Nietzsche and Me

I spent about two hours total of my afternoon reading “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Because I’m addressing the issue of language use and its ties to religion in dystopias, my office mate Tim recommended this essay to me on Thursday. On Friday, as I was reading a research guide to theorists with application to dystopia, I found another mention of this essay. So I read it.

Nietzsche is seen as a precursor to postmodernism, and that’s abundantly clear in this essay. He believes that man constructs a conceptual framework that is far removed from the original idea that it seeks to represent. Over time, this framework is presented as truth, and so man equates the concept with the truth. We tend to follow this method because of the natural laws of the universe. We can all agree to perceive that red is red, a tree is a tree. Thus, when society agrees that a concept or metaphor is true, man believes it to be so. Moreover, man constructs truth only in relation to himself, not to the universe as a whole because his perception is only one of myriad perceptions within the universe. The entire construction of concepts is a deception, but man has no qualms with deception so long as he is not being injured by the deception. Man hates a lie only because of the harsh consequences accompanying that lie.

Nietzsche goes a lot more in-depth, obviously, and he also goes on to discuss how science replaces language as the creator of the conceptual framework. But as I’m reading and attempting to grasp his ideology, I’m recognizing truth within his argument. Yes, we do construct truth that is based on our own experiences and perceptions. I cannot create a concept of a tree based on a bird’s perception. I can’t create a concept of a tree based on my brother’s perception.

My worldview, however, is vastly different than Nietzsche’s. I do not believe that God is dead (and we have killed him). Instead, I see, within humanity’s creation of a conceptual framework, the results of the Fall. Perhaps in Eden, Adam and Eve had the exact same perception of God and nature and truth and reality. But with original sin came difficulty and confusion. God may not be the author of confusion, but humanity is, and in seeking to control the universe in which we live (through the creation of metaphor and concept), humanity seeks to wrestle control away from God.

Yet the nature of God is not totally absent from this creation of metaphor and concept. Nietzsche argues that we create metaphor following the pattern of the creation of nature. As a Christian, I have to believe that we create because God created, and because we are created in His image, we, too, must create as a reflection of His nature. We fall short, however. We miss the mark; we get it wrong. Thus, we are left with metaphors and concepts that can only reflect the original idea, not innovate.

Maybe this post makes sense, or maybe it doesn’t. Right now, my brain is full of Nietzsche’s ideas, so my own argument might be convoluted as a direct result. But as I’m researching and reading and pondering the nature of British dystopian fiction, I’m learning about myself as a scholar and a Christian. My faith in a God of truth and light is strengthened when I am confronted by a world of lies and darkness.

In Mumford & Son’s “After the Storm,” Marcus sings, “You must know life to see decay.” Huxley and Orwell and the others created worlds in which darkness and chaos reign. And I certainly believe that our society, like the natural world, is moving toward entropy, becoming less ordered and more chaotic–this is a result of the Fall, after all. More and more I understand that I cannot store up my treasures on earth, for society is fallible and oppressive. But the ability to recognize truth within the darkness, and to sense the nature of God in philosophy that directly opposes even the presence of God, is a marvelous thing. I love that I can read Nietzsche and attempt to understand his philosophy and see truth in his perception of the world while simultaneously believing in and worshiping a God whose kingdom does not engage with chaos and deception.

“O brave new world that has such people in it”

Mustapha Mond checked him. “But [God] manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that’s described in these books. Now . . . “

“How does he manifest himself now?” asked the Savage.

“Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.”

“That’s your fault.”

“Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice.”

-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

This morning, I finished reading, for the first time ever, Brave New World. Because the novel is such a pivotal text for dystopian literature, I knew I needed to be very familiar with the story. In fact, in reading this book, particular the last few chapters (including the above quote), I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t adjust my theories about dystopian literature to include the overwhelming absence and perversion of religious ideology in dystopian settings. After reading Brave New World (as well as P.D. James’ The Children of Men and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale earlier in the summer), I just don’t think I can ignore the fact that writers of dystopian fiction, in some way, must inevitably deal with religious identity in these futuristic societies.

