... and well worth reading: In which several pertinent issues are touched upon.
I of course agree that "choices we make today will have a bearing on how future generations survive on the planet." Which is why I am skeptical of implementing policy decisions that could cripple nations' economies on the basis of incomplete and contradictory data. The experts, by the way, have just found something new to blame: Experts target rice as climate culprit. This particular practice I presume has been going on for millenia. Then there's that business of warming on Mars, regarding which no decisions we have made could have had any bearing.
This is not to say I don't believe in climate change. In fact, the nature of climate is change. Responsible treatment of the environment hardly needs to be premissed on arguments for impending catastrophe.
That said, I think the point of my comparison to terrorism might have been clearer. What I was driving at is that terrorists are a genuine, not a debatable threat. Yet some in the environmental camp have asserted that global warming is a greater threat to mankind than terrorism. Yet it is terrorism that could theoretically bring about the kind of disaster The Road depicts.
The Road, in my view, doesn't work for several reasons. First, I think it's wretchedly written. Second, it is nihilistic: "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw 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." (I would submit that "the blind dogs of the sun" is another of McCarthy's arbitrary and pretentious metaphors, like the blind spiders' eggs.)
At any rate, if nihilism is your bag, fine. Just don't try to pin some sort of hope on it.
Finally, I think McCarthy is a sadistic writer who takes pleasure in depicting cruelty - the espisode of the snakes being burned alive, for instance. (Or maybe he's just a misanthrope who thinks that the worst of mankind is quintessentially representative. Plenty of people these days seemto share the view that there's nothing wrong with the world that elimination of the human species wouldn't cure.)
Animal Farm works because it is very well written, and very cleverly worked out. It is also a warning with a point: What it warns of is preventable. The Road leads nowhere.
I don't think Vikram and I differ too much here, except maybe with regard to the literary quality of The Road, and that may just come down to a matter of taste. I think both of us think the environment should be treated with care and that terrorists are a bad lot. Fundamentally, I place my trust in the Tao.
Frank,
ReplyDeleteVery Interesting: David Frost Interviews Richard Nixon
How I love a contrarian view - so much better than bland agreement.
ReplyDeleteI would happily argue with you that The Road is anything but nihilistic. Rather, it shows both the depths and the great sacrifices and love which we humans are capable of under extremity. Otherwise, it would end with the boy's death, I feel.
As to 'blind dogs of the sun', I consider it a play on Sirius, the dog star, and parahelia, the mock suns or dog suns. Pretentiousness is of course difficult to define, but for me this is a vivid image, too.
The passage you quote is one of my favourites: it describes the father's despair (POV), which doesn't make the novel itself nihilistic.
Dear Frank,
ReplyDeleteBook Reviewing is an art, an important art. I cannot tell you how may times I have heard a person on a Sunday say to the person behind the counter, "I am just checking to make sure the book review is included." The Book Review section of the New York Times is the reason why many people buy that paper. Now, I am sure that this is true of book reviews throughout the country. People who love to read about books and talk about books enjoy book reviews from their newspapers. To paraphrase Milton, "To ban book reviewing is to kill reason itself." Now, I know that it may seem dramatic but there has to be a place namely the daily newspaper that provides a voice about books. There is nothing wrong with on line or "e" reviews that medium provides a useful and valid service for readers as well. The problem arises when papers decide that book reviewing is unnecessary and that you can go on line or elsewhere for a review. Should not the newspaper be the place where you go for information that matters? What a glaring contradiction? A newspaper that exists for reading the printed word bans the reviewing of books. When I think of the movement away from newspaper book reviews, Shakespeare's sonnet # 66 comes to mind: "And art made tongue-tied by authority"
Hi Lee,
ReplyDeleteI think you've changed my mind about "blind dogs of the sun," though one gets tired of McCarthy's harping on blind - though even I could argue for the functionality of it in his tale.
It seems that everybody who likes The Road sees the father/son relationship as somehow uplifting. But the kid is going to die, too. The last paragraph is about long-gone trout - and I just re-read it and great God almighty does the tone of the prose annoy me - and I presume that, by then, everybody else is gone, too.
Frank, I really appreciate this sort of exchange. I'm going to have another good look at the text with your views in mind, especially regarding some of the stylistic devices. I had my occasional quibbles too; they just weren't yours. I'll get back to you. (However, I fear you're not going to much like my fiction!)
ReplyDeleteP.S. Enjoy your garden. I just finished sowing runner beans.
The father-son dynamic can be and is uplifting even though the son is definitely going to die. To see a true representation of what it's like to be responsible for someone else while at the same time recognizing that death is imminent for both of you is the most obvious, hit-me-one-more-time part of that book, in my opinion. To say the end of that book is happy is to read it like a spider egg. To say that it lifts the spirit is to read it like a blind dog of the sun. Or whatever.
ReplyDeleteJim Crace's "The Pesthouse" covers the same ground and no one could fault his prose (it's more stellar than the dog star, and more serious).
ReplyDeleteHe, too, deals with refugee humans caring for an orphaned child. This is what's poignant in such apocalyptic visions: The young ones will die as well as the old, perhaps sooner. An inversion of the natural order of things, an affront to one of the purposes of life: Survival of the species. It's why they pack such a punch.
Susan, one of the things I found most poignant about The Road is the father's fear that he will leave his son behind to fend for himself (no matter for how long) - at heart every parent's fear.
ReplyDelete