companion, I am drawn toward treating you as if you are as conscious as I am, but perhaps this is nothing more than a prisoner’s kind of madness” (128).

In a time of everlasting peace and prosperity where the individual is crushed and the state rules supreme, Anax finds in her studies that no state can control every individual and someone will inevitably wiggle free. As she deliberates with her examiners, she finds what it really means to be human, and with a surprising twist at the end, this philosophically-minded novel is a treat. I sincerely recommend Genesis for you to read.

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5

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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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Book Review: Zone One

Zone One: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (New York: Doubleday, 2011. 272 pp)

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 and raised in Manhattan. He attended Harvard College and afterward he began working as a reviewer for The Village Voice. Out of the gate, Whitehead’s fiction gained acclaim when his first novel, The Intuitionist, won the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award. His work has earned him the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Also, Whitehead has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Knives and Reason 

Aristotle, when expanding on his defense of virtue ethics, contends that humans act ethically when they maximize the function for which they were created. Just like a knife acts “virtuously” when it is sharp enough to cut, Aristotle suggests that humans act virtuous when they engage in reasoning. The ability to use the complex human brain for social ends allows humans to act ethically in comparison to other animals.

Supposing Aristotle is correct in his assertions, do we, then, act immorally when we refuse to use our reasoning faculties? Or do we act amorally? What happens when external forces cause humans to act strictly on instinct? While reading Colson Whitehead’s post-apocalyptic zombie novel, Zone One, I couldn't help but consider ethics in dystopia.

What Happens After a Zombie Outbreak?

Zone One's Gary from The Composites 

Set in Manhattan, “Zone One” signifies a section of the city zoned for rehabilitation. The book’s protagonist, Mark Spitz—not the Olympic swimmer, this Mark Spitz earned his nickname fighting zombies—works on a three-person sweeper team with Gary, an ADD and trigger-happy individual, and Kaitlyn, the team leader and rule abider. The sweeper team searches every nook and cranny of building after building searching for zombie stragglers.

Before the book’s narrative began, an army of marines choppered into Manhattan on a mission to retake the city. During this time, wave after wave of zombies perished under heavy machine-gun fire. While Uptown remains infested with the undead, “Zone One” holds a minimal number of stragglers. While most malicious zombies instinctively ran into the teeth of the machine gun fire, a select few “malfunction” serenely remaining in places of supposed importance in their former lives. These stragglers are the zombies that the trio is charged to kill.

If You Look Back, You’re a Pillar of Salt 

Throughout the novel, Mark Spitz pauses to recollect the carnage that has occurred after “Last Night”—the name for the day that the zombie infliction took hold. We learn of the standard zombie narrative through his clouded memory. A disease breaks out; panic ensues; and everyone learns to fight for themselves. Often times, Mark Spitz cannot fathom how he has made it thus far:

“He was a thorough, inveterate B. It was his road. He studied for hours and there it waited for him, circled in red ink, oddly welcoming, silently forgiving. Or he refused to open his books and gorged instead on a prime-time platter of sitcoms: he’d still get a B. It was a little play he performed each week and he hit his marks instinctively, stalking the boards of mediocrity. He was not unintelligent; in fact, his instructors agreed that he was often quite perceptive and canny in his contributions to discussion, a ‘true pleasure to have in the classroom.’ The adjectives in his report cards, drawn from a special teachers’ collection of mild yet approving modifiers, described an individual of broader gifts than implied by the grades delivered at the end of each term. All the parts were there. Extra screws, even. There was just something wrong in the execution” (56). 

A Phoenix Rising from the Ashes 

Years after Last Night, organized reconstruction begins. Somewhat comically, the headquarters of the “American Phoenix” buds in Buffalo.

“He’d never been to Buffalo, and now it was the exalted foundry of the future. The Nile, the Cradle of Reconstruction. All the best and brightest (and, most important, still breathing) had been flown up to Buffalo, where they got the best grub, reveled in 24-7 generators and uncurtailed hot showers on command. In turn, they had to rewind catastrophe. Rumor was they had two of the last Nobel laureates working on things up there—useful ones, none of the Peace Prize or Literature stuff—chowing down on hearty brain-fortifying grub, scavenged fish oil and whatnot. If they could reboot Manhattan, why not the entire country? These were the contours of the new optimism” (35).

Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder 

Photo by Andrew C. Mace

However, the characters in this rebuilding state live in a daily stupor. Having learned to survive by instinct, the people—Mark Spitz included—in a certain sense have lost a part of their humanity. Whitehead introduces a term early in the novel called PASD.

“One canny psychotherapist—Dr. Neil Herkimer, who’d made a fortune in the days before the flood with a line of self-help books imparting ‘The Herkimer Solution to Human Unhappiness’—delivered the big buzzword of the moment: PASD, or Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder… Everyone suffered from PASD. Herkimer put it at seventy-five percent of the surviving population, with the other twenty-five percent under the sway of preexisting mental conditions that were, of course, exacerbated by the great calamity. In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right” (54).