Finishing Brave New World almost made me sick. When I read of Huxley’s fictional society shoving God out of every aspect of civilization–hiding Bibles in safes, removing the word “God” and the cross and the person of Jesus from the collective consciousness of its people–and when that society managed to finally abolish the very last remnant of Christianity in the form of a boy named John, I was enraged. I haven’t felt so much tension at the finish of a book in a long time (maybe since reading V for Vendetta, even).

Tension can be good, though. Tension involves wrestling with ideas and strengthening one’s faith. I guess I never imagined that writing my thesis on such a dark topic would be easy, but I certainly didn’t imagine that just reading a novel would so strongly affect my mood this early on. I’ll be immersed in this topic until April. I’m just beginning this road to the end.

Once more, though, I’m reminded of why I can choose to study such texts. I serve a loving God whose Kingdom is not of this world. Even if I face a future society from which God is utterly removed, I know Truth and the Author of Truth. The brave new world that I can anticipate is certainly not an earthly world, and it is certainly a place where Huxley’s dystopian civilization with never reign.

Life As We Knew It

This is the first book in a trilogy called the Moon Crash Trilogy by Susan Beth Pfeffer. I had heard nothing of it until I picked up the third book in B&N one day, intrigued by the cover (all 3 books have a large moon prominently featured). After I discovered that it was a trilogy, I was excited to find that B&N had the first book for $1.99 in a large online sale a few weeks ago.

The story begins in Spring–school is ending for Miranda and her classmates, and their teachers keep assigning homework related to astronomy because the news has been reporting that an asteroid is on collision course with the moon. No one is worried about the crash, just intrigued, until the night of the collision. The asteroid is denser than astronomers realize, knocking the moon closer to Earth and resetting the gravitational field. Of course, tsunamis wipe out the coastlines of America, earthquakes rumble all over the world, and long-dormant volcanoes begin erupting.

The story is told by 16-year-old Miranda through her diary as she, her mother, and her brothers struggle to survive the aftermath. Pfeffer does a great job of lending a sense of isolation to the setting–isolation that frustrates them, but eventually saves their lives. Miranda is also a good protagonist, I think–sometimes, she’s a selfish teenager, but other times, she’s a fighter, just as she needs to be.

I only had a few issues with the books, and those were mostly with writing style. First, I don’t think Pfeffer wrote urgently enough for the initial crash. It was a very quick scene–block party atmosphere with neighbors watching the sky, crash, oh-know-the-moon-is-closer, panic, sing national anthem, go inside to listen to the news. Maybe I was reading too fast, but the catastrophic event needed a few more pages of description.

Other times, specific details would have been nice. For example, Miranda burns pages of her textbook at one point, and she goes through the thought process of whether she should burn them or not before deciding to. But she never writes down which textbooks she chose. All the thought process involved, and she should have at least said something like. “I hate science. That will be the first to burn.” There’s beauty in the details.

All in all, though, I found this to be quite enjoyable. I started reading yesterday afternoon and finished this morning, so it’s a quick read, as well as being engrossing. The second book, The Dead and the Gone, is actually a companion novel, with characters in New York City who experience the aftereffects of the moon crash. Then, the final book, which was released in April brings those characters to Pennsylvania to meet Miranda. I’m very much looking forward to the final two books (and I’ll probably leave soon to go buy the second one!).

Monsters of Men preview

Two of the best young adult novels I’ve ever read (and two of my favorites from last year’s reads) are Patrick Ness’ epic dystopian novels The Knife of Never Letting Go and its sequel The Ask and the Answer. These two books are the first two in the Chaos Walking trilogy, and the last book Monsters of Men was released in the UK this week. Mr. Ness posted the trailer for the book on his blog, and it’s really awesome:

The only problem is the book won’t be released in the US until September. I have to wait five more months to get my hands on an authentic US copy. I’m seriously considering eBay–I might be able to order a copy from the UK, for far more money than I would pay if I waited until September. It might be worth it, though…especially since I’ve seen this trailer.

Dreams are fading out.

When my alarm went off this morning, I woke up from a really disturbing dream. The kind of dream that made me afraid to go back to sleep, even for those 15 minutes until my next alarm. The kind of dream that made me want to squeeze my eyes shut and never open them again. The kind of dream that made me afraid that life had altered irrevocably in the eight hours I’d been asleep.

I wasn’t the main character in the dream, but I felt everything he was feeling. I only remember brief snatches of the dream, fortunately. A man and his son were in some sort of large shopping center or department store (subconsciously pulling in the shopping cart from The Road, perhaps?). It wasn’t a store any longer, though. Some sort of disaster had occurred (i.e. the apocalypse or something), and groups of people were waging a war against each other. I can’t even describe the terror of just moving through the aisles of this store. Anyway, a group of evil men were hunting for this man and his son, and they kidnapped the boy. The man had tried to flee with his son, but to no avail. He dashed into the parking lot, searching in vain for the vehicle they could have escaped in. The parking lot was pitch black dark, with rows and rows of empty vehicles. The man knew that he had arrived at the store in a minivan of some kind, but he couldn’t even remember what specific vehicle was his or where he had parked it. He was desperate and hopeless. When I woke up, he was standing in an empty parking lot, with no one around, absolutely certain his son had already been killed, and knowing that nothing remained that was worth living for.

Dramatic? You bet. My first thought? I’ve got to stop reading dystopian literature.

Over the past year, I’ve read a lot of dystopian novels and seen a lot of dystopian films: the book and film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend; Patrick Ness’ young adult novels The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer; other children’s books like The Giver and The Last Book in the Universe; Alan Moore’s graphic novels Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Books and films that have impacted me greatly–enough so that out of all the books I read and films I’ve seen, these made it into blog posts within the last year or so.

I enjoy dystopian literature and films, in a very strange way. Dystopian texts, and post-apocalyptic texts, remind me that, right now, life is worth fighting for. I have hope in a God who cares for me and for this world, and I’m blessed in immeasurable ways as a result of that. Dystopian settings, depressing and often empty of any higher power, are an other that I can’t really understand outside of my own faith. You can’t understand darkness until you understand light.

I never really realized how much it affected me. Sure, some of my favorite books are dystopian novels that make me feel angry while realizing the power of love. Yes, I wept during the film adaptation of  The Road. Now, my dreams are taking place in a dystopian society, full of fear, hatred, and anger? Maybe I don’t need to see The Book of Eli just yet, even though I’m so intrigued by it.

Maybe I also need to read happier books. I’m working on L.M. Montgomery’s The Story Girl, happy, light reading. But next up on the list is Dickins’ Hard Times for the class on the Victorian Period that I’m auditing. Not so much happy.

At least this dream is making me realize what those books and films do, as well: I have a God who’s in control of everything–my own life, the lives of my students, the lives of baseball players who take steroids, and the lives of poor people in Haiti. I may not live in a utopia, but I certainly don’t live in anything resembling dystopia, either.

“In a way you’ll live forever.”

“But I know who the real hero is, and it isn’t me or even the brave Lanaya. It’s an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won’t let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing things down in a book that no one will ever read.”

-Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe

* * *

In this dystopian novel, books no longer exist. No one reads. No one remembers what life was like before the Big Shake that destroyed civilization. One old man named Ryter is writing the last book in the universe, recording memories from his ancestors and a record of life as it exists now.

Spaz, the protagonist, lives in what’s called a “latch,” a sort of chaotic community run by a latchboss. He needs help getting back to the latch where he once lived, where his adopted sister Bean is dying of leukemia because the cure has been lost. Ryter insists that he go with Spaz, to record this last adventure before he dies.

Other characters in this story are “proovs,” genetically improved people. They’ve been programmed to resist diseases and cancer, so they have no need of chemotherapy that can cure Bean’s disease. Spaz meets a proov named Lanaya, and the three of them fight off gangs of evil people to get to Bean. All the while, Ryter spouts poetry and discusses events that took place before the Big Shake, drilling into Spaz the importance of keeping a written record, of writing down one’s story.