With the entire world living in PASD, has humanity lost the defining quality of humanness? At one point, Mark Spitz proclaims,

“He missed shame and guilt and a time when something higher than dumb instinct directed his actions” (161).

Would Aristotle conclude that humanity has lost its ability to act virtuously? I would think so. Without the guiding conscience of reason, the basic survival instinct has altered what it means to be human in Zone One. Humanity, as always, reveals itself to be a persevering bunch, but PASD makes reconstruction all the much harder.

Difficult to Remember 

On the whole, Zone One left me entertained. But I felt that it was weak in a few places. Most glaringly, when Whitehead directs the reader into the past dissecting the events around the apocalypse, the narrative becomes confusing. Many seemingly insignificant characters receive detailed passages while the stories of some seemingly significant characters fizzle without resolution. Perhaps Whitehead intended to display the corroded nature of human reasoning in these flashbacks. If you encountered multiple years of hell where each day could realistically be your last, would you remember specifics from the past? Even if this motif was Whitehead’s intention, the confusion of the flashbacks hinders the overarching narrative.

But despite my reservations, I enjoyed this book. If you love the zombie genre, speculative fiction, or a literary master jumping into genre fiction, Zone One is an excellent choice for your to-be-read pile.

Verdict: 4 out of 5

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Posted by: Donovan Richards

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Book Review: Blueprints of the Afterlife

Blueprints of the Afterlife: A Novel by Ryan Boudinot (New York: Black Cat, 2012. 430pp).

Ryan Boudinot is the author of the novel Misconception, as well as The Littlest Hitler, the latter which won the book of the year from Publisher’s Weekly. He is on the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in Port Townsend, and blogs about film at therumpus.net. A native of Washington state, he currently lives in the city of Seattle.

New York Alki

Setting off in mild trepidation down my newfound odyssey of contemporary literature, I have found some amazing novels. Despite my fear, Blueprints of the Afterlife takes home the proverbial first prize. In this weird, somewhat dystopian, mainly dysfunctional, post-apocalyptic world, Ryan Boudinot carefully weaves a story of my beloved city and hometown, Seattle, which is both brilliant and freakishly weird.

Photo by Carolyn Adin

Woo-jin is our protagonist, and an award winning dishwasher, who suffers from ennui attacks (excessive empathy). He finds a body, not once, but twice, later meeting its owner, Abby Fogg, alive in “superposition” (a place where she can exist in multiple states: both dead and not). Amidst the entirety of the plot there is a man named Dirk Bickle who remains an enigma throughout the novel.

But what interested me throughout wasn’t the plot, which was absolutely mind-bending (in fact mind-bending isn’t strong enough a phrase) and fabulously entertaining overall. Rather, it was the setting. Set in Seattle, society is building New York City on the shores of Bainbridge Island, an island located close to Seattle.

“In the notes we found several references to the ‘New York Alki’ project. I’d taken Washington state history and knew what this meant. When the first white settlers came to the region in the nineteenth century, they debated what to call their settlement. They had big aspirations for their little frontier outpost but were really bummed out by all the mud and rain. To cheer themselves up they considered naming the place ‘New York Alki.’ Alki was a Chinook word for ‘by and by.’ Meaning, ‘someday.’ ‘New York Alki’ meant that someday this place would be as big and vibrant as New York City. But cooler heads prevailed and decided that naming their city after New York, itself named after old York, was retarded. So they named the city after Chief Sealth and called it a day” (68).

A Consistent Backdrop 

Photo by Midwinter

The ill-founded attempt to name Seattle New York influences Boudinot’s writing, and the backdrop of the entire novel. In the future, this past idea becomes future reality, and the consistent setting of the entire story is this New New York emerging where all the characters meander about their crazed, strange, unconventional lives. The other backdrop is a futuristic Seattle, one that I think can only truly be appreciated if you live here.

“After the great fire of 1889, when Seattle laid new streets atop the ruins of Pioneer Square, the ground levels of hotels, brothers, and dry-goods merchants became the underground. Post-FUS [Fucked Up Shit], a third layer arose, preserving Pioneer Square under a dome. In this district it was always night, lit with yellowish streetlights, real trees supplanted by facsimile trees of concrete and latex” (175).

Living next-door to Pioneer Square (I can literally see Seattle from my window), it’s truly mesmerizing to think about the future of the city as I look at it.

Post FUS 

Photo by Trey Ratcliff

Now in the post-FUS era the earth, and the Pacific Northwest in general, has become a strange place. I should state that this isn’t so much a dystopian novel, it’s a post-dystopian novel. The dystopia has already occurred (the FUS), and now it’s plainly dysfunctional. Part of the era of FUS included a glacier taking over most of Canada (ha!), and parts of America as well.