A beautiful moment happens toward the end of the story. Bean asks Ryter why he constantly makes references to being old and dying. Ryter worries that he won’t have time to finish his book. Bean’s response reveals that she understands the importance of story: ”"But would it ever really be finished?’ she asks. ‘I thought the book was your life, and it would only end when your life ends. Except it won’t really end, because people will read it and remember, so in a way you’ll live forever.’”

This book is a dystopian novel, set in a chaotic world. It’s not as dark as many other dystopian novels I’ve read, making it suitable for younger readers. Just as with other dystopian stories, Philbrick has established a jargon for his world. Fortunately, this jargon either explained or easy to figure out.

It’s really a great story. Ryter quotes Frost and Yeats, which had me cheering internally as I read. He’s a great character, wise and intelligent and courageous, inspiring Spaz to be more than just a slave to the latchboss and to fight for the things that are right and good. This is a re-read for me, but it’s definitely one I would go back to again and again.

“We really have to protect people from wrong choices.”

“Do you love me?”

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. “Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!”

“What do you mean?” Jonas asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated.

“Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete,” his mother explained carefully.

Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.

“And of course our community can’t function smoothly if people don’t use precise language. You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me?’ The answer is ‘Yes,’” his mother said.

“Or,” his father suggested, “‘Do you take pride in my accomplishments?’ And the answer is wholeheartedly ‘Yes.’”

“Do you understand why it’s inappropriate to use a word like ‘love’?” Mother asked.

Jonas nodded. “Yes, thank you, I do,” he replied slowly.

It was the first lie to his parents.

* * *

This excerpt from The Giver by Lois Lowry comes just after Jonas receives a memory of Christmas and family. It’s the first time he’s ever experienced real love, and it transforms him. This passage gives me chills–to think that such a society could exist with the absence of love.

In case you’ve been living under a rock and have never heard of this book, I’ll give you a brief summary. This novel takes place in a dystopian society in which every citizen conforms to the same concept of Sameness. As each child approaches the Ceremony of Twelve, he or she is given an assignment–a career choice, if you will, although a committee decides for each child based on his or her aptitude and interests. Jonas is chosen as the Receiver of Memories. He alone will receive the collective memory of society (collective unconscious, anyone?). He must carry the burden of all the emotions–happiness, love, pain, fear. He experiences poverty, war, hunger, sunshine, snow, Christmas, family, joy. No one else in the community ever knows that such extremes existed.

This is a world with color. Without art. Without music.

Without love.

It’s chilling in its portrayal. The novel beautifully explores notions of freedom. It made me realize that freedom of choice–in what I’ll wear, in where I’ll go to school, in whom I’ll marry–is something I often take for granted. What if that choice were taken away from me? Would I miss choice if I’d grown up without it?

I re-read this book this week because I was working on a paper for adolescent literature on how to use literature to teach social justice to secondary students. I chose this book and The Knife of Never Letting Go as examples of dystopian literature that can be used in the classroom. Dystopian literature is so intriguing and thought-provoking because it shows the extremes to which society could go if preventative action isn’t taken. Will we fight against those who remove choice? Will we fight for the oppressed? Can we make a change and avoid a bleak future?

Something to think about.

“I think the asking is whether we get back up again.”

“Maybe our story will turn out differently if we take the left fork, maybe the bad things that are waiting to happen to us won’t happen, maybe there’s happiness at the end of the left fork and warm places with the people who love us and no Noise but no silence neither and there’s plenty of food and no one dies and no one dies and no one never never dies.”

* * *

“Cuz I see Viola looking back at me as we run and there’s brightness on her face and she keeps urging me on with tilts of her head and smiles and I think how hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it’s dangerous, too, that it’s painful and risky, that it’s making a dare to the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?”

* * *

“‘Here’s what I think,’ I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming, thoughts that trickle into my Noise like whispers of the truth. ‘I think maybe everybody falls,’ I say. ‘I think maybe we all do. And I don’t think that’s the asking.’

“I pull on her arms gently to make sure she’s listening.

“‘I think the asking is whether we get back up again.’”

* * *

This book has been sitting in my room for over a month, beckoning to me, tempting me to abandon my academic pursuits and fall into this incredible story.

I knew it would be incredible from the first moment I laid eyes on the cover. I was taking a break from grading and homework one Saturday morning, browsing the young adult section at Barnes & Noble, not expecting to find anything new that didn’t involve vampires or angsty darkness (not that this book isn’t dark, it’s just not that kind of dark). As soon as I saw the cover, I knew I’d found something impressive. First, there’s the image of a road. This book is about a journey–literal and figurative. And the title: what the heck could The Knife of Never Letting Go possibly mean? So I picked up the book, read the first chapter, and decided I must buy it before I shifted into responsible teacher mode and graded a stack of student journals in the B&N cafe.

When I went home sick on Tuesday, I decided to curl up on the couch and read because that’s what I do when I’m sick. But I was caught up on all my reading for school, so I realized the time had come to read this book.

The basic plot: a boy named Todd is one month away from his thirteenth birthday, at which time he will undergo the ritual to make him a man. Todd, however, lives on a planet called the New World, in an isolated village called Prentisstown. Todd is the last “boy” left in town. This village consists only of men; previous to this story, according to the story Todd has been told, a virus called the Noise germ infected the residents, killing all the women and half the men.  The germ also made it so that every man hears every other man’s thoughts. No one can ever escape the Noise, and even the animals have Noise through which they communicate with humans.

The month before his birthday, Todd is made to flee the town for reasons that he doesn’t fully realize and the readers have no concept of. He grabs a rucksack, and he and his dog Manchee cross the swamp and escape Prentisstown, with an army of villagers forming to chase him down and kill him. Outside of the swamp, Todd meets Viola–the first female he has ever encountered, a girl his age. Her parents are dead, and she is also being attacked by the villagers. The two of them flee, and the story ensues.

The first aspect of this story that is immediately recognizable is the language in which the story is written. Many longer words are misspelled intentionally. For example, “preparations” becomes “preparayshuns.” Also, the author, Patrick Ness, employs a lot of run-on sentences and comma splices, bad grammar, and double negatives, and he breaks many other major rules of language. This should annoy me. It doesn’t. The run-on sentences actually add a lot of tension to the story. They move the action along more quickly and greatly reveal the intensity of the narrative. Additionally, the misspelled words and other grammatical issues aptly imply the degradation of society. Education is no longer important, and the men have slipped into a violent, selfish lifestyle. Much like Faulkner, Ness uses the narrative style in an incredible way to paint the chaos of the society he has created.

This book also provides an extensive commentary on society and religion. One of the main antagonists is Aaron, the preacher in Prentisstown. He is an almost mythical creature–he escapes death so many times, and he always manages to be several steps ahead of Todd and Viola. He preaches hellfire and brimstone, and he’s everything a good preacher would never be. He attempts to hide his violent and repressive nature behind a mask of religion.

Additionally, the book is an interesting commentary on the differences in gender. Women were resistant to the germ, and as a result, men can never know what women are thinking. Women, however, still hear everything men think, and as men attempt to hide their Noise, women become more adept at reading the silences in their Noise.

There’s so much more I could talk about: the idea of voice being what actually comes out of your mouth, or what you actually think; the idea of what actually makes a man; tension between hope and despair; and so much more. However, this blog is long enough already. In conclusion, this book is now one of my favorites. It has a cliff-hanger ending, however, as it’s the first book in the Chaos Walking Trilogy. The second one is already out in hardback, and I’m going to buy it this afternoon because I just can’t wait. That means, though, that I’ll probably have to wait a year or so before the conclusion. It’ll be frustrating, but worth it. The book is so good!

It’s the end of the world as we know it…

or, Ten Things I Love Regarding the Apocalypse and/or Alternative Civilization Societies.

The Victorians in Britain were known for their sensational fiction and ghost stories. Why were these tales so popular during the writers’ lifetimes? The writing reflected an anxiety about the culture: one could be haunted by some secret sin, and a ghost could seek revenge for that well-hidden transgression. Additionally, Victorians greatly valued domesticity, and women were idealized as angels of the home. A haunted house was the embodiment of insecrurities plaguing those places where one should feel safest.