“Several theories emerged to explain the origin and sheer persistence of the glacier. Many suggested the mass of ice possessed an intelligence. It was easy to personify, as it appeared to be deliberately targeting concentrations of human civilization. As it approached Saskatoon, Canadians stood on top of buildings and bridges with bullhorns, loudly and profusely apologizing for warming the planet. But the glacier would not be placated...while [the glacier named] Malaspina laid waste to the Great White North, Americans paid little attention” (171).

Photo by Nate 2B

This quotation exemplifies the kind of strange “Palahniukian” writing that takes place in the novel. Its strange gore mixes with creepy and odd science fiction. But, surrounded by the odd science fiction comes a sort of unusual, Malthusian catastrophe story, where humans are forced to reconcile with how they’ve treated the planet by raping the earth’s resources. Boudinot places effective social commentary and ecological awareness amid this strange science fiction novel.

“It was obvious and apparent: stop using oil, stop making plastic, control the growth of the population to a logical level so we could exist within the parameters of our ecology. If we didn’t do these things, most of us would die. But we were willing to die because a more powerful part of our minds, the old mammalian limbic system, was busy pushing those bars. The more recent, less developed part of our brains, the neocortex, was waving its arms and screaming for us to stop our destructive behavior. In this war between the limbic system and the neocortex, the limbic system won, hence the FUS” (150).

The beauty of this book is the way Boudinot allows the plot to unfold. He uses the common setting of an emerging, post-apocalyptic Seattle as well as the backstory of the FUS era to create a plot that simply rocks hard. He uses crass language (like FUS) in a way that really effectively tells the story of this new dysfunctional world, and uses characters with weird unimaginable things going on to tell a story of epic proportions. Simply stated, I recommend Blueprints of the Afterlife. Even if you don’t enjoy dystopian novels, this one will surely engage, as it focuses more on human dysfunction as a whole. If you enjoy science or historical fiction, this novel would also be an excellent choice. Just give it a try—you’ll be entertained if nothing else.

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5

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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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Television Show Review: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead produced by Frank Darabont, Gale Anne Hurd, David Alpert, Robert Kirkman, and Charles H. Eglee (Circle of Confusion and Valhalla Motion Pictures, airs Sunday nights on AMC)

Starring Andrew Lincoln, Jon Bernthal, Sarah Wayne Callies, Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn, Steven Yeun, and Chandler Riggs.

In an effort to proclaim full disclosure, I must admit that I am not much of a zombie fan.

This sub-genre of horror has always seemed low budget, poorly written, and weakly acted. Zombie films typically depict the survival instinct at a basic level. Although this theme is entertaining on a “what if” level, the zombie theme is incapable of constructing the dramatic subtleties that differentiate fantastic movies from standard run-of-the-mill productions.

Where Are We?

Last night’s premier of AMC’s the Walking Dead, however, destroys my preconceived notions about zombie narratives. The story begins with the protagonist, Sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln), receiving the damaging end of a bullet that results in a comatose state. Deputy Grimes awakes to the blinking lights of an abandoned hospital. This portion of the narrative leads me to the first differentiating factor in this show from other zombie stories: the apocalyptic infestation already occurred. Similar to I am Legend, the rise of the walking dead is only influential to the extent that it effects the current time. In other words, the Walking Dead focuses on the result of the zombie inflicted world rather than the cause of it.

Later in the pilot episode and after Deputy Grimes realizes the drastic differences in the new world he inhabits, he begins an expedition to Atlanta, the urban hub of the region. Having heard that the military commandeered Atlanta as a safe spot from zombies and infection, Grimes travels toward the city broadcasting on emergency channels in hopes of connecting with other human beings. Unbeknownst to him, Grimes’ broadcasts are received by a remnant hiding in the woods. Sadly, the group’s pleas for Grimes to avoid Atlanta fall on deaf ears as he treks toward a city not blockaded for safety but instead overrun by zombies.

Can’t Tell the City from the Woods

I found this urban versus agrarian theme fascinating. By densely placing danger at the heart of an urban center and simultaneously suggesting that wilderness is a refuge, The Walking Dead critiques the human tendency to congregate in urban areas. The density of a population forces it to rely heavily on each other for production. One person might boast a prodigious talent for clothes making, while another might grow the best apples. If each person agrees to specialize and then trade the extras, economic theory proclaims that the society is capable of producing more. However, such production trade-offs force society into dependency. If one section fails, the whole economy falls apart.

In contrast, the pastoral view of wilderness transforms human dependency to a reliance on nature. The post-apocalyptic world of the Walking Dead infers the dangers of urbanized human culture and the positive qualities of an agrarian lifestyle.

Episode one of the Walking Dead intrigued me both for its starting point in a world already broken and also its depiction of urban and rural relationships. I excitedly await the second episode and recommend the series to you provided you can stomach the zombie theme.