In the same way, I think a lot of texts in current popular culture regarding the apocalypse or some futuristic post-civilization society reflect the fear in America (or maybe even the West) today. Since the Cold War, we’ve feared nuclear attack and the end of the world. Technology is changing so quickly that it’s impossible to know where our culture’s dependency on  technology and innovation will be even a year from now. Rapid change brings out anxieties and fears: will we get to a point where technology utterly destroys? Where we devolve into a society where survivial is our only concern?

This seems to be a trend, and one that I’m particularly interested in, although I didn’t really understand my own fascination with it until I sat down to write this list (with actual pen and paper on an old-fashioned wooden desk–shocker!). In the past few years, a lot of the books/movies/TV shows that I’ve really enjoyed have depicted this theme, and I decided it would be fun to make a list of my favorite texts involving the apocalypse. [Note: the order of this list is only the order in which I thought of them.]

1. Absolution, Muse. Their best album (out of an incredible catalog).  [Side note: I haven't bought or even heard their newest album, which came out last week. That album may nullify this point.] I would even argue that this is one of the greatest albums in the history of music. Yeah, it’s that good. This album from a trio of conspiracy theorists/musicians is all about the apocalypse. Examples:

• from “Apocalypse Please”: “It’s time we saw a miracle / Come on, it’s time for something biblical/ [ . . . ] This is the end of the world”
• from “Thoughts of a Dying Atheist,” one of the last tracks on the album: “And I know the moment’s near / There’s nothing you can do / Look through a faithless eye / Are you afraid to die?”

2. The Road, Cormac McCarthy. An incredible, haunting, sparse novel about a man and his son fighting for survival in post-apocalpytic America. Beautiful in its darkness and tragedy.

3. Jericho. A TV show cancelled after a cliffhanger first season, brought back after outraged fans protested, and cancelled again for good after a disappointing, short second season. The setting is a small Kansas town filled with tenacious, ingenius residents who manage to hold onto the remnants of civilization and humanity after most of the major cities in the United States are annihilated by hydrogen bombs. I spent part of last weekend rewatching some of season one when I wasn’t writing papers or grading or planning or anything responsible.

4. I Am Legend, a book by Richard Matheson, and several movies. The book and the most recent film starring Will Smith are the ones I am acquainted with, and the stories are so vastly different that they should be considered separate texts. Essentially, each is the store of the last man left alive (in the movie, it’s NYC, and I don’t remember the location of the book). He has a strange resistance to the vampiric disease that has infected every other human and most animals. He devotes his life to searching for the cause and the cure. The book and the movie each end in a vastly different way. And each is stark and disturbing in its own way.

5. The Giver, Lois Lowry. A classic children’s book about a society of people whose lives are utterly conformed to the set laws of society. A boy named Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memories, and he alone knows the pain, triumph, and love of society, a terrifying and weighty existence. Be sure to read the sequels Gathering Blue and The Messenger. The trio is a great commentary on the importance of both love and pain.

6. The Uglies series, Scott Westerfeld. With its own vocabulary and awesome technology like hoverboards, these books about a futuristic, post-Rusties (a.k.a – us) society are sometimes fun and often thought-provoking. The series deals with some of the same issues as The Giver–what happens when society seeks to conform an entire race? What happens when a select group refuses to conform? (Also–check out the cover to Specials to the left–they have these awesome tattoos called “flash tattoos” that sound painful and super awesome at the same time.)

7. Independence Day. I like films with Will Smith and the apocalypse, apparently. An alien race trying to destroy America + Will Smith + super-nerdy Jeff Goldblum? What’s not to love, really?

8. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” R.E.M. “…and I feel fine.” Really…why worry?

9. The Host, Stephenie Meyer. Really, how could I not include my favorite Meyer book? The whole world (and many other planets in far-off galaxies) has been taken over by a mild, peaceful race of souls who end all wars and violence and set up a calm and gentle society. With two problems: some humans have escape capture and are carefully hidden, while other humans refuse to succumb to the sould placed within their bodies. In my opinion, this is Meyer’s best work, even if it is slow-moving at first.

10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. What happens when we begin to fear knowledge rather than revere it? This happens. Firefighters set fires to destroy books rather than putting fires out. Men hide, secretly memorizing the words of great philosophers and writers, so their words will not be lost forever. And one man realizes the value of knowledge and thinking for oneself and attempts to break away from the society that is so binding and restrictive.

The Road

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”

~Cormac McCarthy, The Road

* * *

I read about half this book two years ago. I have no idea why I put it down and never finished it. In Salem, MA, at this great bookstore, Harvin unearthed this movie tie-in addition of The Road. I bought it a) because it was half-priced; b) because I’d always intended to finish it, and this summer seemed like a good time; and c) because Viggo Mortenson is on the cover.

This book is a post-apocalyptic novel about a man and his son continually walking, searching for food, shelter, and safety, and fighting to survive in the vast remnants of a bygone civilization.

Stylistically, the book is fascinating. There are no chapters–just one continuous narrative with hundreds of short, intense sections, such as the one above. It’s the perfect book for the ADD reader–if you have five minutes while you’re stuck in traffic or standing in line in the grocery store, you can pull it out of your bag and read a few sections. Or you can sit down and become so engrossed that you read it in one shot–as I would have done had I not had Boston to keep my occupied. Even with all our fantastic activities in New England, I still managed to read this book in about two days. Additionally, note the sentence fragments–perfectly representative of the fragmented world in which the man and boy live. I think that, stylistically, this book could be as representative of the postmodern era as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is for the modern era.

As I was reading the next-to-last page of this book in our hotel in Danvers, MA, Harvin turned to me to show me something in the Longfellow poem she was reading. I shushed her and ignored her until I could read the last paragraph, after which I threw the book down on the bed. The ending is superb–but it leaves so many questions open-ended, which I think is actually quite a good thing. In reading the book, the reader never actually learns what caused civilization to end. All we know is that most people–seemingly worldwide–are dead, and the few who are left are slipping into madness or are on the run from those renegades who embraced crime and violence. It’s been years since civilization ended, as we discover that the man’s wife was actually pregnant with the boy when the disaster happened. The boy is now old enough to talk, and to grasp some huge concepts about civilization and the past vs. the present. In addition to knowing that years have passed, the only thing we really know is that whatever disaster occurred left the world covered in ash. The man and boy must wear face masks so as not to breathe in the ash, and everything is coated in gray. Was it fire? Flood? Famine? We never know for sure. In the book, however, that doesn’t matter. What matters is life after the tragedy–how does the man continue to live in this hopeless existence? He has his son–and some hope that perhaps someday the world can be a better place for his child.

The reader can imagine and fill in those blanks in the story. If the reader understands that the world ended in some great fire, then that works. If it was a series of natural disasters (like The Day After Tomorrow), then that works, too. There’s also more to the story after the reader closes the book. What happens to the characters after the events that conclude the novel? Does civilization return to some semblance of normalcy? There’s tension in the unanswered questions, but there’s beauty in the unknowing, too. Much like life, the story could take so many different directions.

Now that I’ve read the book, I am, of course, super excited about the film (ahem…Viggo Mortentenson as the unnamed man…yes, please). The film will be released on October 16, and after watching the trailer, I’m very intrigued to see how the filmmakers handle the issue of what exactly caused civilization to collapse. It seems that they deal with it somehow. Perhaps they merely chose some specific disaster and incorporated it into the plot. They also seem to deal a great deal in the backstory of the novel. All of the narrative of the book takes place on the road. The man and the boy are the two main characters, with a few minor characters that they meet along the way. The man also has flashbacks to life before the tragedy, and I think that’s where Charlize Theron’s character will appear. Anyway, it will be very interesting to compare the film to the book, especially since the filmmaker was asked to make a film version of the story before the book was even published in 2006. You can watch the official movie trailer here.

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“The road crossed a dried slough where pipes of ice stood out of the frozen mud like formations in a cave. The remains of an old fire by the side of the road. Beyond that a long concrete causeway. A dead swamp. Dead trees standing out of the gray water trailing gray and relic hagmoss. The silky spills of ash against the curbing. He stood leaning on the gritty concrete rail. Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”